Attitude Makes All The Difference
When I was building custom homes I always had my eye out for the employee with that little something extra. This might be expressed in many ways but usually they were more inquisitive, more enthusiastic and more positive. I used to have a saying I’d share with every new person who walked in the door: “If you’ve got a good attitude then that’s 75 percent of what you need.” Sure, it’s important to know a bottom plate from a stud, and yes you have to know how to properly use your tools, but all of those things can also be learned pretty easily. Attitude is different.
People come to us with all different kinds of attitudes that have been developed over long periods of time from many different kinds of stimuli. I always try to remember that if I had the same experiences and role models that someone with a bad attitude had, I’d probably have a bad attitude too. We are really much more than just ourselves. We are walking talking composites of many other people and we have put together our personas mostly by chance.
How do you take a bad attitude and make it a good one? If I knew the answer to that I’d be on Oprah. But when it comes to working with people you are always going to be dealing with attitudes, after all these attitudes are reflections of who they are so the attitude is going to be right there, out in front.
Probably the most troublesome attitude for a manager to deal with, and for that matter everyone else too, is a negative attitude. Negativity left un-checked permeates the culture of a business and before long as you catch snippets of casual conversation you hear a constant rumble of negativity. Eventually it gets deep into the work and then you’ve got a real problem.
It’s telling that it is more popular to make negative observations about the work place than it is to make positive ones. When was the last time you heard someone at the coffee pot say, “Boy, I just couldn’t wait to get here today!” So any manager has a real challenge in trying to turn around negative workplace cultures, but the place to start is with the individual. If we all just stopped participating in negativity it would probably go away. One person can be the catalyst for change.
In the meantime, no matter where you are in the hierarchy of your organization you should consider that it is just as easy to see the positive as it is the negative. All it takes is adjusting your focus.<
