Personal Development

Laszlo Bock , Vice President of HR at Google, in an interview with the New York Times commented that “the academic record is useless”, and then nuanced, “as a recruitment criteria”, because we need people who like to find out things.

By interpreting this statement, the article aims to help understand and combine the areas of “knowledge or know-how” that a professional need in order to be successful in both personal and professional life.

When we grow older and worry about our future and our integration into the working society, we learn a profession and / or study, which will provide us with a technique and / or knowledge: we know accounting, we are engineers or doctors, we are cooks, carpenters or mechanics … Having this knowledge with the maximum depth is very positive and necessary and the more the better. We have all been told at one time or another, “knowledge does not take up space”, but to get the most out of this knowledge, we need to combine it with skills and attitudes.

What is a skill or know-how?

Skills such as knowing how to explain an idea, organizing your time, working in a team, treating the client well, knowing how to listen, managing a conflict, negotiating, critical thinking, learning skills, creativity, etc.

What is an attitude or “know-how”?

Having a predisposition to change, emotional control, constancy, being enthusiastic, accepting the error, having tolerance for the no, etc.

Let’s see some examples to understand the relationship between these different concepts of knowledge:

• You are a person with experience and knowledge in a specific sector, and you have an idea about a certain subject:

You need the ability to explain it as well as possible so that it is understood and “bought “.

You need the ability to manage the project for its implementation. It is possible that in the course of the implementation there will be reticence, some errors will occur, you will need to have tolerance to the error and not fall into discouragement

If you fail in any of these steps, based on different skills and attitudes rather than knowledge, the likelihood that you will be taken back to another idea decreases.

Who is one of the main beneficiaries of being able to develop your ideas? Yourself.

• You are a person with predisposition, enthusiasm, …. “pure energy”, your attitudes are unbeatable, but you lack the ability to organize and plan your time to select where to invest this energy … your results, will not be the same.
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• An athlete with an exquisite technique with the ball, but who does not interpret the best solution for every moment of the match, or who by the slightest error gets discouraged, will not get the same performance from his technique.
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• You have a very good technical product but you don’t invest enough energy in generating a climate of trust with the customers. If you are the only one, they will buy from you, but if there is another one that offers the same solutions and generates a greater climate of trust and relationship with the client, they will buy from that person.

We have always been concerned about knowledge, we invite you to “take care” of your know-how and your being, it will help you find more solutions in a social work environment increasingly demanding and changing, and in which the difference is made by the small details.

To improve your skills and attitudes it is important to reflect on which are innate and which you can learn. We all have a genetic part, but the majority of skills and attitudes can be learned and improved, taking into account that the ability to learn is a skill, success depends on the willingness to leave the comfort zone, understand a new concept, train it, put it into practice, improve it, and not get discouraged.

To make the most of your knowledge and experience you don’t need to be a great specialist in every skill and attitude, simply identify the ones you consider will make you better in the development of your profession, and try to work on them to improve them.

Remember that if we add the skills to the knowledge, your capacity and performance increase, but if we add the attitude to the knowledge and skills, they will multiply exponentially.