Once my boss called me and said “can you take interview to hire one person in our team?” I happily agreed as this would be one of my first experience to take an interview rather than just attending the interviews.
I asked my boss “what parameters are we supposed to consider while hiring”. My boss said just hire a person you think will fit in the team. I wondered how many of us realize the importance of this process of hiring while selecting the life partner. In most of my blogs earlier, I have connected life’s learning to corporate world, but today it’s going to be reverse.
Listing down the points which I thought would be important while selecting a person in my team (for job and the life partner)
Good communication skills
I always believed that communication is the key to any relationship. It may be a relationship between a mother and a daughter, father and son, husband and wife or for that matter the teammates in an organization. Why do we need to communicate?
Just an example from the corporate world. I as an employee may be performing bad in my work all of a sudden. There could be many reasons to it. For example- my boss is not good (touchwood that I have never been in that situation ever in my life and can write a book on ideal bosses if I had to), or I am looking out for a new job and I am disinterested or may be someone in family is unwell or there could be thousand other reasons. It is better to communicate the actual reason before any assumptions are made.
Right Attitude
It is an individual’s perspective! And an attitude has to be consistent. If you like something, you always like it. You love a dog, you love all dogs. And attitude can be positive or negative. A positive person can have negative attitude and vice versa. What we have to see is the right attitude!
Taking an example from the personal life, I was extremely unwell one day and my husband has a habit of watching late night football matches. I “requested” him not to watch it one day as I was unable to sleep. He didn’t like it. He said “I have to watch” and continued watching. Watching match is his passion (positive attitude). He did show consistency! I explained to myself that insensitivity and rigidity is also an attitude (Negative attitude). I wondered would he have bothered if instead of me if it was his own parents or siblings. Will he show consistency there? (Taking advantage of giving such example by being sure that my husband never read my blogs or if he has to, he has an attitude of only glancing at few lines)
Team player
This is a very critical factor. My boss asked me to hire a person to understand if she can fit in our team. So do the families get involved while selecting the life partner to tell if the person can fit in the team or what we can call as families.
As in case of professional life, we forget few points in personal life while selecting a life partner.
•Not all teams do not have same ideologies and approaches. We cannot expect the individual while hiring to fit in all teams and so is the case while selecting life partner. The life partner may not be liked by all in the families.
•Every team has a different role to play in professional world. You may not hire a person for sales role and ask him or her to do the job of a finance guy or vice versa. Same is the case in personal life with life partner. A person may be a good life partner as a husband and wife but not be a good son-in-law or daughter-in-law. But can we abandon the person? We use the best skill of the person and allow them do what they like rather than throwing them out saying you can’t play a role of a leader and are just an individual contributor. If this is the case, then the hiring or selection process went wrong somewhere. But one cannot play along with the lives and career for someone else’s mistake.
•The teams work independently but there is an interdependence of every team on other. Isn’t it the case with personal life also. But it has to be INTERDEPENDENCE with INDEPENDENCE. Just because one team has dependence on other, the first team cannot take all decisions. Sales and finance may be interdependent, but one can’t ask other for decision making and can’t blame other for ones failure as well.
•Flow of communication is very critical in a team. So is the case with life partners. They majority of things go wrong when right thing is not communicated at the right time to all team members. So is the case in personal lives.
While selecting life partner, people change teams. A girl leaves the team of her parents to join a team call husband and wife and so is the case with the guy. Parents join the new team called in laws and grandparents and they need to change their roles. There has to be clear understanding of the new roles in personal lives as well. Else people do go back to work under same bosses and team again if they don’t fit in well in new ones.
Long term potential
In the corporate scenarios it is often said that cost of hiring new person is way higher than retaining the old one. Hence the person being hired should have long term potential. Yes! We need to check for long term potential while selecting a life partner too as not only the cost to hire (dating or wedding) but also the cost to ask the person to leave is way too high when it comes to marriages. So BEWARE! :)
And as we say every individual is different, so would be their expectation while hiring a person in a team or even while selecting a life partner.
Note: These were my criteria’s for selecting an individual for my team and may be highly subjective!
