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We hire for success but fire for failure. We promote people with the best education and experience and then complain that they cant lead their teams, build coalitions or resolve conflict. We think of people as great leaders and then get disappointed when they dont know how to manage. Disastrous hiring and performance management methodologies are causing organizations, leaders and employees to fail.

Both sides are unhappy. Employees arent being set up for success, and supervisors report being drastically dissatisfied with employee performance. The Eagle Hill National Attrition Survey found that employers end up with average or low performers 75% of the time. This is a huge problem. We employers, hiring managers and supervisors get too excited about what people promise and too disappointed when they dont deliver.

This is the bitter truth about why people fail to succeed in their jobs.

We know that the most effective leaders and employees demonstrate superior skills in communication, conflict resolution, critical thinking, ethics and emotional intelligence. Soft skills trump hard ones, but we dont hire for them. Instead, we still prioritize candidate rankings by experience, education and school brands.

Education and experience matter, and depending on the job, hard skills such as budgeting, writing, software design, typing, engineering, etc. really matter. Hard skills are important considerations when making hiring and promotion decisions. I consider these factors when making hiring decisions, and depending on the position, the minimum education and experience requirements may be rather non-negotiable. However, the bitter truth is that soft skills provide a better metric than education and experience ever will for assessing performance and predicting success. Highly educated and very experienced employees get fired every day because they fail to demonstrate critical soft skills.

Ive worked with thousands of supervisors and executives, and they are not talking about how they need to hire people with higher levels of education and more experience. No, that is not their challenge. They tell me that they desperately need to get people who will demonstrate better behavior. They want people who can communicate better. They want people who can resolve conflicts better. They want people who think critically and who ask thoughtful questions. They want people who are ethical and demonstrate integrity. They want emotionally intelligent people who are self-aware, reflective, disciplined and motivated. They want people who will give feedback and are also happy to receive it.

Work experience is not a substitute for soft skills unless the hiring manager is able to design and apply metrics to evaluate the development level of specific soft skills. Also, a college degree cant substitute for soft skills. Supervisors and managers report that they want employees who are intentional about behavior, and a degree only shows that an employee was intentional about an accomplishment.

We can hire people for what they know (for all their education and experience), but they will fail if they dont make it a priority to manage their behaviors. Following is a list of reasons a cross-section of directors, managers and supervisors shared with me during a meeting on performance management systems.

I asked the group of about 200 to share the real reasons that they either fired, refused to promote or downgraded a performance review on an employee within the prior two years. This is an aggregate list (in order of number of responses) for what they provided.

Employees were fired, not promoted or rated poorly because they

As you probably noticed, the lack of a college degree and a lack of prior work experience arent listed as mitigating factors. It is clear that most identified issues are directly connected to deficiencies in soft skills and behavior rather than any education or experience deficiency.

Organizations absolutely have to create and apply better hiring and performance management methodologies.

Sure, employees are responsible for their own behavior, but they are not responsible for establishing the behavior or performance standards which they will ultimately be evaluated against. More often than not, the directors and managers in the group reported to me that they didnt have clearly defined performance standards and metrics for behavior or soft skills. The really couldnt properly develop or evaluate an employee for these aspects of the job, so they would find other justifiable reasons and ways to deal with the employee without ever really dealing with soft-skill deficiencies.

The bitter truth is that weve got to do better. Organizational leaders must design and apply methodologies for hiring and for effectively evaluating and managing performance. The organization deserves better. The struggling supervisors deserve better. The employees deserve better. The customers deserve better.

Organizational leaders can do better by taking these action steps:

We hire for experience, but we dont fire for it. We hire for a degree, but we dont fire for it. We hire for a particular certification, but we dont fire for it (except in instances where the person has lied about it). And we dont mitigate poor performance as a result of these credentials. Most, if not all, factors that contribute to poor performance and/or employee terminations correspond to deficiencies in soft skills and human behavior.

Until we align the primary hiring factors to the primary firing factors, nothing will change.

More here:
The Bitter Truth About Why People Fail To Succeed In Their Jobs - Forbes