I spend a lot of time walking around airports. Having done around 350,000 air miles each year for 15 or so years, I’ve gotten to know a number of airports very well. I’ve spent lots of time either walking in or out of or simply wasting time walking around airports.
One of the habits I’ve developed in all that time is a predilection to avoid the travelators that have become de rigueur within airports. I also seem to have developed a bit of a competitive streak in that I always try and ensure that whenever I am walking next to a travellator, I actually get from one end to the other faster than those who are actually travelling on said travellator.
It’s fair to say that I tend to live my life at speed. Whether it’s walking or working. I’ve only got limited time on this planet and I want to make it count. I was thinking about this walking speed thing the other day as I recalled something that a colleague of mine is often heard saying. His favourite phrase when it comes to making employment decisions is:
if you want to see how fast someone works, look how fast they walk.
It’s a viewpoint not unrelated to a recent article I wrote about hustle being the difference between high performers and those less high-performing – if people take forever to walk from their desk to the tea room to get a cup of coffee, then chances are they’re going to take an inordinately long time to perform any task they are given at work. As I thought about this admittedly overly simplistic classification of workers, I thought about other gross generalizations that I have a bias towards.
In particular, I often find myself noticing the choice of radio station that employees listen to. I have no scientific evidence to base this on other than observation of those around me over the past several years, but that observation would indicate that there is an astonishingly high correlation between those who listen to Radio New Zealand as a matter of choice and those who perform well in the workplace. This observation also holds true with, for example, my US colleagues who skew towards NPR listening.
A proxy for the Radio New Zealand test that I’ve developed would be the correlation between those who make a habit of reading a daily newspaper or its equivalent and those who perform well. Perhaps, if I may go down this rabbit hole, the correlation between those who get their news from Facebook or Tik Tok with those who perform more poorly in the workplace.
Now obviously it’s not up to me to say what people should listen to. And, yes, I understand that some people have particular reasons for not listening to mainstream media. However, what is, in my view, a strong correlation with an association of causation is the thirst for knowledge. With curiosity. With a desire to understand the wider world and one’s place within it.
Now I wouldn’t suggest that employers should start using media habits as a question in employment interviews. I’m sure some of my softer colleagues might suggest that would be a question that somehow breaches the basic human and employment rights of candidates. That said, I think it is important to find ways to test for curiosity as an indicator of employment performance.
I’ve told the story before of the board meeting where one of my fellow directors and I had a fascinating discussion about Victorian plumbing systems in England, the Bronte sisters and the Babbage engine – all in the ten minutes or so before the board meeting started. Now none of that stuff is of any relevance to the board in question. However, conversations like that are, in my view, a good indication that those taking part in that conversation bring a broader worldview to the table.
Now, of course, there are those who, with some validity point out that if you’re employing for a specialist role, the only thing you need to test is the candidates’ ability within the constraints of specialization. I would humbly disagree with that view. I believe that we are all an aggregate of all that we have seen, learned, heard, read, observed and cogitated upon within our lives. And that the more that observation comes from a wider pool, the more likely we are to add value to organizations.
I’m a big fan of Radio New Zealand and Corin Dann and Ingrid Hipkiss travel with me on my daily commute. Personally, I have more confidence working with people who share time with those two than those who do not.
