Research and experience have shown that in certain critical ways, people do not change. The ways individuals think and feel vary, but certain inherent patterns of behavior remain with us throughout our lives-even if we try to change them. These characteristics make up the essential nature of each individual. Assuming these traits are alterable and attempting to change them only wastes precious time and resources.

Right Skills, Wrong Attitude
Anyone who has worked with restaurant companies understands the importance of truly friendly and helpful service in the industry. Employee personality and attitude drive a customer's motivation to return. Companies that want to get people to come back must build a team of employees with friendly, smiling faces who are easy to talk to and are good listeners. Most companies in the service industry recognize this and spend a great deal of time, money and energy on training employees to meet these needs. Yet, the training does not seem to yield the expected or desired results. Why not?

Many companies implement an incorrect strategy: hiring skills and trying to train attitudes. The hiring process tends to place more importance on experience and availability than on attitude and friendliness. Recruiters and managers feel that employees can always be trained to offer friendly service once they are hired. What they do not realize is that while skills usually change with practice and experience, inherent personality and attitudes do not. More often than not, great skills teamed with poor attitude will translate to the kind of employee companies do not need and cannot train. Who is the better bet as a new hire in a restaurant, the cheerful person who enjoys meeting people but needs to be trained to balance trays, or the irritable but efficient person? The recruiter might choose the latter, but attempting to change his personality will be impossible.

Try training a surly employee to be friendly while doing the things trainers tell us are important: providing the concept and illustrations about the power and importance of friendliness, teaching the techniques of being friendly and getting the person to practice friendliness. Once you have done this, set your student to work and try to observe him or her. I guarantee that the surly parts of your student's personality will already be reemerging. You spent time and money trying to change the unchangeable, and in the process, incurred significant lost opportunity costs by hiring the wrong candidate and passing over the newcomer with potential.

Hire Attitude, Train Skills
To find the best fit, recruiters should concentrate on hiring attitudes and training for skills. This is particularly important in a job where a good attitude is everything. Apply this strategy, and you will soon be known as the friendliest company in the business.

The selection process must be altered and fine-tuned to assess personality and attitude. This is where the considerable progress in the science of personality assessment can help. Scientific methods can be applied to identify traits that usually do not change. Based on this knowledge, you can choose the right questions to ask and the right answers to listen for-those that actually predict the existence of the critical traits. A selection tool created to do this effectively will save resources while creating increased potential for achievement. When companies recognize the immense value of identifying the right person for each job and then invest in developing smarter assessment and hiring systems, they gain a huge advantage over the competition. Training and development resources can be focused on the skills that are most teachable, which will give employees the proficiency to apply their innate capabilities to produce a winning performance.

Anticipate Nature
You can't fight Mother Nature, but you can certainly learn to anticipate and deal with her tendencies-to your advantage. The nature of individuals is not likely to change, even under exceptional circumstances. Yet each individual has enormous potential to develop in those areas where they have the right combination of traits. As managers and leaders of organizations, it is our choice. We can resist the natural tendencies that determine everything from weather to personality, or we can invest our time and energy to understand, facilitate and capitalize on the power of nature.