E-News for June 2001
Greetings ALMA Members,
Like many labs, we are required to review our safety rules twice per year and sign a statement to document that we have fulfilled this obligation and agree to abide by the rules. In our case, these rules have changed little over the past ten years and we have reviewed them twice a year during this entire period. Only this time, one of my technicians went beyond merely reading the words during this very routine exercise and started questioning the reasons and logic behind some of the rules. I was astonished to find that in a few cases, I couldn’t explain the rationale for a rule and a few others seemed pointless. Most of the lab staff had read these rules twenty or more times so why hadn’t someone noticed these inconsistencies before? I think that this illustrates the same mental process that prevents us from seeing the dangers that lurk in familiar tasks that we have performed many times—how many lab accidents involve tasks that have been done safely countless other times? In the case of our safety rules, a single new perspective shifted the thinking process of the entire group that allowed us to adopt a more questioning attitude to break through this mental barrier. Perhaps the lab manager can serve as a similar stimulus to shift the staff’s thinking in examining the safety of familiar tasks. I believe there is an opportunity to improve safety in the lab by raising the level of awareness during routine operations and encouraging a more questioning attitude among the staff.
With the state of employment in labs these days, it may be a bit out of step to be talking about recruiting employees but we can only hope that better days will eventually return so we can again practice this important managerial function. I recently noticed an ad for a course on how to hire the best people that made several interesting points. First, it mentioned the strategy of one manager who takes prospective employees to dinner where he has arranged with the waiter to purposely screw up the candidate’s order. He then observes how the person reacts to this situation to gain insight into his/her behaviors and personality. The basic idea is that behavioral traits are the key to identifying the best people and that our usual approach of looking at previous experience does not accurately predict performance. It was stated that one of the most common mistakes is to hire someone for what they know and then fire them for who they are. These ideas somewhat parallel my own experience in that the brightest hires have not always been the best performers. In the past, I have been swayed by impressive credentials when my natural instincts made me uncomfortable with the person before me—my instincts turned out to be correct. I’ll bet that most of you have had similar experiences in your own labs and that your top performers are more likely to have achieved their status due to attitude, enthusiasm, people skills, and other aspects of behavior than due to technical expertise. When we finally start hiring again, we should remember that the analytical approach that we have been trained to follow as chemists is not necessarily the best way to deal with the often irrational world of human behavior—trust your impressions and judgement.
If you have any comments, cost saving suggestions, opinions, etc. let me hear from you .
Wayne