One of the treatments for stroke patient rehabilitation is Constraint Induced Movement Therapy. The neurologically stronger limb is restrained so the patient can’t use it, and they are forced to use the limb that has been impacted by the stroke for extended periods. Because they are forced to use the impaired limb to get the things they need and want, their neurological system has to find ways to get that limb working, through strategies like repurposing undamaged neural pathways.
This is the power of motivation. When someone really wants something, they will find a way to get it done. This principle applies all the way down to the neurological level.
Likewise with work. Even if a person doesn’t have a particular ability or aptitude that you think is required to get something done, if they have the motivation they will find a way. This is where skills-based analysis becomes important. People’s intrinsic motivation tends to lie in certain domains.
I once did some work with a client in their contact centre. They struggled with poor performance, and they wanted to know what kind of people would be successful in their work environment so they could realign their recruitment strategy.
We conducted extensive personality and ability profiling of their team, and looked at the qualities of the high performers vs. low performers. It turned out that counterintuitively their high performers were not customer-orientated; they were task orientated. They were motivated by closing open tickets and they closed more tickets then their peers. This organisation was a regulatory agency so their customers had no choice but to come to them.
The high performers were laser focused on getting the required regulatory task complete, and the customers were a secondary consideration.
This was a motivation question. The job description for the role was full of customer-orientated language, and being a customer contact centre, people were applying for the job because they liked talking to people. However a detailed observational analysis of the work would have revealed that the work was all about closing tickets, not about customer service at all. They needed workers motivated by completing tasks, not making customers happy. Because the high performers were motivated by closing tickets they developed techniques to manage customer interactions in the call to get to the outcome they wanted…even though they may not have had inherently high interpersonal skills or much interest in their customers.
One of the really key benefits of using skill-based analysis to understand jobs is not about ability at all. It is about understanding what kind of motivation is required to get the job done.