When you hire someone, what are the most important qualities you look for? Someone asked me this question once, clearly expecting answers like commitment, experience, education, or values alignment. They were surprised by my answer: teachability and integrity.
If you want optimal performance from the individuals on your team, you need them to be teachable and to have integrity. Leaders who understand what those traits look like can build teams they can trust and rely on—saving time and headaches, and resulting in better performance overall.
Teachability means taking action
Teachability is not hear-ability. If somebody is good at hearing what you say, they may listen intently, take notes, and even ask great questions. They may come away from the conversation full of ideas and insights. However, that doesn’t mean they’re doing anything with those ideas and insights.
Teachability means you do something with what you heard, which can be far more difficult. So often, people say, “I know what to do, but I just can’t do it because…” or “I didn’t because…” These individuals are not teachable. If someone hears something and agrees it’s a good idea and then still doesn’t do it, they are not really teachable.
I was once approached by an individual who asked me to mentor him. I told him, “I don’t think it would be a good use of my time or yours, because you’re not teachable.” He responded by insisting that he was in fact teachable. His response proved my point. He could have asked, “What can I do to get better? How can I improve? What are some things that would make me teachable?” Instead, he simply insisted he was teachable, without showing any willingness to take action and change his behaviors. That is not teachability.
Teachability means not only absorbing the information, but also acting on that information. I’ve worked with many teachable people. These are the individuals who sit down, have a discussion, say, “I’ll get to it,” and then implement what they learned from that discussion.
As a leader, when you work with teachable people, you will find there is little to no need for you to follow up or check in on them, or to ensure they’re doing what they said they would. You don’t have to go to great lengths to make sure they “get it.” As a result, you aren’t spending valuable time repeating the same guidance repeatedly.
What to look for when hiring for teachability: the act of (self) reflection
Teachable employees can be a huge boon to any business, but can teachability itself be taught? Often, the onus is on leadership to hold up the mirror to an employee to get them to recognize areas in need of improvement, be it punctuality or teamwork. Teachability is no different.
Let’s say you’re eating a hot dog with ketchup on it, and you finish your hot dog, look in the mirror, and see ketchup on your chin. You have the choice to wipe the ketchup off or keep it there. Until you looked in the mirror, you didn’t have that choice, because you weren’t aware of the problem. The mirror of leadership works much in the same way.
If you work for a leader and that leader holds up a mirror and says to you, “You’re not very teachable,” that may be the first time that you’ve gotten that kind of feedback and faced that issue. You can then decide: do you become teachable or not? Do you wipe the ketchup off your face or leave it there?
In an ideal world, employees will provide for self-reflection and check the proverbial mirror themselves to notice that ketchup smudge. However, to do so, they have to know what they’re looking for. They must understand, for example, that teachability hinges on not only listening but also taking action. From there, it’s a matter of critically asking themselves whether they fulfill those criteria. Are they putting their thoughts into actions?
This isn’t an easy process, so it is often on the manager to point it out. Even then, there is still a need for the employee to engage in self-reflection. Do they take the feedback, consider it, and think, “Okay, how can I change this?” Or do they take the feedback, say, “Okay, thanks!” and go about their merry way? Ideally, it’s the former.
When hiring for teachability, that power of self-reflection is paramount. There’s a reason human resources people have been asking the question, “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?” As familiar as these queries may be, they demand self-reflection—and that, in the workplace, is a critical pillar of teachability.
Integrity means delivering on what’s promised
Certain things can’t be taught. Integrity is one of them. Integrity essentially means simply that a person can be trusted to do what they say they’re going to do. That doesn’t mean the boss says, “Jump,” and the employee asks, “How high?” It’s simply about clarifying and agreeing on accountabilities.
Say you ask an employee to deliver a report to you by noon the next day. An employee with integrity may say, “Well, noon isn’t feasible, but I can get it to you by close of business, at five ‘o’clock.” They will then deliver on that promise.
In contrast, an employee lacking integrity might say, “Noon it is!” even if they know the deadline is unreasonable. Then, when the deadline comes around, they might argue that the timeframe was too tight or that one hurdle or another interfered. That’s not integrity.
The obligations of integrity in the workplace go both ways. If you’re the boss and you tell your employee, “I’m going to give you feedback once a month,” then you should deliver on that promise. Otherwise, you are demonstrating a lack of integrity. How can you then expect it from your team?
In either case, integrity is essentially about demonstrating honesty consistently. The great advantage of integrity is that it creates trust on both sides of the equation. An employer who sees their employee delivering on their promised behaviors will have greater trust in them, and vice versa.
What to look for when hiring for integrity: an ability to manage expectations
Integrity allows people to believe, “I can rely on you. You are predictable. You’ve demonstrated your integrity. Therefore, I trust you.” Unfortunately, this is a relatively elusive sentiment, especially in the modern workplace.
What makes integrity so complicated is the fact that two people are involved. It’s a combination of what one person projects and what another person perceives. The challenge comes down to simple communication.
Say a manager tells an employee, “I’m going to help you with your career.” After work, that employee tells their buddy over a drink, “My boss said they’re going to help me with my career. They’re going to mentor me and provide guidance and make sure I get opportunities to learn.” Meanwhile, the manager is at the next bar over, telling their friend, “I told this employee I’d help them with their career. So, if they ever leave and need a recommendation letter, I’ll help them.”
The core message, “I’m going to help you with your career,” has been interpreted in two completely different ways by the employee and the manager. What was presented versus what was perceived wasn’t clarified. This sets the stage for the manager’s integrity to be viewed in two very different ways.
Three months later, the employee may discover that their expectations of mentorship, guidance, and learning opportunities aren’t being met. Meanwhile, the manager may have no clue that their employee is getting frustrated. In the employee’s eyes, the manager isn’t delivering on their promise; they lack integrity. In the employer’s eyes, this isn’t the case at all.
It’s not that the manager lacks integrity. The manager is still willing to help the employee by writing them a recommendation letter. It’s just that what the manager is doing doesn’t align with what the employee expects. Even if this misunderstanding is clarified later, the reputational damage has already been done. In the employee’s opinion, the manager’s integrity has been dinged.
Ultimately, integrity doesn’t just require behaving in a consistent way. It requires setting up appropriate expectations in the minds of other people. This determines whether or not you are perceived as having integrity (which, in the working world, is just as important as having it in the first place).
You may have great integrity, but if you are speaking or behaving in a way that creates expectations that are different from your actions, you will not be perceived as having integrity. Integrity can suffer either because you don’t behave in a certain way, or you aren’t perceived as behaving in a certain way. Either way, trust erodes—and performance suffers.
Hiring for integrity doesn’t necessarily mean hiring the person who donates to charity or volunteers in the community. Integrity is at the same time much simpler and much more complex than that. When hiring for integrity, seek people who have a track record of delivering on their commitments and who have an ability to communicate well. They need to be able to articulate what expectations you have of them against what they’re committed to delivering. Then, you’ll have integrity.
Teachability and Integrity: the cornerstones of successful workplaces
Hiring has become a technical process in many ways. Companies use hiring matrices and scorecards to create a quantitative approach. However, qualitative measures remain just as important. A person can have an elite education and years of experience. If they don’t have integrity and don’t prove to be teachable, you probably don’t want to be stuck managing them.
In fact, I’d argue that teachability and integrity are paramount precisely because these traits can’t be secured through schooling or experience. Other assets employers may look for, like skills, can be taught. Teachability and integrity are trickier.
Further, it’s not enough to have just one person with teachability and integrity on the team. For a business to function optimally, these traits need to be consistently present in all involved, at every level. A small company might get by having just one marketing person or one IT person on the staff. But, regardless of size, a company needs more than one person with integrity and teachability to thrive.
Leadership and human resources share the responsibility of ensuring those traits are infused throughout the workforce. Knowing what to look for when hiring for teachability and integrity is the first step. Beyond that, leadership must accept the responsibility of holding up the mirror and reflecting back to employees their reality.
The leader must clarify what’s important—teachability and integrity. The leader can hand over the mirror and say, “This is what’s important. Teachability. Integrity. This is what I mean by that. Now, do you have it?” If the employee fails to examine their reflection and look at themselves internally to determine an answer, the leader can step in: “If you don’t use the mirror, then I’ll be the mirror.”
As with so much in the working world, the responsibility ultimately comes back to leadership. Those leaders who prioritize teachability and integrity, and demonstrate those characteristics themselves, are the ones who will build agile, adaptable teams that they can trust—and that trust them.