One good technique that HR professionals can do is test how good new recruits are at making commitments. Perhaps, understanding a bit of the interests of interviewees may give a good perspective of how committed a person may be.
For instance, if a candidate is involved in athletics and trains to perform at his or her best, you know that such a person is one that is good at making and keeping commitments. Athletes who train and keep an appointment with the self are committed individuals.
You do not have to be an athlete to be a committed person. Going through college and higher degrees of learning would have not been possible unless you made a commitment to be successful. We could resolve that many an educated person is a committed person. However, it is difficult to generalize on this score, but one can conclude that people who have achieved educational success are committed. In addition, educated people can be committed people if they achieved educational success in spite of difficult circumstances, like poverty for example.
An electrician, a plumber, even a garbage hauler is an educated person when they commit the self to be skilled in a trade or do a job that the rest of society detests to do. A garbage hauler or dooman takes pride in the jobs they do. Some refer to a garbage hauler as a sanitary engineer and a doorman as an access controller. The worst thing to do is treat people who do menial tasks disrespectfully, doing so and the menial worker will lose his/her commitment to the job. Who does not like to feel good? How good UN secretaries felt when their job titles changed to administrative assistants; they became more comittmed as well.
The greatest of commitment failures are with the New Year. Last year thousands to millions of folks made New Year resolutions, which more than 50 percent will fail to keep. You can easily audit yourself on that by asking whether you kept any resolutions in 2006 for which you committed in 2005. Interviewers can ask job seekers whether they honored their New Year resolutions. Other evidences of good committers are those who make a commitment to reduce weight and stick with it. That does imply that overweight folks are not committed. However, those who make a commitment to get rid of extra pounds are truly committed people when they can show results.
All what we are talking about here is self-control. One good way to exercise self-control says behavioral scientists are to make your commitments public. That is right – let the world know what you hope to do as long as it does not infringe your privacy and confidentiality.
When we speak of being committed with education, we can further hypothesize that those commitments stayed kept (stickiness factor) because your involvement was public and there was pressure for you to perform. Parents, relatives, friends, are all after you and monitoring you until you finish high-school, college, a Masters Degree and perhaps a Ph.D. Therefore, the real committed person is one who can self-regulate the self. When you make commitments public then you force yourself to keep to the resolutions because of possible embarrassments from colleagues, friends and family, for dishonoring promises to the self.
Of course, the biggest commitment in life is staying married, and sadly, many folks break that commitment for insignificant reasons, although some must break the commitment of marriage when the other party is no longer the same person as before marriage. Why suffer your short life with a problem other. However, there is a lot of embarrassment in divorce or separation as marriage is a public matter. In the same way as marriage, you may want to treat your other commitments for the New Year as if you would regard the institution of marriage. I hope that the stickiness factor may be more apparent then when your commitments are public knowledge. To help yourself, make your commitments public.
Finally, a note to supervisors; setting targets too high will result in commitments that staffers just cannot keep. Also reaching for inhuman goals will only increase stress levels with consequential ill health.
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