September 30, 2008
With the turmoil in the financial markets and everybody blaming the financial institutions themselves (e.g. the banks and their senior managers, the investment bankers, the regulators, governments, etc.), it is interesting that nobody has concentrated on the dealers. Who they are, how they got their jobs and whether they are the right people to assess the viability and fundamentals of global businesses.
Yes, their greed, their huge bonuses and the fact that they make money whichever way the markets go has been questioned, but we need to ask a more fundamental question: Is one of the reasons for the credit crunch because we have based our economic system on valuing the wrong kind of people and therefore the wrong kinds of behaviours?
Greed and big bonuses has played a big role in accelerating the downfall of banks like Lehman Brothers and HBOS through the practice of short-selling, but it takes a particular type of person with a certain personality and morality to make such questionable decisions – exactly the type of person that fills the trading floors of the world’s stock exchanges!
So maybe, alongside the new raft of regulation that will follow this financial crisis, we also need a new philosophy and morality that guides the behaviours of those working in the money markets. This starts in the Boardrooms of the major financial institutions – it includes the way that traders are rewarded and the way that behaviour is reinforced. Traders are like Pavlov’s dogs in this respect – if you reward ruthless trading for short term gain they will keep doing it, find new ways to do it and try to do more of it. On the other hand, if you remove the reward and start offering (maybe even bigger) rewards for ethical and sustainable wealth creation then their behaviour will change – and probably quite quickly. People who are used to big paychecks quickly notice when they stop rolling in!
The other place to look to drive long-term change are recruitment and selection processes. Lloyds TSB were criticised a year ago for lacking ambition and being populated by an overly conservative crowd – now they are being hailed as the culture most likely to succeed in the new economic climate. So it looks like the personality and ability profile of the major financial institutions’ workforces needs to change – one thing’s for sure, there’s no place for the Wall Street of Tom Cruise and Michael Douglas any more! Maybe risk-taking will be slightly less important over the next five years and traders need to be more rounded businesspeople who can combine analytical skills, sound judgement and risk management to forge better individual and collective outcomes for their employers……..and if that’s the case, they too, would and should be handsomely rewarded.
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Leadership, Management, Recruitment and Selection, Talent, Well-being, citizenship, economy | Tagged: Well-being, recruitment, credit crunch, psychology, selection, financial crisis, dealer personality | 
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Posted by Cary Cooper
June 19, 2008
Last month Personnel Today reported research from Frankfurt University showing that ‘professional smilers’, such as flight attendants, sales personnel, call centre operators, waiters and others in contact with the public for extended periods of time, were at risk of seriously harming their health. Professor Dieter Zapf, a psychologist and researcher into human emotions at Frankfurt University, said that fake friendliness led to depression, stress and negatively affected the immune system. The implication of the findings was that every time a person is forced to repress their true feelings, there are damaging consequences for their health.
This is hardly surprising, but for me puts the spotlight on recruitment decisions – those of both candidate and recruiter. For the recruiter, it’s critical to know what you’re looking for and how to identify it in the candidate. For example, if you are looking for a friendly, sociable flight attendant you need to understand the enduring personality characteristics that drive the behaviour you are looking for, as well as checking that the person has the skills to interact with passengers effectively. If someone has a personality characterised by high levels of neuroticism and introversion they are very unlikely to behave in the manner you require – no matter how well they perform in the role play at the assessment centre. Learnt skills can mask true personality in the short-term, but it never lasts.
Which brings me to the candidate’s responsibility in these situations: No matter how much someone wants the job there is no point in them pretending to be someone that they are not. If you like to spend time quietly problem-solving, analysing data or writing reports you are unlikely to enjoy the kind of work that requires a lot of human contact, outgoing behaviour and constant smiling. So it’s important to be honest with yourself and the recruiter and to self-select out of the process when this kind of mismatch occurs.
For people, who are naturally outgoing (in personality terms, extroverts who are open to experience and have low levels of neuroticism) I doubt that working in these roles would be inherently stressful, as the Frankfurt study claims. However, for someone who wasn’t completely honest during the recruitment process, or got the job as the result of a poor selection decision by the employer, these kinds of roles could become excruciating. I’d like to see the results of a study like this that controlled for personality type.
http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2008/05/16/45890/enforced-smiling-in-the-workplace-puts-health-at-risk.html
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Management, Recruitment and Selection, Stress, Well-being | Tagged: Depression, personality, recruitment, Stress, stressful | 
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Posted by Cary Cooper
