Organizational Behavior: Hiring for Serenity

Avoid taking on the disgruntled employee

I once made the mistake of hiring a disgruntled employee. Once. It was one of the dumbest mistakes I made as a manager, and I vowed never to make it again. From then on, I devoted a substantial portion of my hiring interviews to finding serene employees.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference

The Serenity Prayer

No organization is perfect. I knew a project manager who would tell members of her team to be thankful for organizational shortcomings, because “If the company didn’t have problems that needed solving, we wouldn’t have jobs.”

The question is how your employees will react when they see management engaging in behaviors that seem inefficient or unfair. Ideally, they will be serene, as opposed to overly passive or disgruntled.

Overly passive employees will just go along quietly, making no effort to bring about improvement. They will not complain, but they will not contribute to identifying and fixing organizational weaknesses.

Serene employees will point out problems in the spirit of trying to improve organizational performance. They will suggest alternative ways to arrange a business process so that it works better.

The disgruntled employee will complain without offering constructive suggestions. Disgruntled employees complain in order to impugn the motives of corporate management and/or to claim that they are smarter than those above them.

If you serene, then being smart will pay off. As long as management’s motives are sound, you will earn appropriate promotions.

If you are serene and management’s motives really are suspect, then run away. Find a position in a different department within the organization, or in a different organization altogether.

Hiring for Serenity

With serene employees, you can process their constructive suggestions. They are content as long as you acknowledge the problems that they raise. When you need to keep existing processes in place, you can explain this in a way that they will accept.

What I call disgruntled employees are those who will not be satisfied no matter what. Every organization has problems that need fixing. Serene employees want these problems to be fixed. Disgruntled employees don’t.

Disgruntled employees are toxic to those around them. They foster bad morale, so that whatever their level of ability at doing their job, they lower the performance of the group.

You cannot satisfy the needs of disgruntled employees, because their overwhelming need is to be disgruntled. It is in their temperament. The only thing you can do about disgruntled employees is avoid hiring them in the first place.

In a job interview, I would ask a question like:

In your last job, what did your boss do that you appreciated, and what did he or she do that bothered you?

What did that organization do well, and what were its problems?

The job applicant might not say anything negative. I personally would find that worrisome. Is the person overly passive? If they are afraid to speak out in an interview, will they ever become comfortable in my organization?

But the real red flag comes when someone has nothing positive to say about a previous organization. Instead of telling you anything that they appreciated about their previous boss or organization, they jump right into what was wrong there. And they go on at length.

The serene applicant will say, “I thought that they should have done X instead of Y.” The disgruntled applicant will not have any constructive suggestions to offer for how things could have been better in the prior job.

Identifying a potential disgruntled employee turns out to be surprisingly easy, once you make it a priority. People who are temperamentally disgruntled cannot help exposing themselves in an interview, if given the opportunity.

In business, an employee’s serenity prayer would be:

Give me the serenity not to whine about problems that are difficult for my organization to fix, the courage to propose constructive solutions for problems that are easy for my organization to fix, and the wisdom to know the difference.

A manager’s serenity prayer would be:

Give me the serenity not to get defensive when an employee points out something that we in management are doing wrong, the courage to get rid of an employee who does nothing but whine, and the wisdom to know the difference.

This essay is part of a series on human interdependence.