inter-personal skills

Understanding people and their “natural” (or thrust) behaviour style can go a long way to helping HR professionals streamline the recruitment of new employees. Research shows that poor behavioural fit with existing team members can lead to conflict and a significant drop in team and individual performance. So it’s a good idea to be able to interview not only for ability and attitude, but also for behavioural fit.

The Harvard Business Review recently published the findings of research relating to effective Leadership traits. After scrutinising the leadership traits of 11 000 leaders, and isolating the worst performing 10%, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman found the 10 most common leadership shortcomings. These are ranked according to the size of the difference between successful and unsuccessful leaders' scores. Successful and failed leaders differed most in their energy and enthusiasm as perceived by the teams they were leading.