I know he has the title, but is he believable?

I'm sure you've seen reports of the numerous large and some high-profile organizations that are altering or outright scrapping traditional, ratings-centric performance management processes to move towards a more nimble, flexible, and frequently centered around coaching and development. More forward-looking as opposed to scoring the past as it were.

While the actual results of these new, 'no more ratings' performance programs have so far been mixed at best, it does seem likely that this trend will continue for a little while longer anyway. And one of the by products of these kinds of programs ironically enough, is the generation of more 'perfomance' data, not less, or at least more than in a traditional annual review process. In these new programs, check-ins, kudos, 'real-time' feedback comments, 1-1 meetings, and even micro bonuses or awards will be happening all year long, will need to be soted, assessed, and made sense of in order for these programs to deliver on their goals - namely improved business and individual performance.

I was thinking about this when reading about how one firm, Bridgewater Associates is taking this idea of high-frequency, real-time, and highly data driven approaches to employee performance and development to an incredibly detailed level. 

You should read the entire piece, but here is a snippet from Business Insider piece that sheds a little color on how the firm uses data points on 100+ traits to rate, evaluate, and assess their staff:

Every employee has a company-issued iPad loaded with proprietary apps. One of them, called "Dots," contains a directory of employees and options to weigh in on various elements of each person's work life, categorized in values, abilities, skills, and track record.

There are more than 100 attributes in total, but the collections of attributes are customized to roles in the company, in the sense that an investor's performance would not be measured according to the same traits that would be used to measure a recruiter's performance.

Employees are free to use Dots whenever they'd like, when they want to praise or criticize a colleague for a particular action.

The numerical value of these Dots is considered along with performance reviews, surveys, tests, and ongoing feedback and averaged into public "baseball card" profiles for every employee. The profiles get their name from the list of attributes and corresponding ratings, the same way a baseball card would list something like a player's batting average accompanied by a brief description of their career.

These are then brought into play in meetings where decisions are being made. Using their iPads, colleagues will vote on certain choices, and in the system of believability-weighted decision making, each vote will have a weight depending on the individual's baseball card and the nature of the question.

"A person's believability is constantly relevant," Prince said. "In a meeting, it is relevant to things like how you self-regulate your own engagement in a discussion, how the person running the meeting manages the discussion, and in actual decisions. At all times a person should be assessing their own believability so that they can function well as part of a team."

There's a lot to unpack there, and I am fairly sure that this kind of pervasive, detailed, transparent, and for many, scary, kind of performance/evaluation scheme would not work at most places and for most people. But I think there are (at least) two key features of this system that any organization should think about in terms of their own performance processes.

The first is that the 'Dots' app has the ability to collect, synthesize, and make sense of the many thousands of data points that are generated each year for every employee. So that these interactions, assessments, and bits of feedback are not wasted, or pass off into the ether shortly after they are created. In this way the firm continues to build valuable intelligence about its people and their capability over time. 

And secondly, this information is taken into account when decisions are being made. So that if you have built up credibility over time on a particular subject, your opinion or vote on issues related to that subject carries proportionally more weight than someone less experienced or believable on that issue, regardless of position or title. This data-driven approach to 'Who should we believe about this?' helps the firm guard against 'loudest voice in the room wins' trap that many organizations fall prey to.

Really interesting stuff and while maybe being a little too extreme (and disciplined) for most organizations, the Bridgewater approach to performance might give you at least a general idea of where we are heading - a place where every employee action, interaction, and decision is logged, rated, and contributes to their overall profile. And where that profile is taken into account when decisions need to be made. 

Good stuff for a Wednesday. Have a great day!

Learn a new word Thursday, I mean Wednesday: The Dunning-Kruger Effect

I know that the wildly popular 'Learn a new word' series on the blog is meant to be a semi-regular Thursday feature, I didn't want to let this new term I just came across languish for another 24 hours, hence we have the first iteration of 'Learn a new word Wednesday.'

Today's word/term helps us understand the problems we have had in our own careers and in our own organizations with an element of the traditional performance management process known as the 'self-assessment' or 'self-rating.'

You know, that component of the typical performance management process (usually positioned at Step 1), where you and everyone else is meant to attempt to quantify your own skills, competencies, progress towards meeting whatever goals were set for you way back when.

Let's see, do I give myself a '3' or a '4' for 'Tolerance for Ambiguity?' If I go with the '4', does that make me look like someone who is just trying to prop myself up above the other jokers in the group? But if I only give myself a '3', then that will make it easier for my manager to rate me as average too, since if I only think I am a '3' then why should she disagree with me?'

It's a nightmare, no doubt.

Which brings us to today's Learn a new word. Let me introduce, (apologies if you have heard of this before, it was new to me over when I saw it) - The Dunning-Kruger Effect.

From our pals at Wikipedia, (so you know this is true):

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. The bias was first experimentally observed by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University in 1999. Dunning and Kruger attributed the bias to the metacognitive inability of the unskilled to evaluate their own ability level accurately.

Their research also suggests that conversely, highly skilled individuals may underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks that are easy for them also are easy for others

There it is, scientific proof that shows that we are all, the skilled and the unskilled alike, (substitute skilled and unskilled for 'average' and 'high' performers and you see where I am going), pretty much incapable of accurately assessing our own ability.

It makes intuitive sense, kind of, that the unskilled or even average performers would assess themselves a little too favorably when given the opportunity - after all who likes to actually admit they are not very good at something? Add into this tendency the crazy pressures and power dynamics that come from the workplace performance management process and you can easily see how self-assessments become really dubious in terms of their value.

On the flip side, the Dunning-Kruger effect tells us that highly skilled performers will over undervalue themselves and their abilities. If I can do this easily, that must mean it is easy to do, goes their thinking.

This is likely the fundamental reason why in sports so many of the very greatest players don't actually succeed in post-playing career efforts at coaching. Playing the game at a high level came so easily to them, that they can't see why it does not come so easily to the normal or average players that they have to coach and mentor, resulting in frustration and suboptimal outcomes.

You might have had a sneaking suspicion as an HR pro of the shaky and questionable value of the self-assessment process. If you did, you know have a fancy term to attach to your POV. 

Don't blame the player. Blame the Dunning-Kruger effect. 

The three keys to success on the crew

I had a really fun and interesting couple of days this week at the IBM Connect event in Orlando, a pretty large and diverse event that showcases many of the technologies and ideas from what is a large and diverse company.

Amongst all the showy elements, (an opening mini-concert by the band American Authors and a short comedy set from SNL's Seth Meyers), and the deep dive sessions that focused on collaborative, social, and talent management technologies, I thought the most fascinating part of the show was a short meeting with one of the IBM/Kenexa customers, who shared some elements of her company's recruiting challenges, and how they were responding to these challenges.

The company in question, AMC Theaters, is a large operator of movie theaters in the US, (possibly elsewhere, I am not sure if that came up at all in the conversation), and like most high location high volume retail/service companies has to recruit for many thousands of front-line and entry level positions each year. In the case of AMC, each year means about 17,000 or so new hires for these front-line or 'crew' positions. Efficiently hiring that many folks is not simple, and presents any organization a number of problems. But for AMC, applicant volume is not one of them - with an estimated 750,000 applications for these 17,000 positions coming in annually. For these jobs AMC does not really have to 'recruit', they have to 'select'.

So when AMC set about making changes to the process in order to improve efficiency, ease the burden on theater management, and improve hiring outcomes, there was and is certainly a pretty large 'technology' component. You can't process that many people/positions without a solid tech foundation. But you also don't really get any better at hiring simply by organizing it more effectively in an ATS, you have to actually get better at hiring. And AMC was able to do that, again supported certainly by technology, by breaking down to three elements what it takes to be successful in one of these 'crew' positions. If you possess these three keys, then you were far more likely to be successful on the crew, to stick around longer, and would help drive improvements on the key metrics that AMC tracks.

According to AMC the three keys are that you are friendly, dependable, and you have some ability to sell. They test/screen applicants for these elements up front, (again assisted by technology tools that have helped them develop and validate the tests), give theater managers insight into a given applicant's test results in order to help shape areas to focus on during interviews, and finally make interview and hiring decisions based at least partly on them.

What was interesting to me was their ability to distill all the myriad attributes that could potentially contribute (or detract) from job performance into these three identifiable and validated elements. If you can do that, then you don't really have to waste candidates, recruiters, or hiring managers time trying to discern other nuances of a candidate's background ('So, tell me why you don't have a position listed on your resume from April 2012 to January 2013?'), or trying to teach interviewers some kind of personality assessment parlor tricks.

I dig the approach that AMC has taken towards improving the process for hiring 17,000 front-line workers, many of which have little to no 'real' work experience to draw from. As they have found out, it is likely that the previous experience, or lack or it, doesn't really matter that much anyway. If someone is friendly, dependable, and can sell a little bit, well then they have a good shot at success on the crew. 

And I left the meeting wondering if applying the 'What are the three keys for success on this job?' would make all kinds of hiring/screening challenges easier.

I'm wondering how much time we spend in the hiring process trying to determine the presence or lack of qualities that ultimately, don't matter much at all.

Thanks to the folks at IBM for inviting me down to IBM Connect!

WEBINAR: Hire for smart (unless you think the world will stop changing)

I'm sure you've seen or heard statements like '61% of the jobs in the USA by 2017 don't even exist today' or 'Kids are learning things during freshman year in college that are already obsolete by the time when they graduate.' Ok, I made up the '61%' stat - but the gist of the assertion is probably accurate. No matter what you or most of the people in your organization are doing today, there is a pretty good chance you and they will be doing something different, even significantly different, tomorrow.

What matter more to long-term, sustainable, and adaptable organizational success probably isn't finding and holding on to people that (just) know how to do their current job, but to find, develop, engage, and retain the kind of people that will be able to thrive in tomorrow's uncertain future as well. Way back when, before we knew anything about competencies and personality types and employee engagement mumbo-jumbo - most smart managers knew that finding the smartest people was the only to be able to navigate uncertain times. With this in mind, my friends at Fistful of Talent are back to help you make the leap to hiring smart vs. hiring a resume.

Here are the deets: 

Join hiring smart (people) experts Kris Dunn and Kelly Dingee for Brains Before Bros: Why Hiring Smart People over Experienced People is a Winning Talent Strategy, sponsored by our friends at SumTotal, on Tuesday June 12 at 1pm EST and they’ll hit you with the following:

 

A rundown of the factors driving talent scarcity in today’s workforce and why it’s better to hire smart people and train for success.

1. FOT’s definition of “smart” and common false positives you need to consider when defining what smart looks like for your organization.
2. Three signs that your top talent may be looking to jump ship and how to reel them back in by providing the incentives they really want. (Hint: It’s not always monetary).
3. Five ways to keep training and development programs aligned with evolving expectations from top applicants and your existing talent – without breaking your budget.
4. We’ll close this webinar by bringing in Steve Parker from SumTotal to help you ensure your leadership team is creating the right environment to get the most out of your existing talent.

Your traditional approach to talent isn’t working –- start putting brains before bros and maximize your talent strategy today.

Register for the FREE webinar HERE.

As always the webinar comes with the standard Fistful of Talent promise: 100% of the time it's guaranteed to work 60% of the time.

Self-assessments: You can't be honest even if you want to be

Exhibit A for your consideration from Business Insider:

"The Romney Campaign Is Hammering Obama For Giving Himself An 'Incomplete' Grade On The Economy"

The Romney campaign is slamming President Obama for saying in a local television interview in Colorado that he would give himself an "incomplete" grade on fixing the economy, blasting the president for not even awarding himself a passing grade.Obama characterized his record on handling the economy as "incomplete" when KKTV News reporter Dianne Derby asked him what grade he would give himself. Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan was quick to respond to Obama's remarks this morning on CBS. “Four years into a presidency and it’s incomplete?" he said on CBS' "This Morning" with Charlie Rose. "The President is asking people just to be patient with him? 

Forget the politics on this example, that really isn't the point. The point is no matter what answer/grade the President gave himself, his opponents and detractors would have ammunition and opportunity to go on the attack.

Answer the question too positively or optimistically - 'The economy is doing great, we are on track to have everyone in America back to work, a chicken in every pot, a shiny new car in every garage, etc.', and he gets destroyed as being colossally out of touch and remote from the reality many are facing across the country.

Go too negative and self-critical - 'Well, unemployment is still over 8% and has been that way for years, the price of gas is climbing, the national debt is out of control, etc.' - and the other side will jump all over that, painting him as not just a failure, (they are doing that already), but as one who admits his failings and is likely in over his head.

Now you can agree or disagree with his policies, but either way Obama is a sharp guy, (again keeping politics out of this), so he tries to answer the question, do the self-assessment, with a bit of a hedge - he rates his performance as 'Incomplete' and tries to do the sensible thing, highlight some of his accomplishments, (he wants to get re-elected after all), but also pointing out there are some areas that still need improvement and focus, (thus trying not to come off sounding like naive and disconnected with reality). But in trying to play both sides against the center, in a way, the 'Incomplete' sort of comes off as kind of hollow, flat, and unsatisfying. And of course his opponents jump on that as well.

The truth is, the question is mostly unfair, since every possible answer is 'wrong', (sort of like the 'When did you stop kicking your dog?' question). And this recent, and widely reported example of a self-assessment points out the problems inherent in any kind of self evaluation, which are used in the workplace by lots and lots of organizations as the jumping off point for an annual performance management process.

In fact, I'll bet the hatred that many folks profess for the typical performance management process stems from the fact that it usually starts with the self-evaluation, a process step and exercise that is almost impossible to get 'right' and difficult even for the most self-aware to complete in a manner that actually adds real value to actual performance.

As Obama's recent 'Incomplete' reminds us, and in the word of the ever-prescient Admiral Ackbar, (yes, I am making an Admiral Ackbar reference), 'It's a trap!

Can you ever win the self-assessment? 

Can you really be honest evaluating your own performance and effectiveness and not come off sounding like a pompous jerk?

If you've figured out the secret, maybe the re-election campaign could use your help.