Personal Saboteurs - How to Find Quality Candidates

A hiring manager's worst fear is picking a standout candidate that turns out to fall short of their high expectations not long after being hired. While HR professionals and executives have been combating this disappointing occurrence for decades, some seem to think that measuring positive intelligence could be an effective way of weeding out these tricky candidates. In today's blog post, we identify the concept of positive intelligence and dive into the topic of personal saboteurs.

What is Positive Intelligence?

Positive Intelligence is a way of measuring the degree in which an individual will sabotage themselves and their own progress. In college, this could be seen as a student sleeping in rather than attending their Human Resources Management 101 class, while in the workplace this could be personified through an intentionally missed meeting. How individuals mentally justify both of these instances is dependent upon their own internal personal saboteurs.

About Personal Saboteurs

According to Shirdzad Chamine; author of the New York Times Best Seller, "Positive Intelligence", personal saboteurs are "internal enemies. They are a set of automatic and habitual mind patterns, each with its own voice, beliefs, and assumptions that work against our best interest. To illustrate, when our mind tells us that we should prepare for tomorrow’s important meeting, it is acting as our friend, causing positive action. When it wakes us up at 3:00 a.m. anxious about the meeting and warning us for the hundredth time about the many consequences of failing, it is acting as our enemy; it is simply exhausting our mental and physical resources without any redeeming value."

Every adult has personal saboteurs, but as an individual grows into adulthood, they become increasingly unaware of them, thus making it difficult to simply approach an individual and ask them about their pitfalls. Chamine created two FREE analytical tests that determine a candidate’s positive intelligence as well as their individual profile of saboteurs. Each test takes between 2-5 minutes to complete and gives an in-depth snapshot of their mentality as it could be essentially related to their contribution to a new work environment.

There are 10 common saboteurs, each with its own commonalities and traits. Each of the saboteurs and a brief description is included below.

• Judge - The focus is continuously negative.
• Controller - The need to always control situations.
• Sticker - An extreme perfectionist.
• Avoider - Conflict avoidance.
• Restless - Rarely satisfied without constant activity.
• Pleaser - The constant need to be liked or validated.
• Victim - The focus is continuously painful and emotional.
• Hyper-Rational - There is no room for emotion.
• Hyper-Vigilant - Constantly concerned with potential dangers.
• Hyper-Achiever- Finds achievements to be of utmost importance.

Each of these saboteurs can be seen as both strengths and weaknesses. The key to understanding how saboteurs can shuffle out tricky candidates is in understanding each saboteur in itself. To learn more about each saboteur, including positives traits and potential mental discrepancies, visit Chamine's Positive Intelligence site. While on the site, feel free to take the two tests and find out your own personal saboteurs for continued professional growth.