Landlord White Paint
By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
I grew up in New York City and lived there for a lot of my life. Unless I paid to have my apartment painted, every apartment I lived in was painted in what is referred to as “landlord white.”
What is landlord white paint?
It is cheap white paint, commodity paint, that doesn’t age well. It starts to yellow, chips easily, and does not look well in a short period of time.
When people are young, they take their experience from many of the schools they attend and learn that the way to do well in school is to act like everyone else,
regurgitate a bunch of facts when we tell you to do so (tests), do what we tell you to do when we tell you to do it) and to act like everyone else in an interview and in the workplace, say the same things as everyone else leaving hiring managers with little to choose between and wondering where they can find fresh ideas.
Like business transformation, the system has created monotony and drudgery.
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Few American corporations would ever hire the adult Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, or Caterina Fake even though each created billion-dollar enterprises and enormous value for investors.
They prefer nice college graduates from good schools even though Ev Williams (twitter, medium), Jack Dorsey (twitter, Square) and Biz Stone (twitter, medium) never graduated college. Neither did Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook or Rob Kalin from etsy. Oh! Steve Jobs and Bill Gates didn’t graduate either.
Why do so many businesses hire the human equivalent of landlord white paint and are surprised when they are disappointed with the results they get?
Why don’t many firms look for the story behind the story in each person to identify their “color” and then help that color become more robust? What is it that makes someone special, and not just landlord white paint?
Statistics show that in the US, employee engagement statistics show 33% of workers are engaged. 67% are either quiet quitters or “not-so-quiet quitters” (disengaged workers).
If these are the results you want, keep doing what you’re doing. Otherwise, it’s time to revisit your processes and change them to make them deliver better outcomes.
Ⓒ The Big Game Hunter, Inc., Asheville, NC 2022
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ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter is a coach who worked as a recruiter for what seems like one hundred years. He is hired to provide No BS Career Advice globally. That can involve job search, hiring staff, management, leadership, career transition and advice about resolving workplace issues.
Schedule a discovery call at my website, www.TheBigGameHunter.us
Website: JobSearch.Community
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/TheBigGameHunter
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