How Do You Find Ingenuity?

Ingenuity
Inventive or resourceful employees are worth their weight in gold. They are clever and imaginative and will work at a problem until they can solve it. Work is where this skill is needed at all times.

If your employees deal with your customers - every customer needs a problem solved. What happens when an employee doesn’t have this skill? You will most likely loose the customer. And lost customers will cost you your business.

Consider the following:
1. High Concept1 – The capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new.

2. High Touch2 – The ability to empathize with others, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch the quotidian [daily routine] in pursuit of purpose and meaning.

These are the skills of those with ingenuity. These are the skills you need your employees to have! These are the skills you really need to be looking for in an employee.

Ask questions like the following to help find employees with ingenuity.
1. Share with me an example where you have used your abilities on the job to define a problem that you saw. And how did you solve it?
2. Tell me of a time where you challenged prevailing assumptions and asked hard questions to facilitate change.
3. Describe a time where you worked by yourself to accomplish a project—a project where you took full responsibility for its completion.
4. Tell me about a time when you had to go above and beyond to get a job done.
5. What was a major obstacle you were able to overcome in the past year?

Prize the employee with ingenuity, they provide the passion that keep customers coming back.


Take from the Special Report #4 How to Get Someone Qualified! Found at The Image Foundry

1 & 2 Daniel Pink, A Hole New Mind