Learned helplessness

is a condition of a human being or an animal in which it has learned to behave helplessly, even when the opportunity is restored for it to help itself by avoiding an unpleasant or harmful circumstance to which it has been subjected. You can read more about the experiment done on animals here.

According to Dr. Richard Pestak, learned helplessness plays an important role in stress.

There is nothing more stressful than dreading unpleasant experience that you have no control over. The result can be paralyzing sense of futility, helplessness, and stress related anxiety. The solution is to decide if you can reasonably expect to bring about a change in the situation. Certain things you will not be able to do anything about. But instead of giving in to a state of learned helplessness, change the one thing that you do retain some control over: your own attitude towards the stressful situation.

The opposite of helplessness is optimism, ‘an Explanatory style’ which is “a psychological attribute that indicates how people explain to themselves why they experience a particular event, either positive or negative”

Another danger which can contribute to Learned helplessness is being around the naysayers who add to the ‘gloom and doom”. Warren Buffet recently talked about it in the CNBC saying, “Fear is very contagious. You can get fearful very quickly, but you don’t get confident, you know, in five minutes. You can get fearful in five minutes, but you won’t get confident for some time.”

So in a time when a lot seems beyond your control,

Two separate conversations with different senior leaders’ triggered this post.

One asked whether there was a single test to help identify the right person for the right job. The other felt that the probation period could help determine the suitability as a short interview was not sufficient to know whether a candidate was the right fit.

There can be no single test to determine suitability of a candidate and all organizations need to take responsibility to ensure that the candidates who are recruited are most likely to succeed in their jobs.

Errors in selection can and ought to be minimized by taking multiple perspectives and views. Tests (where applicable) and interviews are a part of a wider selection process. One way to approach the process is to look for competencies that are common to all successful people.

Here are two leaders on what they looked for as ‘must have’ competencies for success:

Jack Welsh (Former Chairman and CEO of GE) looked for

James M. Kilts (Former CEO of Gillette)

(Brains and capacity for hard work are a given)

(Source: Doing what matters)

Incidentally when

“Warren Buffett was asked why the Gillette board of directors chose Jim Kilts to be CEO, he said, “Jim made as much sense in terms of talking about business as anybody I’ve ever talked to. If you listen to Jim analyze a business situation you get absolutely no baloney. And, frankly, finding someone like that is a rarity.”

Ultimately, Good leaders learn to develop a Personal Check-list of what has worked for them while picking out good candidates.

A book on a related subject that makes interesting reading is Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers

• Deepa