Work Matters

  • I Am Just Like You

    A few days back, I wrote about David Dunning's book Self-Insight, which presents a compelling case that there are numerous impediments to self-awareness and that many of these roadblocks are mighty difficult to overcome. I am now on the last chapter, which contains some interesting ideas about how to increase our awareness of how skilled or unskilled we might be at things and our awareness of how others see us.  Dunning points out that a host of studies show that one major impediment to self-awareness is that people see themselves as unique — usually as superior to others –  when that actually are  not: as more ethical, emotionally complex, skilled, and so on.  Dunning proposes on page 166 that:

    "People would hold more accurate self-perceptions if they conceded that their psychology is not different from the the psychology of others, that their actions are molded by the same situational forces that govern the behavior of other people. In doing so, they could more readily learn from the experiences of others, using data about other people's outcomes to forecast their own."

    I find this quite fascinating. I believe that the average person would benefit from this perspective, but some industries would suffer — especially those that have a kind of Ponzi scheme quality where most people fail, a rare successes happens now and then, but no matter what happens, the people who run the system always seem to benefit.  Both casino operators and venture capitalists come to mind.

    The implication, however, that if we assume "I am just like you" rather than "I am special and different," or even that "we are all the same," we might make better decisions and learn at others' expense rather than our own strikes me as a lesson that could be quite valuable.  For example, I've been rather obsessed about the virtues and drawback of learning from others mistakes rather than your own (see this post on Randy Komisar and Eleanor Roosevelt), as this question has huge implications about how to teach people new skills and the best way to develop competent and caring human-beings.

  • Reducing Interruptions and Saving Lives: New Study on Drug Treatment Errors

    Mn-mederrors28_0_0500770798
    I have written here and other places on Amy Edmondson's wonderful research on how, when nurses feel as if they have psychological safety, they openly talk about and try to correct drug treatment errors, but when they work in a climate of fear, they are afraid to even admit when they have made mistakes — which led to a rather bizarre finding in Amy's early research that in nursing units where people felt safe, even compelled,to talk about and learn from mistakes, they reported ten times more errors than in a nursing unit where the supervisor slammed nurses who admitted or where "caught" making mistakes. 

    This morning's San Francisco Chronicle reports an equally fascinating study on reducing drug treatment errors. This one focuses on the evils of interruptions, which as  research by Gloria Mark shows, slows and undermines performance, and creates great job stress. As the article reports "A UCSF program to improve accuracy in administering drugs – with
    particular emphasis on reducing interruptions that often lead to
    mistakes – resulted in a nearly 88 percent drop in errors over 36
    months at the nine Bay Area hospitals, according to results being
    released today."  The cool thing about the article is that the nurses at different hospitals invented different local methods for reducing interruptions, to the vest you see pictured above to covering windows so colleagues couldn't see them (and thus run in and interrupt them), to developing quiet zones, or quiet times during drug administration.  Note that drug treatment errors are huge problem, resulting in over 400,000 preventable injuries per year and 3.5 billion in costs. So a 88% reduction is huge.

    This research is also fascinating to me because it shows how, so often, when people say they are too busy, don't have enough money, or their will be resistance to change that these are excuses, or worse yet, negative self-fulfilling prophecies.  In particular, I think that people — especially managers — often use spending money as a substitute for thinking, when inexpensive and low-tech solutions work just fine.  I am looking forward to digging into this research further.

  • Flawed Self-Evaluations: David Dunning’s Facinating Work

    Professor David Dunning from Cornell University, along with numerous colleagues, has done fascinating and sometimes discouraging research on self-awareness.  His most famous paper on the topic was published in 1999 with Kruger … check-out the abstract of Unskilled and Unaware of it.  I have known about it for a long time, but I have just discovered Dunning's book, Self-Insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself.   This is a pretty pure academic book, but it sure is fascinating, and should make all of us stop and pause when we feel supremely confident about ourselves.  You can learn tidbits like people do a pretty bad job of guessing their IQ scores, are downright awful at rating their ability to catch other people's lies, that workers do a far worse job of assessing their own social skills than their superiors or peers, that in survey of thousands of high school seniors 70% of respondents rated their leadership ability as above average while only 2% rated their leadership ability as below average, and — turning to my own profession — that 94% of college professors say they do above average work.

    Self-Insight also contains an update of research for the 1999 article — the basic finding is that people with worst skill levels at diverse tasks (ranging from debating skill to having a good sense of humor) consistently overestimate their abilities by huge amounts.  For example, people who had skill levels at the 12th or 13th percentile usually estimated that they were in the 60th percentile of performance.  In contrast, people above the 50th percentile made far more accurate assessments — although the most skilled people tended to underestimate their relative skill a bit.

    The upshot of this rather famous work is that you should be wary of self-assessments in general, but especially wary of people who seem to be incompetent. As Dunning puts it, "The central contention guiding this research is that poor performers simply do not know — indeed cannot know — how badly they are performing.  Because they lack the skills required to produce correct answers they also lack the skills to accurately judge whether their own answers are correct." 

    The book has all sorts of great research and I found it a lot more fun to read than most academic books, but be warned that it contains a lot of studies and such.

  • Selecting Talent: The Upshot from 85 Years of Research

    I recently wrote about how the "talent wars" are likely to be returning soon in the U.S. (and indeed, there are signs they have already returned in places like China and Singapore), and how companies that have treated people well during the downturn will have an advantage in keeping and retaining the best people –and those that have not damn well better change their ways or will face the prospect of their best people running for the exits in concert with the inability to attract the best people.  A related question has to do with the problem of determining who the best people might be — what does the best evidence say about the best way to pick new people? 

    Its is always dangerous to say there is one definitive paper or study on any subject, but in this case there is candidate — a paper I have blogged about before when taking on graphology (handwriting analysis). But there is one article that just might qualify. It was published by Frank Schmidt and the late John Hunter in the Psychological Bulletin in 1998. These two very skilled researchers
    analyzed the pattern of relationships observed in peer reviewed journals during
    the prior 85 years to identify which employee selection methods were best and
    worst as predictors of job performance. They used a method called "meta-analysis" to do this, which they helped to develop and spread. The advantage of this method is — in the hands of skilled researchers like Schmidt and Hunter — is it reveals the overall patterns revealed by the weight of evidence, rather than the particular quirks of any single study.

    The upshot of this research is that work sample tests (e.g., seeing if people can
    actually do key elements of a job — if a secretary can type or a programmer can write code ),     general mental ability (IQ and related tests), and structured interviews had the highest validity of all methods examined (Arun, thanks for the corrections). As Arun also suggests, Schmidt and Hunter point out that three combinations of methods that were the most powerful predictors of job performance were GMA plus a work sample test (in other words, hiring someone smart and seeing if they could do the work),  GMA plus an integrity test, and GMA plus a structured interview (but note that unstructured interviews, the way they are usually done, are weaker).

    Note that this information about combinations is probably more important than the pure rank ordering, as it shows what blend of methods works best, but here is also the
    rank order of the 19 predictors examined, rank ordered by the validity coefficient, an indicator of how strongly the individual method is linked to performance:

    1. Work sample tests (.54)

    2. GMA tests …"General mental ability" (.51)

    3. Employment interviews — structured (.51) 

    4. Peer ratings (.49)

    5. Job knowledge tests (.48) Test to assess how much employees know about specific aspects of the job. 

    6. T & E behavioral
    consistency method     (.45) "    Based
    on the principle that past behavior is the best predictor of future
    behavior. In practice, the method involves describing previous
    accomplishments gained through work, training, or other experience
    (e.g., school, community service, hobbies) and matching those
    accomplishments to the competencies required by the job.     a method were past achievements that are thought to be important to behavior on the job are weighted and score

    7. Job tryout procedure (.44) Where employees go through a trial period of doing the entire job.


    8. Integrity tests (.41)  Designed to assess honesty … I don't like them but they do appear to work. 

    9. Employment interviews — unstructured (.38)

    10. Assessment centers (.37)

    11. Biographical data measures(.35)

    12. Conscientiousness tests (.31)  Essentially do people follow through on their promises, do what they say, and work doggedly and reliably to finish their work.

    13. Reference checks (.26)

    14. Job experience –years (.18)

    15. T & E point
    method (.11)

    16. Years of education (.10)

    17. Interests (.10)

    18. Graphology (.02) e.g., handwriting analysis.

    19. Age (-01)

    Certainly, this rank-ordering does not apply in every setting.  It is also important to recall that there is a lot of controversy about IQ, with many researchers now arguing that it is more malleable than previously thought. But I find it interesting to see what doesn't work very well — years of education and age in particular. And note that unstructured interviews, although of some value, are not an especially powerful method, despite their widespread use. Interviews are strange in that people have excessive confidence in them, especially in their own abilities to pick winners and losers — when in fact the real explanation is that most of us have poor and extremely self-serving memories.

    Many of these methods are described in more detail here by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Also note that I am not proposing that any boss or company just mindlessly apply this rank ordering, but I think it is useful to see the research.

    The reference for this article is:

    Schmidt, F.L.
    & Hunter, J.E. (1998) The validity and utility of selection methods in
    personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of
    research findings,” Psychological Bulletin, 124, 262–274.

    P.S. Note the corrections, thanks Arun! 

  • d.school Alum Laura Jones Selected by BusinessWeek as one of “21 People Who Will Change Business”

    Prototyping
    I just got a note that Laura Jones, who now works for Visa on innovation initiatives, was selected by BusinessWeek as one of 21 People Who Will Change Business.   We were lucky enough to have Laura in our class on Creating Infectious Action class about two years ago, and I agree that Laura has the zest for life, smarts, and determination — plus the leadership skills — to change business or anything else.  That is Laura (on the left, you can see her energy) during our first day of class, developing prototypes to improve dental hygiene.  I still remember the first time met Laura, and was rather amazed to hear her say that the reason she applied to the Stanford Business School was she wanted to take d.school classes, and the great work she has done at the d.school and at the business school has apparently been noticed.  Congratulations to Laura and take this coverage as a good sign for design thinking and for the value of the perspective that the d.school offers. I look forward to hearing about the work that Laura is doing at Visa.

  • More Jargon Monoxide: A Lovely BBC Story Adds to the Pile

    One of the themes I can't resist posting about is the horrible language used in business.  It has been especially fun since I heard Polly LaBarre call the whole mess, "Jargon Monoxide," one of the best phrases I have ever heard in my life.  I wrote a later post on terms that make me squirm, where I complained about value added, leverage, and core competence.  Most recently, we had some fun, and expressed some disgust, talking about euphemisms for layoffs, which — thanks to your comments — produced such gems as "fitness plans," "offboarded" (I see a picture of someone walking the plank in mind's eye), "He got the box," and the differences between management language "Your position is redundant" or "rationalizing," versus employees language like "He got shit canned" or "he got whacked." 

    The ever helpful Dave sent me a great BBC article today that continues the tradition of cataloging jargon monoxide.  It is called 50 Office Speak Phrases You Love To Hate. I don't want to spoil your fun by listing too many, but I especially loved to hate "ideas showers," "we need a holistic cradle-to-grave approach," "granularity," and a truly wonderful sentence that a university sent out to its staff after a round of layoffs "We are assessing and mitigating immediate impacts, and developing a
    high-level overview to help frame the conversation with our customers
    and key stakeholders."

     I believe the translation of that sentence is "We are trying to figure out what the hell to do next."

    Let me know if you have any new favorites that might be added to the BBC article.
     

    P.S. Dave, thanks again.

  • Former CEO Richard S. Fuld of Lehman Brothers: A Striking Picture

    Richard-fuld

  • Do You Learn More from Working for a Bad Boss than a Good Boss?

    Bad bosses suck, as I often document here.  Of course, you knew that anyway — many of you know it all too well from first hand experience.  But perhaps they do more good than I have given them credit for in the past. Carol Bartz, the feisty, tough, unusually plain-speaking CEO of Yahoo! (see this earlier post or this story), makes an intriguing point about bad bosses in today's New York Times that is weirdly related to my recent post On Noticing That You Don't Notice. Here is the link to the interview, and the argument I found especially intriguing:

    I also think people should understand that they will learn more from
    a bad manager than a good manager. They tend to get into a cycle where
    they’re so frustrated that they aren’t
    paying attention actually to what’s happening to them. When you have a
    good manager things go so well that you don’t even know why it’s going
    well because it just feels fine.

    When you have a bad manager
    you have to look at what’s irritating you and say: “Would I do that?
    Would I make those choices? Would I talk to me that way? How would I do
    this?”

    There are several elements of this comment that made me stop and think. The first follows from my post on not noticing, as the implication is that when things are going great, you don't engage in very deep cognition about them, because little is happening to give you pause or upset you. In fact, this point is consistent with research on cognition and emotion suggesting that people in good moods do not engage in as much mindfulness,deep thought, or self-doubt as people in bad moods. 

    The second thing that intrigues me is as I thought about some of the more interesting bosses I've been reading about and communicating with, I've ran into quite a few who make a related argument.  Perhaps most famous is the late Robert Townsend, author of the still amazing Up the Organization, who argued repeatedly that he learned how to be a good boss at American Express because his bosses were so bad and the company was so badly ran that he learned what not to do — very close to Bartz's point.  Even closer is an amazing comment I posted here a couple years ago from a surgeon, who during his residency at a prestigious hospital, got together with  fellow residents every week to vote on the senior or "attending" surgeon who most deserved the "asshole of the week" award — and wrote in a journal that had been passed down from generation to generation of residents. The great thing about this story is that he his fellow residents all vowed not to be assholes when they became more senior, and all — who now hold prestigious appointments through the country — have all worked to try to keep that vow.

    Now, as much as I love Bartz's thought process, I do disagree with her that when people have a lousy boss and want to escape, she tells them " You have to deal with what you’re dealt. Otherwise you’re going to run from something and not to something. And you should never run from something."

    That bugged me for two reasons.  The first is that, if these complaints are about a lousy boss who reports to Carol, it is her job to do something about it, not to just tell the victims to suck it up and just deal with it.  Indeed, there is so much research showing the damage that lousy bosses do to productivity, commitment, and well-being that Carol or any other boss who learns of a horrible boss below them in the pecking order owes it to their company to deal with it. The "victims" may be learning more, but those lessons come at a high price that hurts both organization's and people.

    The second thing that bugs me is from the victim's perspective, which is that there is so much evidence that bad bosses do damage (recall this Swedish study on heart attacks), that if you care about your physical and mental health — and those of the people you come in contact with, your friends, lovers, children, and so on — that you should escape as soon as you possibly can.

    Clearly, I don't agree with Bartz about everything, but I admire her enormously because she is so thoughtful and so straightforward, a refreshing voice in a world where too many people are afraid to express strong opinions.

    This all raises a great question: What is the most important thing you ever learned NOT TO DO from working for a bad boss?

    P.S. One another thing I agree with Bartz about — in fact a headline of the article — is that perhaps we ought to get rid of annual performance reviews, as there is good reason to believe that they do more harm than good, as I blogged about here and this Wall Street Journal article by Sam Culbert argues. 

    UPDATE: I always appreciate the quality and range of comments that readers make, but in this case, they are even better than usual.  I suggest that you read them carefully.  This post has been up less then a day, so I expect even more good stuff and to change my opinion again over the coming days.  But my initial reaction to the comments is that I (and certainly Bartz) should have emphasized the dangers of bad bosses even more, the damage they do to people and as at least one comment implies, the danger that — just as abusive parents tend to produce abusive children –  the odds are high that bad bosses will teach their followers to be bad bosses like them.  Also, by just talking to people who have survived and learned from bad bosses, and become bosses themselves, we blind ourselves to all the able people who have left companies and occupations because they had the sense to leave, were so damaged that they had to leave, or worse yet, became lousy bosses someplace else applying what they learned — and after doing a lot of damage — got fired and demoted. Yes, there are examples of the opposite effect, of people who have become great bosses by doing the opposite of past lousy bosses, but the psychological forces of imitation, learning, and identification with authority figures all push people in the opposite direction.  Perhaps the best way to learn for bad bosses is to watch and study other people's bad bosses — that way you get the learning without the damage and risk of imitating their incompetent and nasty ways. 

  • Civilian Friends vs Police Friends: From Captain Nick Gottuso

    Nick SWAT
    I just got
    this missive about cops from Captain Nick Gottuso, a Police Department Captain in Hillsborough, California.  Nick is also one of the Commanders of a SWAT
    team composed of about 50 officers from local police departments on the San
    Francisco Peninsula, and heads up their sniper squad.  You can see him above, in full uniform beside
    the SWAT truck. Nick was the coach on one of my daughter’s soccer teams and I
    get to know him as I was an assistant coach — he is a great guy.  

    Nick is also a great shot.  I once asked him why some of the coins on his
    key chain had bullet holes in the side rather than middle, and wondered if he
    had missed. He answered that he had put the bullet on the side because it made
    it easier to get on the key chain.  Nick
    loves his job as much as anyone I know. 
    And you can understand why when he tells about the things he
    does, like being involved in hostage stand-offs, and the smaller but important
    things he does every day.  For example, he was
    involved in catching a thief who stole something from one of my colleague’s
    houses. 
    Because I
    know Nick, and how much he loves and identifies with his job, I was especially
    struck by this note he sent around (the origin is unclear, I’d love to give
    credit to the person who wrote it, so if you know, please chime-in).

    Let me know what you think. Here is Nick’s preface: "For those of you who are Cops, you
    will find this very true. For those of you who aren't… this gives you a
    little insight as to why we are, the way we are.    ”

    Always a
    Cop:

    Once the badge goes on, it never comes off,
    whether they can see it, or not. It fuses to the soul through adversity, fear
    and adrenaline and no one who has ever worn it with pride, integrity and
    guts, can ever sleep through the 'call of the wild' that wafts through
    bedroom windows in the deep of the night.

    When Cops
    Retire

    When a good cop leaves the 'job' and retires to
    a better life, many are jealous, some are pleased and yet others, who may
    have already retired, wonder. We wonder if he knows what he is leaving
    behind, because we already know. We know, for example, that after a lifetime
    of camaraderie that few experience, it will remain as a longing for those
    past times. We know in the law enforcement life there is a fellowship which
    lasts long after the uniforms are hung up in the back of the closet . We know
    even if he throws them away, they will be on him with every step and breath
    that remains in his life. We also know how the very bearing of the man speaks
    of what he was and in his heart still is.

    These are the burdens of the job. You will still
    look at people suspiciously, still see what others do not see or choose to
    ignore and always will look at the rest of the law enforcement world with a
    respect for what they do; only grown in a lifetime of knowing. Never think
    for one moment you are escaping from that life. You are only escaping the
    'job' and merely being allowed to leave 'active' duty.

    So what I wish for you is that whenever you ease
    into retirement, in your heart you never forget for one moment that 'Blessed
    are the Peacemakers for they shall be called children of God,' and you are
    still a member of the greatest fraternity the world has ever known.

    Civilian
    Friends vs Police Friends


    CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Get upset if you're
    too busy to talk to them for a week.
    POLICE FRIENDS: Are glad to see you after years,
    and will happily carry on the same conversation you were having the last time
    you met.

    CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Have never seen you cry.
    POLICE FRIENDS: Have cried with you..

    CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Borrow your stuff for a few
    days then give it back.
    POLICE FRIENDS: Keep your stuff so long they
    forget it's yours.

    CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Know a few things about you..
    POLICE FRIENDS: Could write a book with direct
    quotes from you.

    CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Will leave you behind if
    that's what the crowd is doing.
    POLICE FRIENDS: Will kick the crowds' ass that
    left you behind.

    CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Are for a while.
    POLICE FRIENDS: Are for life.

    CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Have shared a few experiences.
    ..
    POLICE FRIENDS: Have shared a lifetime of
    experiences no citizen could ever dream of…

    CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Will take your drink away when
    they think you've had enough.
    POLICE FRIENDS: Will look at you stumbling all
    over the place and say, 'You better drink the rest of that before you spill
    it!!' Then carry you home safely and put you to bed…

    CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Will talk crap to the person
    who talks crap about you.
    POLICE FRIENDS: Will knock them the hell out for
    using your name in vain.

    CIVILIAN FRIENDS: Will ignore this.
    POLICE FRIENDS: Will forward this.

  • On noticing that you don’t notice

    Moggridge_B I've been working with a long document in Microsoft Word, and having the general struggles that go with being a PC owner.  I never upgraded to Vista because I heard the horror stories, but still it seems that I spend about 10% of my work time, sometimes more, either struggling to figure out how to do things, to undo things that Word does to me that I don't want, or to wait for the endless boot or shutdown times or upgrades they install that slow the machine.  On the other hand, although I was kind of hostile to them before I got one, I keep noticing that — except when I am typing — that I do all sorts of things on my iPhone without noticing them, I notice that I don't notice any friction. 

    I first heard this phrase from IDEO design guru Bill Moggridge who, among many other things, the author of a great book called Designing Interactions.  It is one of those phrases that applies to all sorts of things, great customer experiences where good things happen and your feel no friction, organizational practices that are seamless and painless, and even government services that seem designed to reduce the burden on you. I think of the difference between the airport at Singapore — or even Hong Kong — versus going through most of Kennedy or the awful Heathrow.  I think "not noticing" isn't exactly the same as delight, or perhaps is a special kind of delight you have when something or some experience does not tax your emotional or cognitive energy.

    I wonder, what other products, experiences, or practices do you love because you "notice that you don't notice?"