Well before I got into my first job, I remember teachers talking about how a casual attitude and a 'cool' approach to life affected your career prospects. I never took it seriously at that point of course. I remember a math teacher as far back as 11th and 12th grade talking about this. I don't remember it being mentioned by any of the engineering professors, but come MBA again senior HRs tended to value a serious attitude a lot more than a laid back attitude. I've had interviewers knowingly act over-casual in order to elicit a casual response from me. Something like 'I know you didn't perform that well during Sem 2- It's not a big deal though.. I mean you did top the class in the other Sems and getting low marks once isn't a problem.. you can fail once a while right?' digs a pit in front of you, and he awaits you to jump into the pit by agreeing with him. Having mainly worked on technical fields until the start of the MBA, I had become to a large extent not-so-serious. Now this is not a conscious effort I put in to try and have a chilled out attitude- it is just something that comes naturally. And it had nothing to do with how good I was at whichever thing I worked on. And in technical fields, to a large extent it doesn't matter how chilled out a person is. There are highly eccentric scientists and programmers who have even higher levels of success. Being weird or unsocial does not affect their career prospects too much as long as they are excellent when it comes to subject knowledge. Of course if they end up in managerial positions in the company, it can be more of a problem- even if the field is technical.
However when it comes to working in non technical fields, a casual attitude is a huge issue. And to be honest, after having a few months of work experience I can see why. There is an incredibly huge correlation between casual attitude and not doing your work properly. At this point I think I should clarify what I mean by casual attitude , so that the previous statement doesn't seem too obvious. Someone who plays Ludo in office irrespective of whether his manager sees him has a casual attitude even if he is the most hardworking guy and does his job way better than a pretentious guy who acts as if he's working while browsing through facebook. Now that we have that clear, let me go through the reasons.
Firstly, it is relatively more difficult for non-technical fields to quantify how good a person is at his job. Thus we are forced to look at things like seriousness, attitude, language, dressing and so on- whereas a programmer might be hired just for his coding skills(which can easily be measured). And to be fair to HRs, fields such as sales and in fact any field which involves direct interaction with the client DOES require people to be well groomed, serious and all of that in order to be successful. Secondly, since people know that having a casual attitude is not looked upon favourably, it results in naturally less self-conscious people also acting serious. Thus, only those who really don't care about their career prospects end up with the casual attitude, along with a few hard working people who still haven't figured out the importance of acting serious.
And because of these two reasons (and possibly more), I do find that casualness is an amazing measure of a person's seriousness towards work. There seems to be a very strong empirical link. And So, I will try to be as serious as possible during my next interview which is up soon.
However when it comes to working in non technical fields, a casual attitude is a huge issue. And to be honest, after having a few months of work experience I can see why. There is an incredibly huge correlation between casual attitude and not doing your work properly. At this point I think I should clarify what I mean by casual attitude , so that the previous statement doesn't seem too obvious. Someone who plays Ludo in office irrespective of whether his manager sees him has a casual attitude even if he is the most hardworking guy and does his job way better than a pretentious guy who acts as if he's working while browsing through facebook. Now that we have that clear, let me go through the reasons.
Firstly, it is relatively more difficult for non-technical fields to quantify how good a person is at his job. Thus we are forced to look at things like seriousness, attitude, language, dressing and so on- whereas a programmer might be hired just for his coding skills(which can easily be measured). And to be fair to HRs, fields such as sales and in fact any field which involves direct interaction with the client DOES require people to be well groomed, serious and all of that in order to be successful. Secondly, since people know that having a casual attitude is not looked upon favourably, it results in naturally less self-conscious people also acting serious. Thus, only those who really don't care about their career prospects end up with the casual attitude, along with a few hard working people who still haven't figured out the importance of acting serious.
And because of these two reasons (and possibly more), I do find that casualness is an amazing measure of a person's seriousness towards work. There seems to be a very strong empirical link. And So, I will try to be as serious as possible during my next interview which is up soon.
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