Companies do not hire you just because you made good grades in school. You are hired because you’ve demonstrated attributes which resulted in a good outcome (good grades). To get good grades, you managed your time, showed discipline to accomplish a purpose, etc. The assumption is this: if you can apply those attributes in a job, the outcome would be good. You must understand that the processes to get a good grade are more important than the grade. Most attributes to success are universal while grades are not. Staying on course with those attributes makes the future predictable even when the grades become irrelevant!
Success in life is not defined by academic grades even though good grades will not hurt. The fact is this: a person can make As in a university-life-phase and still fail drastically in a professional-life-phase. While the phase-exams are different, behind them are clear relationships: process. It is safer to hire an A student than a C student as the A student had demonstrated the ability to set goals (every student desires to make good grades) and accomplished them. The key thing is not the A but the process that leads to the A. Simply, if you hire that A-student graduate, and he/she continues to apply those principles, there is a high chance he can deliver A performance in the company.
In other words, the As mean nothing; it is the process that matters. That process includes activity prioritization, dedication, focus, time management, etc which the student had elegantly managed to get A. Yes, he may not be the smartest student in class. The smartest student had been overwhelmed, failing to manage his time, and ended with B.
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This is why I tell people that finished with poor grades: your problem is not the poor grades but the processes that produced the grades. Until you fix the processes, you may continue to struggle in your career. If you have the capacity for “C” and worked really hard and made a “B”, you are far better than someone that possess capability for A but ended in B. Why? He is a dropper and is losing steam, and could be falling to the bottom.
Processes to good grades are more important than the grades in school. If you made good grades in school, and while working, abandon the processes that produced them, you will start recording poor grades in life! Those success-attributes are universal.
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This is not physics, but it does help for calibration or measurement sake.
It’s also possible that those who set A Grade goal and accomplish same are less innovative and not diverse, they are likely to be more linear in their thinking and approach, so the best bet would be to put them in a working system, they can perform optimally there. But they are not likely to be the best candidate when it comes to building systems, because the characteristics that work there isn’t that of setting a particular goal and achieving same, you need more of imagination and unconventional way of thinking and living.
Depending on what the task is, there are traits that could be the game changer, those measured and calibrated frameworks always miss them.
I totally agree with you Francis. I’ve come to realize that our Nigerian education system plays a major role in making people less focused on being innovative in approaching problems. In the coperate world, the innovative game changers are more likely to get to the top faster.