Martin was waiting in the conference room when I arrived. He had a single sheet of paper in front of him.
“That was easier than I thought,” he started. “I simply observed the way my team members dress, and it was curious how quickly I noticed the difference between my top performers and the rest of my team.”
“Observing physical characteristics can give you important clues about a person’s value system. People communicate a great deal about themselves without speaking a single word.” Now it was Martin’s turn to nod his head.
“Does this have anything to do with habits?” he asked.
“What are you thinking?” I replied. I could see the wheels turning.
“Well, the fact that my top performers dress differently, I mean neater, cleaner, more polished, is not because they consciously thought about it. It seems that is just who they are. And it comes out in their work product. A person who takes pride in their personal appearance, also takes pride in their work product.”
“Why do you think that happens?”
Martin paused. “I am beginning to see a clearer connection between values and behavior. Even if people don’t think about it, consciously, that’s why they do what they do.”
“So, how important is it, for a manager, to understand the value system of team members?” -TF
I definitely don’t agree with that one. If you judged my current team by the way how they dress you couldn’t be more wrong. And that team isn’t extraordinary in that, believe me.
Maybe your experience is wider or maybe IT is different in that area (although it’s hard to believe for me), but for me above rule doesn’t work. And it isn’t fair too, but that’s another story.
I agree with you there Pawel. Especially in IT, this do not seem to fit. Many of the best programmers i know dress in old t-shirts but produce great code and are the most effective workers. Maybe thats why they dress that way? So we could say that if programmers dress “badly” they are good coders? I do not think so..
But it does tell you something about the person, that I do agree to.
So, what does a sloppy dresser (from an effective coder) communicate? Without knowing the individual (archetype), here are some guesses. This person has the ability to focus, yet is unconcerned about the perceptions of other people around them. Or, this person has the ability to focus on core processes, but may perform poorly on other peripheral parts of a project. One of my best friends was a superb technician (television camera equipment) back in my earlier days in television production. If the color was wrong, he would have the covers off and at the circuit boards, tweaking the image to perfection. One of the best intuitive technicians around. Unfortunately, he always misplaced the screws, so when you picked up the camera, the outside covers would come off. Never tucked his business shirttail in, seldom wore socks. Brilliant guy you would definitely want on your team as long as you had someone else in charge of tracking the screws to the cover panels.
I’d say that if you know what were your people values lie, you know what’s triggering them. May come in handy when the tasks have to be spread in the team. Results will improve automaticly.