when making hirring and promotion decision.leaders often put too much emphasis on performance and not enough on the potential to learn.over time,egon zehnder,a global exclutive search firm,had developed a sophisticated means of evaluating candidates that considered not only their past achievements but also their competencies.however,it found that in numerous instances,candidates who looked equally good on paper performed differently on the job.why?
a partner at the firm,karena strella,and her team beliveed the answer was individauls'potential for improvement.after a two years project that drew on academic research and interviews,they identified four elements that makeup potential:curiosity,insight,engagement,and determination.they develop interview questions to get at these elements,along with psychometric measures applied via questionnaries.this new model now plays a key role in the search firme's assessments of job candidates.egon zehnder has found that-potentail candidates perform better than their prres with less potential,thanks to their openness to acquiring new skills and their thirst for it is common for people to ascribe thier successes to hard work,brilliance,and skill rather than luck;however,they blame their failures on bad fortune.this phenomenon,know as the attribution bisas,hinder learning.in fact,unless people recognize that failure resulted from their own actions,they do not learn from their mistakes.in a study we conducted with chris myers,we asked psarticipants to work on two different decision-making tasks spaced one week apart.each task had a correct solution,but only a few people were able to identify it.we found that participants who took responsibillity for doing poorly on the first activity were almost three times as likely to succeed on the secound one.they learned from their failure and made better decisions as a result
leader can use the following methods to encourage others to find the silver lining in failures,adopt a growth mindeset,focus on potential