When we first meet people, our natural inclination is to size them up—to create an immediate impression of their abilities and liabilities.
Unfortunately, we often hold on to these vague and hasty conclusions and never revise them. This means we can easily overlook the talents of people we have written off based on superficial information.
Many people know to search for the overlooked value when they are buying something, but there is also great potential for overlooked value in the people around you.
Years went by, and Jane wondered if anybody was ever going to ask her to do anything more challenging than count. Her job was to monitor the assembly lines at a cosmetics manufacturer. Each hour she took note of the production level of each line and sent the information to the floor manager.
Jane counted output, matched it with a count of materials used, and then did it all over again. Nobody asked her why the lines were slow or fast. That wasn’t her job. Just count.
Over the course of five years, Jane took note of a hundred factors that influenced the pace of the lines, factors she knew nobody else was paying attention to. For one, if the volume on the radio system was too low, the workers spoke to each other more often, slowing down their pace.
The general manager casually asked her one time how things were going, expecting a generic response. He nearly fell over when Jane said production was down 2 percent and offered a list of the three most likely explanations.
Jane finally became visible to management, and she was promoted to a job where she could put to use many of the observations she’d made over the years.
Researchers find that the tendency to quickly assess abilities in other people is thought by many to be a highly valuable skill. In truth, this habit actually reduces productivity and increases turnover. One of the key characteristics of successful business leaders, according to 61 percent of them, is a willingness to engage in revitalization of employees, actively trying to see what workers are capable of and then helping them achieve that.
Boyer 1999