Work Matters

Category: Evidence-based Management

  • Adopting The No Asshole Rule: Don’t Bother If The Words Are Hollow

    I just got off the phone with executives from an unnamed large company who are thinking about implementing a "no jerk rule." I am, of course, a big fan of this idea. And there are organizations that have such rules and the implement them effectively, such as Baird, the financial services firm.

    But I think they were a bit taken aback by how vehement I was about the dangers of just plastering the words everywhere, and not following it with the real work of implementing The No Asshole Rule (and, of course, this applies to any other norm in the organization… we wrote a lot about this in The Knowing-Doing Gap).  I wanted to know if the reward and prestige systems already supported the rule, and if not, how they were going to change things.  I wanted to know if the senior executives already modeled the right behavior, and if not, was something being done to make sure they changed their behavior.  I wanted to know if there were known assholes in visible positions, and if there were, was something going to be done to change their behavior or send them packing –to signal that the words were not hollow. 

    As with all norms, the espoused beliefs don't mean much unless they are backed by what people do — especially during the little moments.  Google is an interesting case in point.  Although they are imperfect like every human organization, it remains a civilized place because, as one senior executive explained to me years ago, "it isn't efficient to be an asshole here."  That is a sign to me that the norm is working, and all the strategy and product stuff aside, it is impressive they seem to have sustained this norm despite their size and the relentless performance pressures.  

    To return to the dangers of hollow rhetoric: It is especially destructive when it comes to the no jerk or or no asshole rule.  When organizations say it, but don't do it, when it does not constrain and describe how people act — and no serious efforts are being made to begin implementing the norm — the result is that double-whammy:  Leaders are seen as both assholes and hypocrites.  

  • Richard Feynman On The Folly Of Crafting Precise Definitions

    One of my best friends in graduate school was a former physics major named Larry Ford.  When behavioral scientists started pushing for precise definitions of concepts like effectiveness and leadership, he would sometimes confuse them (even though Larry is a very precise thinker) by arguing "there is a negative relationship between precision and accuracy."   I just ran into a quote from the amazing Nobel winner Richard Feynman that makes a similar point in a lovely way:

    "We can't define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers… one saying to the other: "you don't know what you are talking about!". The second one says: "what do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you? What do you mean by know?""

    Feynman's quote reminded me of the opening pages of the 1958 classic "Organizations" by James March (quite possibly the most prestigious living organizational theorist, and certainly, one of the most charming academics on the planet) and Herbert Simon (another Nobel winner).  They open the book with a great quote that sometimes drives doctoral students and other scholars just crazy.  They kick-off by saying:

    "This is a book about a theory of formal organizations.  It is easier, and probably more useful, to give examples of formal organizations than to define them."

    After listing a bunch of examples of organizations including the Red Cross and New York State Highway Department, they note in words that would have pleased Feynman:

    "But for the present purposes we need not trouble ourselves with the precise boundaries to be drawn around an organization or the exact distinction between an "organization" and a "non-organization."  We are dealing with empirical phenomena, and the world has an uncomfortable way of not permitting itself to be fitted into clean classifications." 

    I must report, however, that for the second edition of the book, published over 20 years later, the authors elected to insert a short definition in the introduction: 

    "Organizations are systems of coordinated action among individuals and groups whose preferences, information, interests, or knowledge differ." 

    When I read this,  I find myself doing what Feynman complained about.  I think of things they left out: What about norms? What about emotions?  I think of situations where it might not apply: Doesn't a business owned and operated by one person count as an organization?  I think of the possible overemphasis on differences: What about all the times and ways that people and groups  in organizations have similar preferences, information, interests, and knowledge? Isn't that part of what an organization is as well?  I could go on and on.

    I actually think it is a pretty good definition, but my bias is still that I like original approach, as they did such a nice job of arguing, essentially, that if they tried to get more precise, they would sacrifice accuracy. Nonetheless, I confess that I still love trying to define things and believe that trying to do so can help clarifying your thinking.  You could argue that while the outcome, in the end, will always be flawed and imprecise, the process is usually helpful and there are many times when it is useful pretend that you have a precise and accurate definition even if you don't (such as when you are developing metrics). 

  • Our New York Times Piece on Evidence-Based Management: The Uncut Version

    Jeff Pfeffer and I had a piece appear today in The New York Times "Preoccupations" column called "Trust the Evidence, Not Your Instincts."  We are pleased with the points it makes and how it reads, but as is inevitable given the space constraints in newspapers, the final version is a bit shorter than the piece we submitted. In particular, we wish there had been space to include our point that, not only has linking incentives to standardized test scores been generally ineffective, a nasty side effect is that such programs often drive teachers and administrators to cheat (giving students the right answers or erasing wrong answers and replacing them with right answers).

    In addition, one point that we didn't emphasize even in the "uncut version" is that we are NOT arguing financial incentives are generally useless, dangerous, or unwise to use.  They do motivate human-beings, and seem to be especially effective (as Dan Pink shows us) for tasks that do not require high levels of imagination.  But a condition for any incentive system to work is that people need to have enough control over their work.  A big problem with many teacher incentive programs is that, all too often, individual teachers just don't have enough resources, enough influence over the preparation kids had before they enter their classroom, enough influence over what happens to their students outside the classroom, and enough support from the administration.  So no matter how motivated the teachers might be, they can't have a big impact on student's scores, at least through honest means. Although it isn't pretty or ethical, teachers and administration sometimes turn to something they can control: They give the kids answers, erase wrong answers and change them to right answers, or in some cases, find ways to get the weakest performing kids out of their classes and schools, even when those students need the most help.  Unfortunately, in too many schools, this means the weakest students are moved to special education classes, which raises mean test scores in regular classes, but hurts both the kids who don't belong in special education classes as well those who do.

    OK, here is the uncut version:

    Title:

    The Virtues of Evidence-Based Management

    Reading lines:

    We know a lot now about what it takes to build humane and effective workplaces.   Leaders and managers can avert a lot of unnecessary harm –and do much good – by learning and heeding the best evidence.

    Text:

    Consider this scenario.  You have a serious illness. Your doctor prescribes an intrusive, painful, and expensive treatment— and you have to pay for it.  What she doesn’t tell you—because she has not consulted the research – is that most studies show the treatment is ineffective and fraught with negative side-effects.  You go through the procedure, suffer severe pain, and spend a lot of money.  Unfortunately, as with most patients, the procedure proves ineffective. You later uncover the research your doctor failed to consult.  When you ask why she didn’t use this evidence, she answers, “Who pays attention to studies?  I have years of clinical experience.  Besides, the protocol seemed like it ought to work.”  

    Does that sound like malpractice?  It does to us.  Fortunately, pressures to practice evidence-based medicine are reducing preventable errors.  Not so in most of our workplaces, where failure to consider sound evidence repeatedly inflicts unnecessary damage on employee well-being and organizational performance.   But it doesn’t have to be this way.

    No workplace practice is as important—and apparently vexing—as pay.  Many people believe that pay for-performance will work in virtually any organization, so it is implemented again and again to solve performance problems — even in settings where evidence shows it is ineffective.  Consider the recent decision to end New York City’s teacher bonus program after wasting three years and 56 million dollars.  As this newspaper reported in July, a Rand Corporation study found this effort to link incentive pay to student performance “had no effect on students’ test scores, on grades on the city’s controversial A to F school report cards, or on the way teachers did their jobs.”  This bad news could have been predicted before squandering all that time and money.  The failure of such programs to boost student performance has been documented for decades.  A careful review of pay for performance in schools in the 1980s showed these programs rarely lasted more than five years and consistently failed to improve student performance.   The 300 page Rand report emphasizes that (although exceptions exist) evidence against the efficacy of teacher incentive pay in U.S. schools continues to grow stronger and is especially evident in the most rigorous studies. 

    This practice doesn’t just waste money.  As Chicago economist Steve Levitt and others show, strong incentive programs can entice – or scare — teachers and administrators to “cheat” on the tests, either by providing students with questions and answers in advance or changing student’s answer sheets to increase apparent performance.  Recent well-publicized cheating scandals in Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and elsewhere could have been foreseen by anyone who read and heeded this research.  Building a culture of cheating in schools corrupts both students and teachers for no good purpose.

    Evidence about numerous other practices is ignored too.  Harvard University’s J. Richard Hackman finds that stable membership is a hallmark of effective work teams.  People with more experience working together typically communicate and coordinate more effectively.  Although this effect is seen in studies of everything from product development teams to airplane cockpit crews, managers often can’t resist the temptation to rotate people in and out to minimize staffing costs and make scheduling easier.  This happens even though, for instance, the National Transportation Safety Board found that 73% of the safety incidents reported on commercial aircraft occur on the first day a new crew flies together. 

    Hiring the right people is another key decision in every workplace.  Many studies show that unstructured face-to-face interviews are biased; for example, interviewers prefer candidates who are likeable, similar to them, and physically attractive (even when these qualities are irrelevant to performance).  Numerous selection methods are superior – among the best is to simply see if the candidate can perform the work.  Yet interviews remain the primary selection method used by organizations.  And we’ve often been astounded by the refusal of seasoned managers and executives to even consider evidence that interviews are a flawed selection tool.

    Strongly-held but weakly supported beliefs about workplace practices reflect what psychologists call “confirmation bias.”  When people hold firm beliefs about something, they tend to ignore, reject, and forget facts that clash with their beliefs; and remember, accept, and more readily accept facts that support their beliefs.   A related impediment is the excessive self-confidence that plagues many people, especially those who wield power over others.  Decision-makers may acknowledge they use a practice that is ineffective for most other people and organizations — but believe they are so talented that the usual findings don’t apply to them.  

    To illustrate, numerous studies show that mergers typically inflict economic damage on the acquiring company.  Yet when one of us served on the board of a software company that was contemplating an acquisition — a “target” company in a different city and of comparable size (conditions that predict merger failure) — the CEO argued it would succeed despite the evidence because he wasn’t like most CEOs.  He was wrong.  It failed, just as most acquisitions do under these conditions.

    Despite such impediments, there is an evidence-based movement afoot in some organizations.  When Gary Loveman became COO of Harrah’s in the late 1990s, he decided that improving the service provided to the best customers—“the people who made the cash register ring”—was a priority.  Loveman had taught service management at Harvard Business School, so was well-versed in research on customer loyalty — and how employee turnover undermined it. Loveman’s team implemented numerous evidence-based tactics including realistic job previews. After candidates were offered a job, they were informed about the good and bad elements so they could decide if the work was right for them.  Turnover plummeted, service improved, and coupled with Harrah’s innovative marketing, the company went on a decade-long run of outstanding performance. 

    A recent study at Google demonstrates the power of accepting and acting on evidence, even when it clashes with ingrained beliefs.  For most of its history, Google’s leaders believed that deep technical expertise was the most important quality for a manager. They believed the best bosses pretty much left their people alone, and their main role was to help with technical problems when people got stuck.  Yet when Google examined what employees valued most in a manager, technical expertise ranked last of the eight attributes examined.  Attributes like being even-keeled, asking good questions, taking time to meet with people, and caring about employees’ careers and lives were most crucial.  Google found that managers who did these things led top performing teams, had the happiest employees, and suffered the least turnover. In response, Google is making many changes in how it selects and coaches managers, and is devoting particular effort to improving its worst managers.  We applaud Google’s leaders for overcoming their biases. But note the attributes of great managers Google “discovered” were evident in hundreds of prior studies. Perhaps if Google’s leaders hadn’t believed they were so “special” and “different,” they might have launched such efforts to improve their managers years earlier.

    The evidence-based medicine movement arose in response to thousands of unnecessary deaths and billions of wasted dollars that could have been averted by implementing proven practices.  Similarly, the growing pile of studies on the human and financial costs of employee disengagement, management distrust, bad group dynamics, faulty incentive schemes, and other preventable damage suggests the need for an evidence-based management movement.  Some organizations are leading the way.  It’s time for many more to do the same.

    P.S. Speaking of evidence-based management, Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer, authors of The Progress Principle, had a great editorial The Times today called "Do Happier People Work Harder?"

  • 5 Warning Signs to Watch for at Apple

    I declined several media inquiries to comment on Steve Jobs and the impact his departure will have on Apple.  I did so because predicting the future of any company is always hard, but especially so for Apple where the secrecy is so severe.  For example, although Tim Cook has stepped in and out of the CEO role multiple times, the assumption seems to be that Jobs has retained influence on daily operations throughout the past three or four years. Clearly, Steve is quite sick and has been for a long time, which leads me to wonder to what extent Steve Jobs himself versus the IDEA of Steve Jobs has held stronger sway in Apple.  In any case, it is clear the Cook has been running a big proportion of day to day operations for years now.  But perhaps Jobs has had little more than symbolic influence for years.  If that is true — and I have no idea if it is — the odds that Apple will continue its impressive run might be a bit higher than pundits predict.  Regardless, in the short-term, my hunch is the capital markets have the right take on Apple (the stock is holding rock steady) as it has such great products, pizazz, stores, and operations that sudden trouble seems unlikely.

    When I finally did a media interview for FT Germany yesterday, I got to thinking about Apple from an organizational and cultural perspective.  I was especially influenced by Adam Lashinsky's magnificent Fortune piece called Inside Apple.  The story that emerges from Adam's piece and other bits of information is that Apple's structure, work practices, and beliefs about how to get done are woven together to support a highly centralized model of decision-making, where very talented individuals and small teams are given specific tasks, individuals are held highly accountable for implementation, and extremely strong cultural, interpersonal, and performance pressures are present. 

    Although I won't dig into the debate about trade-offs between centralization and decentralization, centralization works best when leaders face a relatively small number of important decisions, when they find ways to reduce the emotional and cognitive load on the relatively small number of people making major decisions, and tight personal, organizational, and cultural controls mean that decisions from on high are implemented quickly and without much question.  At its best, in a centralized system, there is much confidence in leaders, fast communication up and down, and relatively little time spent on dysfunctional politics (as there is no power vacuum, little second guessing, and severe penalties for ignoring or undermining orders from on high).   Although it is mighty hard to know exactly what is going on in Apple, this description seems to fit most stories and other information about the place under the shared leadership of Jobs and Cook. 

    Assuming this is more or less accurate, I started wondering, what would be some signs that such a system was heading for trouble? Consider five:

    1. The size of the board of directors starts to grow.  Apple has been criticized for having a board that is too small, only 7 people.  Smaller teams not only make better and faster decisions, and have better dynamics, a small board helps a senior management team move faster as there are fewer masters to serve and, on average, the speed and quality of their advice should be better.  If more members are added to Apple's board (especially if they get to 10 or more) it would suggest the board and top team are putting too many things on their plate, trying to please too many masters, and creating more complex group dynamics that will slow and complicate decision-making and implementation in both groups. 

    2. The number of products expands dramatically.  When Jobs first returned to Apple, they had a huge pile of products — he killed all of them within the year.  For example, as Jobs said ten months after his return, they had so many different kinds of Macs and other hardware that Apple employees couldn't even tell their friends which ones to buy (See this old 1998 video, especially minute 5:20 to 7:30 or so).  In contrast, look at the product line now, they only make one iPhone at a time, one iPad, and have a pretty narrow set of Macs too.  If you are going to run a highly centralized organization (as one friend of mine calls it "genius driven"), a smaller product line is especially important because, that way, the senior team need only track a relatively small number, which averts placing excessive cognitive load on them.  As I wrote here earlier, Jobs has argued that a hallmark of great companies is that they not only kill all the bad ideas, they kill most of the good ones too so they can focus on doing a few things well and not design inelegant products or experiences that reflect an effort to jam every seemingly good idea in someplace.

    If Apple's product line gets bigger, especially a lot bigger, it gets harder to run the organization without delegating more major decisions.  In addition, and perhaps most crucially, when an organization has an irrationally large product line, when consumers and even insiders can't understand the logic, the real explanation often is that there are many medium power groups that have enough resources and influence to build their own hardware, software, or whatever BUT not enough power to stop others.  As a result, many medium size fiefdoms emerge, attention turns inwards to gaining political advantage over competitors, and away from what is best for the company and customers.  I saw this at GM before the bankruptcy.  This was also exactly the situation that Jobs faced when he returned to run Apple in the mid 1990s. My conversations with Apple insiders suggest that dysfunctional politics explained the big product line, not the strategy.  So a big increase in products — and one that doesn't seem to make much sense — would signal the team is putting too much cognitive load  on itself, moving to a more decentralized model that does not fit with other elements of Apple, and that people are spending more time battling to get THEIR product out and to kill others developed by colleagues instead of making a few INSANELY GREAT products.

    3. Departures of senior executives.  One of the most consistent strengths of Apple that observers emphasize is the quality of their top team.  The same goes for their board too, with perhaps the star being the amazing Bill Campbell, one of the most renowned coaches and mentors on the planet and THE most desirable board member in Silicon Valley. Presumably, Tim Cook has had years to work with them, and the dynamics are healthy; I suspect one reason Apple is so effective partly is because of this stability.  When people start leaving any group, there is good evidence that the resulting disruption undermines group performance as it takes time for groups to absorb and learn how to work with new people.  I would be especially concerned if people who left are replaced by outsiders, as Apple clearly has distinct ways of thinking and acting that would take time for even the most able outsider to learn.  Moreover, when people start leaving a top management team at unexpectedly high rates, it often signals trouble: They are unhappy with their CEO and fellow executives, they are being forced out, or both. Note that there have been some key departures of senior executives  in recent months, so this is something to keep an eye on.  In particular, if head designer Jonathan Ive left, that would signal that something is terribly wrong.

    4. Leaks to the press.  As an outsider who would like to know more about Apple, and who often talks to journalists that cover Apple, the difficulty of learning anything about the company just amazes me.  It took me a good four months to confirm that my former Stanford colleague Joel Podolny had become head of HR after hearing the first rumor it had occurred — and of course Joel was too smart and well-socialized to answer the email I sent him asking him if the rumor was true.  While information does sometimes get out (consider Adam Lashinsky's great Fortune piece) a hallmark of Apple's culture is that people in the company take secrecy so seriously — especially when it comes to forthcoming products and release dates (the current secrecy around the iPhone 5 being a case in point).  I have friends who work at Apple, not just Joel.  It is amazing to see what happens to them when they go to work there.. they stop talking, they won't return emails, and you learn — if you do run into them — not to ask them about anything sensitive.  After all, should they slip and tell you, they are putting their own jobs at risk.  Now, such paranoia, although unattractive in some ways, does have advantages in that competitors are kept in the dark and consumers don't really know when an Apple product they buy will be outdated.  Apple has been able to do an especially brilliant job of tweaking production levels (thanks to Tim Cook's amazing supply chain) and pricing so they can squeeze the most out of existing but soon to be outdated hardware and software.  Perhaps even more important, Apple's infamously effective secrecy is a sign of fantastic cultural control and individual commitment to the company. If we start seeing more leaks than in the past, it signals the strength of the bonds among people are weakening and their fear of breaking this most sacred of Apple commandments in waning — that Apple's carrots and sticks aren't working as well as in the past.

    5. Acquisitions, especially big ones.  Just this morning, I was reading some stories quoting management professors who predicted that Apple is sitting on so much money that they would probably go on a shopping spree and buy a bunch of companies.  If this happens, I would really start to worry.  Yes, small strategic acquisitions to bring specific people or specific technologies that Apple needs to move ahead are probably necessary and wise.  But if you look at research on acquisitions, especially big acquisitions, not only do they tend to fail, they do a bunch of things to organizations (especially senior teams) that would be especially deadly for Apple.  They distract leaders from the day to day operations of their firms, increase the overall cognitive and emotional load, bring in different and change resistant subcultures that are usually harder to transform than senior executives predict, they result in additions (and subtractions) to the top management team and board of directors (and thus create the group dynamics problems outlined earlier), and often broaden the product line (The Compaq/HP merger being a case in point).  As such, it seems to me that doing a big acquisition — or worse yet, a stream of them — would be an especially efficient way to undermine Apple's seemingly magnificent structure and culture.  Apple got big by doing a fairly small number of things very well and by doing them for themselves.

    As I said at the outset, it is impossible to predict Apple's fate.  I would speculate, however, that regardless of whether all or none of the things above happen, the best bet is that Apple will slip a bit in the next decade.   One reason is simply regression to the mean, that things even out over time, so extreme outliers in any distribution tend to drift toward the average.   There are some forces that helps this process along in very successful companies.  As my colleague Jeff Pfeffer likes to say, whether it comes to a great restaurant or a great technology company, the inevitable distractions, overload, outside scrutiny,  arrogance, confusion, and fear of screwing things up (rather than focusing on making things better and better) mean, all too often, that "success ruins everything."   Regardless, regression to the mean seems to happen in most or all systems where large variance in performance is seen.  Certainly every high flying technology company that ever existed has eventually drifted toward the middle or bottom, at least for awhile.   Even the most enduring, such as IBM, have gone through some hard times and, of course, Apple had some mighty tough times in the mid 1990s. 

    Meanwhile, I confess that I hope Apple continues to be great and become greater.  If the iPhone 5 is as cool as I hope, I will get one.   My old 3GS is still running strong, but I don't think I will be able to resist.  About a year ago, I had dinner with design guru Don Norman , who was once a senior executive running advanced development at Apple,  Don was quickly fired when Jobs returned.   Don, who is smart, charming, and has a sharp tongue, noted that Jobs' decision was understandable, he just wished that Steve had been a little nicer about it.  Don — who owns both a Droid and iPhone — made an interesting comment.  That you could argue all day about the technical pros and cons of each phone, but he pretty much always grabs the iPhone because it is just more fun and that "fun thing"  is a reflection of Steve Jobs' and Jonathan Ive's combined genius: Something no other technology company seems to ever figure out quite so well or so consistently.   If Apple can protect and keep spreading that human magic across its products, and keep running that amazing supply chain, nothing that any of us say will matter.  Their greatness will persist.

  • What Would You Do If Your Doctor Relied on a Book Like This?

    As regular readers of this blog will know,  I am a strong advocate of evidence-based management.  Yes, there are times when sound evidence isn't available, can't be generated fast enough to make a pressing decision, or clashes so much that you need to go with your gut instinct.  But there are plenty of times when good evidence is available and ignoring it is management malpractice.  This is not only the basis of the book Jeff Pfeffer and I wrote, Hard Facts, it is a theme that runs through all my books.  There are certainly times when I express opinions that reflect my values and biases, or offer hunches or gut reactions that aren't grounded in strong evidence– I try to make clear when that is the case.  That is human enough, part of the creative process (see my P.S.), and as I said, sometimes necessary when no good data are available, but a pressing problem exists.

    But a huge flaw in the current practice of management is the often open disdain for sound evidence and logic that does or could exist, which is then quickly followed by absurd and extreme claims that are reminiscent of old-fashioned snake oil salespeople.

    Imagine if you had a serious illness and your doctor suggested a serious of treatments. She proudly proclaimed that it wasn't based on any theory or evidence, but assured you it would be effective.   Sounds like she is a quack, doesn't it? Pretty much the same thing happens all the time in management.  As an example, Jeff Pfeffer got a request to write a blurb for a book this week (I will not reveal the name to protect the innocent and the guilty) that begins with this claim:

    Don’t buy this book if you have the time and inclination for studying theoretical concepts. You’ll be disappointed in less than an hour.

    Do buy this book if you’re in a hurry and want to accelerate your achievements and your goals. You’ll be moving faster in less than an hour.

    I was a bit annoyed by the dig at concepts, as to me, that is an irrational rejection of sound logic. But what really bothered me was the second claim because, if you reject theory and evidence, how could you support such a claim? 

    I don't think there is any evidence that any management book can lead to significant self or organizational improvement after an hour of reading.  That is simply an unsupported claim.  It is, however, a nearly perfect example of Bullshit, at least as defined in the bestseller of the same name. As author Harry Frankfurt explained:

    "It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit."

    Following Frankfurt's perspective, a book like this one — and so much other management advice — fit the definition of bullshit quite well — people aren't exactly lying, they simply have no interest or respect for the truth. They just want your money.

    P.S. If you want to read about a great example of a leader and, now investor, who cares about the truth, check-out this fantastic post by John Lilly, who grew Mozilla from 12 to 600 employees and now is a VC at a very hot firm called Greylock, which just hired a data scientist.  At the same time, John emphasizes that much of the creative process necessary for entrepreneurship requires inspiration, whims, and hunches — sometimes  fueled imperfect but rich and emotionally compelling illustrations from ethnography and related methods.  John offers the motto, "Design like you are right, read the data like you are wrong."  I love that, as it shows the path for linking the messiness and courage required for human creativity with the rigorous reality checks that are hallmarks of evidence-based action.  It is also a good example of the attitude of wisdom, which Jeff and I have written about a lot.

  • New Study: Helpful and Friendly Co-Workers Can Keep You Alive

    Tiffany West from the World Economic Forum just alerted me to an intriguing new study that suggests having the right co-workers can help us live longer, while having the wrong ones might kill us.  The article was published by Arie Shirom and four of his colleagues and is based on a diverse sample of approximately 800 Israeli employees, who were tracked by the researchers for 20 years.  The main finding is that those who had unsupportive co-workers died at a much higher rate (2.4 times lower).  You can read a good summary here, along with some other bells and whistles. 

    Here are the two questions they used to measure "peer social support, as described on  page 270 of the original article:

    Peer social support was scored high for participants who reported (a) that their immediate coworkers were helpful to them in solving problems, and (b) were friendly to them.

    I was most intrigued by these two items because they remind me of the two hallmarks of a good boss that I saw over and over again as I read research when writing Good Boss, Bad Boss.  A good boss is one who is both competent at the work at hand and who treats his or her charges with dignity and respect.  One of the most fun variations of this theme is David Kelley's "love and money" balancing act. 

    But it is instructive that, when you step back and look at all this evidence about what we, as humans, want and need from the people for lead us and who work with us, much of it boils down to two simple things. We want people who are skilled at the work and using to use those skills to help us perform our jobs when we have too much work to do or don't know how to solve the problem at hand.  And we want people who treat us with warmth, respect, and who inject a bit of fun in life (at least that is what I want from from a friendly co-worker).  Academics have found many nuances and will find many more, but these two simple categories jump out again — and they make sense.

    These findings also reinforce that advice I have given again and again about the kind of workplaces it is best to seek versus avoid, and my related advice on surviving an asshole infested workplace.  As I have always said, if you are surrounded by a bunch of assholes — and people who won't help you solve work problems and who are unfriendly would qualify — get out as fast as you can.  This study suggests that, they longer you stay around such people, the more your health will suffer, and eventually, your risk of an early death will rise.

    This is not a perfect study, the sample is not representative, a larger one would have enabled the researcher to do more fine-grained analyses, and while the two item measure of co-worker support was suggestive, it is rather coarse.  But all studies are imperfect, and this one is impressive because the authors followed this group for so long and took considerable care to rule out competing explanations, such as the health of the worker when the first measurements were taken in 1988.

    P.S. There was an interesting twist in the findings, the mortality effects seen in 2008 were driven mostly by the impact of support on workers who were 38 to 43 when the measurements were first taken in 1988. As the authors suggest, the younger workers may have still been healthy enough to avoid the mortality effects of bad co-workers, but the lack of effects on older workers seem harder to explain.

    The citation is: Work-based predictors of mortality: A 20-year follow-up of healthy employees. Shirom, Arie; Toker, Sharon; Alkaly, Yasmin; Jacobson, Orit; Balicer, Ran. Health Psychology, Vol 30(3), May 2011, 268-275.

  • New York City Halts Teacher Bonus Program: Another Blow to Evidence-Resistant Ideology

    The New York Times reports that the school system has abandoned their teacher bonus system because it is ineffective. I quote:

    A New York City program that distributed $56 million in performance bonuses to teachers and other school staff members over the last three years will be permanently discontinued, the city Department of Education said on Sunday. The decision was made in light of a study that found the bonuses had no positive effect on either student performance or teachers’ attitudes toward their jobs.

    The research appears to be quite careful and the RAND Corporation is highly respected:

    The study, commissioned by the city, is to be published Monday by the RAND Corporation, the public policy research institution. It compared the performance of the approximately 200 city schools that participated in the bonus program with that of a control group of schools. Weighing surveys, interviews and statistics, the study found that the bonus program had no effect on students’ test scores, on grades on the city’s controversial A to F school report cards, or on the way teachers did their jobs.  “We did not find improvements in student achievement at any of the grade levels,” said Julie A. Marsh, the report’s lead researcher and a visiting professor at the University of Southern California. “A lot of the principals and teachers saw the bonuses as a recognition and reward, as icing on the cake. But it’s not necessarily something that motivated them to change.”

    Are you surprised? I am not, and if the people running the New York City school system had actually read a large body of existing research, they would never have wasted all this money in the first place. In our opening chapter of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense, Jeff Pfeffer and I reviewed the extensive literature on the links between incentives and teacher performance, and it turns out that although there always have been people with great faith in pay for performance systems for teachers — going back to at least 1918 — careful studies show over and over again that they do not improve student performance.  The New York Times article suggests that despite the ideology supporting pay for performance systems, there is growing evidence that the current round of incentive-based teacher pay isn't working — just as it never had worked:

    The results add to a growing body of evidence nationally that so-called pay-for-performance bonuses for teachers that consist only of financial incentives have no effect on student achievement, the researchers wrote. Even so, federal education policy champions the concept, and spending on performance-based pay for teachers grew to $439 million nationally last year from $99 million in 2006, the study said.

    To be clear, pay for performance schemes do appear to have some effects in schools — most of which are bad. One of the most well-documented (see this post on findings in Freakomomics and related research) is that some teachers and administrators start cheating when their pay is linked to performance on student's standardized tests.  Their are strong hints that this is exactly what happened in Washington, D.C. and other cities where financial incentives for teachers and administrators are linked to student test scores. 

    Note that I am not arguing against pay for performance systems in general.  They work in other settings –sports, sales, lots of other places,as we show in Hard Facts.  But they don't work for teachers for a host of reasons, perhaps paramount among them are that teachers rarely have enough control over key student behaviors before, during, and outside of class, over class composition (and when they do, they sometimes use it to cheat the tests.. such as by sending poor perfomers to special education classes), and over other resources they need to have a strong enough impact on student learning.   Also, giving students a test once a year probably isn't a very good way to measure what students are learning.  As The New York Times report argues, another problem with pay for performance schemes is that it turns teachers' attention away from intrinsic rewards (the reason most go into the profession in the first place) and toward extrinsic rewards (See Dan Pink's Drive to learn more about the trouble with extrinsic rewards). 

    To be clear, I am NOT a general supporter of the policies of teacher's unions.  Although I do think that way too much blame and way too little credit is given to teachers, I do have an evidence-based pet peeve against how vehemently teacher's union's defend the jobs of bad apples, the rotten and incompetent teachers.  This argument is consistent with the work on "Bad is stronger than good" that I've discussed here before… while it is tough for even a good teacher to overcome a lousy system and have strong positive impact on students, it is pretty clear that really lousy teachers can make a bad system worse, and dampen the positive effects of a good one.   I believe that if unions changed policy here and became even more vehement about reforming and removing bad teachers than their critics it would improve their reputations and the quality of education — and earn them political capital to battle lousy policies such as tying teacher pay to student test performance.  (See this great discussion and debate at The New York Times).

    To return the dismal record of pay for performance systems in schools, some years back, I had an interesting conversation with Tony Bryk, a prestigious educational researcher who is now heads the Carnegie Foundation.  We were were at a think tank, a place called the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and I asked Tony why — even though there is so much evidence against practices like pay for performance for teachers — they remain popular and come back in waves… until overwhelming evidence emerges again that in fact they are bad.  Tony suggested two reasons.  The first has to do with ideology — that people hold some assumptions so strongly (like economics and business minded folks who believe that incentives are the best answer to changing any kind of human behavior) that they refuse to accept any evidence that runs counter to their beliefs — no matter how strong those findings might be.  The second reason was what Tony called "collective amnesia."  He argued that, in the history of educational policy, the same bad ideas seem to come around every 10 or 20 years, and policy makers and their staffs either don't remember or make no effort to dig-up relevant research to guide their decisions, regardless of their ideologies.  In the case of pay for performance, it appears that both of these factors are operating. 

    Practicing evidence-based management isn't easy given our various human flaws.  But we sure could save a lot of money, a lot of heartache, and make people's lives a lot better if we all tried a lot harder to do it.  There are plenty of outcomes in life that are impossible to predict.  Unfortunately, what happened in New York was completely predictable, even if people with blind faith in linking test scores to financial rewards for schools and teachers remain unwilling to believe this well-established truth now. 

    P.S. A comment below suggests that some recent studies do show a positive effect of financial rewards on student performance.  My reading of the Rand Report suggests that for studies done in the U.S. there are a a few studies that show a positive impact, but the weight of the evidence supports the historical pattern of no effects or negative effects.  The more rigorous studies in particular find no ot weak effects on test scores, and little effect on teacher motivation, although there is some evidence that teachers devote more evidence to teaching to the test and less to teaching other things (not a surprise).  There is also some evidence that teacher cooperation goes down a bit and evidence that teachers game the system more to boost test scores.   A researcher from Chicago explained to me that in the schools she was studying (this was about 10 years ago) that scores were going up but she believed that it was not so much because incentives motivated teachers to work harder, but because it motivated them to get rid of their weakest students (often by sending them to special ed classes) and to refuse to "skip" gifted students because they pumped-up the average test scores in a class.  Finally, the most obvious effects of pressure on teachers and administrators to pump up test scores is cheating on the tests (by the teachers and administrators), as we have seen from evidence from Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta, and just today, a probe started into cheating at schools in New Jersey.

    I am not rejecting the value of financial rewards as motivational tools for teachers outright, and it does appear that there are some special conditions under which they may be of some value. But the weight of the evidence suggests that most of the money spent on such incentives could have been to better use, that the ideological support for them is much stronger than than the evidence in support, and that one of the most consistent effects is bad — teachers and administrators cheat either to get the incentives or because they fear losing their jobs.

    This is my conclusion. You may reach a different one.  Here is a link to the 300 page Rand study of the failed New York program, which contains an excellent and very current review of the research.

  • How Many Pilots Does a 737 Need? Evidence-Based Management in Action

    I have been reading a lot about group and organizational size lately because it is a key issue for understanding the "scaling problem" that Huggy Rao and I are currently tackling.  After all, if you want to grow a large organization or network, it is crucial to understand how large "the building blocks" should be, how many people a leader can lead, and the the upper limits of organization and network size.   You will likely see other posts on this issue here as I am fretting over this question a lot.  But I couldn't resist a quick post drawn from J. Richard Hackman's fantastic book Leading Teams. 

    Richard reports an astounding solution to a disagreement between United Airlines and the pilots union when United was making its first big purchase of the 737 aircraft.  Boeing designed the cockpit so that it could be flown by either a two or three person crew.  Of course, United wanted two pilots because of the enormous savings in labor expenses; the union wanted three pilots because they argued that, since the planes would be flown in busy air spaces, it would be better to have a third person on board to help with demanding work and to keep an eye out for problems.   Well, this kind of disagreement didn't surprise me and I am sure it doesn't surprise me.  But what shocked me as that United and the union jointly sponsored an independent group to study the differences between two and three person crews during actual flight operations.  The study found no consistent differences between two and three-pilot crews.  As Hackman reports on page 119 of Leading Teams:

    "Members of the three-person crews did leave the cockpit more frequently to visit the cabin, which may have helped strengthen the work relationship between pilots and flight attendants. But they caught no more potentially conflicting traffic called to their attention by air traffic control than did the two-person crews."

    Chalk-up one for management on this one; as Richard points out, 737s are now exclusively flown by pairs of pilots, not trios.  I love this story because it appears to be an actual evidence-based decision. Unfortunately, this happens far less than it should.  As a process, it fascinates me because asking an objective third party to study problem when two parties have conflicting ideologies, goals, or incentives –and agreeing in advance to a decision that fits the evidence — seems like the right way to go about things.  I am not even sure if that is what happened in this case, but I fancy the notion.  I know that it usually won't be feasible in real life because we human-beings aren't that cooperative and rational, but it would lead to more effective and safer organizations.

    P.S. Check out Hackman's awesome recent post at HBR on group effectiveness. He has been studying this problem for over 40 years and I believe knows more about both the academic and practical challenges than anyone on the planet.

     

  • A Rough But Intriguing Metric for School Assessing a School Principal

    Yesterday, I did an interview for the BAM network on Good Boss, Bad Boss.  The content expert on line was Justin Snider, who teaches at Columbia and has in-depth knowledge about K-12 schools, as that was the focus of the conversation.  Justin had great questions and comments about bosses in general (see this recent post) and about school principals in particular.  I thought he made especially good comments about how the best principals are PRESENT, constantly interacting with teachers, students, and parents. He especially suggested that school principals think about where their offices are located.. are they in a place that essentially requires them to keep bumping into teachers and parents, or are they in some corner of campus that reduces the amount of interaction.

    I like Justin's point about the office because it reminds me of the design for Pixar's building in Emeryville, which was inspired by Steve Jobs' assertion that they needed to make sure that everyone was basically forced to bump into each other as a result of the placement of the food and bathrooms.  At one point, Jobs half-seriously suggested that there be just one central bathroom so that everyone had to run into everyone else and there would be a lot of random encounters as people walked to and from that crucial location. The ultimate design resulted in more than one bathroom , but the food and bathrooms were located so that people need to walk through this central area constantly — one of those little things that has helped fuel Pixar's creativity over the years.

    After the interview, Justin and I exchanged emails,  I told him a story about how I saw the difference between the impact of a good versus a bad principal at my daughter's middle school, how there was a great principal who seemed to know every students name and was widely loved.   He retired and was replaced by a bad one who seemed to not know any student's name and was so out of touch that his lack of soul and other more objective acts of incompetence provoked widespread despair among students and parents, and quite a few teachers complained about his lousy leadership openly.    I was reminded of this difference between the two principals just a few weeks ago when, even though it is has been a few years since the good boss last saw my daughter, he greeted her by name in a local restaurant. In contrast, my daughter is still annoyed that the bad one mispronounced so many student names, including hers, at graduation (Her name is "Eve," he called her something that sounded like "Ev.")

    Justin had an interesting reaction to my little story:

    Actually, right after our call concluded, I realized I should have said that a great back-of-the-envelope measure of whether a principal is generally doing a good job is how many students' names he or she knows.  In my experience, there's a strong correlation between principals who know almost all students by name and those who are respected (and seen as effective) by students, parents and teachers.  It's not a perfect measure, of course, but I think it's probably a fairly good indicator of a school's climate and a leader's effectiveness.

    I like Justin's observation.  Of course, some us are better at remembering names than others and we all have cognitive limits. But Justin's argument is compelling to me because knowing people's names seems like a good sign that a boss is directing attention to those he or she leads and is responsible for helping and is not overly focused on him or herself, or on kissing-up to the superintendent, board of education, or other superiors.

    What do you think of this metric?  Is it right for schools? What about other workplaces?

  • Evidence that “Retail Therapy” is Effective

    Just as I feared!  BPS Research reports a recent article containing a series of small studies that shows "retail therapy" does work — at least in a sample of young American consumers.  And they found little evidence of regret or guilt after the purchases.  Here is the description of the third and most compelling of the studies:

    "Lastly the researchers had 69 undergrads complete two retrospective consumption diaries, two weeks apart, documenting their purchasing behaviour, mood and regrets. All the participants admitted in the first diary to having bought themselves a treat (mostly clothes, but also food, electronics, entertainment products and so on). Sixty-two per cent of these purchases had been motivated by low mood, 28 per cent as a form of celebration. Surprisingly perhaps, treats bought as a form of mood repair were generally about half the value of treats bought for celebration, reinforcing the notion that retail therapy is constrained, not out of control. Moreover, according to the diaries, the retail therapy purchases were overwhelmingly beneficial, leading to mood boosts and no regrets or guilt, even when they were unplanned. Only one participant who'd made a retail therapy purchase said that she would return it, given the opportunity."

    I better not show this study to my teenage daughters.  They love retail therapy and I have never seen a hint of guilt from them… only the motivation to do more in the future!

    The citation is: Atalay, A., and Meloy, M. (2011). Retail therapy: A strategic effort to improve mood. Psychology and Marketing, 28 (6), 638-659 DOI: 10.1002/mar.20404.

    P.S. As I have said before,  BPS Research Digest is one of my favorite places on the web.  Check it out.