More on the performance curve

About a year ago I published a piece called 'The Performance Curve', a quick look at how in professional baseball decades of analysis of player performance reveal a very typical average performance curve. Player performance, (hits, home runs, wins for a pitcher, etc.), almost universally 'peaks' at about age 29 or 30, and almost always begins to decline, sometimes steeply, at about age 31. The chart I used in that post is below:

The specifics of the Y-axis values don't really matter for the point I am after, (they represent standard deviations from 'peak' performance', but simply looking at the data we see for both the original study sample (veteran players with 10+ years of data), and 'less restricted' players, (more or less everyone else), that performance peaks in the late 20s and declines, predictably, from there. Keep this data in mind the next time your favorite team drops a 7-year, $125M contract on your best 31 year old slugger. 

Last year my point in running the post was that these kinds of performance curves likely exist, and are becoming more discoverable, in all kinds of jobs due to the increase and improved capability of tools and technologies to better manage, track, and analyze performance. I still think those conclusions to be true a year later.

But what got me thinking about that post from last year was yet another chart I saw this week, this one excerpted from the bank HSBC on the macro-impact of changing demographics, particularly in the workforce of industrialized countries. Take a look at the chart below, on the generalized productivity (as defined by output), across the typical worker's life-cycle:

According to HSBC, and unlike the data we see with baseball players, 'performance', (again, in this case limited to a measurement of productivity), continues to climb during a worker's life, peaking at around age 50 or so. And worth noting, even though the productivity peak hits at about 50 and this average worker still has about 15-18 more years of work ahead, that the relative productivity in that last decade+ is still relatively high.

Said a little differently, HSBC is saying that a workforce made up of 50 - 65 year-olds would be, on aggregate, more productive than one made up of 30 - 45 year-olds, all other things being equal. Obviously, this is data that should be taken in a very general sense, as we have seen from the baseball example, there are many roles whose physical requirements negate the increased productivity effects of age/experience have on other roles. So while a 55 year-old first baseman will never be able to compete physically with a 28 year-old one, change the role from 'first baseman' to 'accounting manager' and we may have a very, very different outcome.

Last thing I want to leave you with on this, and the thing to take away and really think about is what is happening, (again, in a general way), in labor forces across the industrialized world, and what will continue into the next 10 years or so. Here is another chart that shows how the workplace and workers are skewing older, courtesy of Jed Kolko:

The combination of more rapid population growth and increasing labor force participation among older workers are expected to result in about one-quarter of the workforce by 2024 being aged 55+. That is a huge increase from only 20 years prior, (1994), when the percentage of workers aged 55+ was only about 12%.  And workers 65+ are expected to make up almost 10% of the workforce by 2024, up from less than 3% just 20 years prior.

There is plenty to think about here for sure, and as usual, no simple answers. The workforce is certainly skewing older, that seems to be indisputable. But what that means to organizational performance is not as clear, unless you are managing baseball players. For the rest of us, thinking about how these changes will or at least should impact how we hire, develop, coach, train, and mentor employees in the next 10 -15 years is probably one of the most important human capital challenges we will face. Think about it.

Ok, that's it - I'm out. I need to get back to being super-productive (judging on where I sit on the curve).

You call it 'feedback', they hear it as 'criticism'

Let's start with some level setting and definitions:

Feedback (noun) - reaction to a process or activity, or the information obtained from such a reaction

Criticism (noun) - an ​opinion given about something or someone, esp. a ​negative ​opinion, or the ​activity of making such ​judgments

Feedback, especially when you fold in the more technical elements or applications of the term, (like feedback from a machine or from some kind of industrial or mechanical process), more or less connotes neutrality, impartiality, and crucially, accuracy. Sure, sometimes feedback slants negative, but it should be accurately negative, if such a term exists. Because when negative feedback gets interpreted by the recipient of said feedback as being unfairly or inappropriately negative, then it ceases to really be feedback at all, and becomes criticism.

And while most folks seem to appreciate and respect honest, accurate feedback, not nearly as many are down with taking accepting criticism, or for that matter, critics.  In fact, many really creative, innovative, and talented folks, the ones everyone is trying to recruit and retain, have little time for critics.

One example:

The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius faced plenty of criticism in his career. Sibelius's response to criticism was dismissive: "Pay no attention to what critics say. No statue has ever been put up to a critic." 

If you have decided to throw in with the current trend and ditch the annual performance review process (that flawed as it is, has likely served its purpose over the years), you are going to have to get better at assessing how people are interpreting the 'feedback' you and your managers are now laying down on the reg.

One of the main reasons that the traditional performance review process has failed many organizations is that it only provides any kind of feedback to employees on an annual basis. Even if the feedback was kind of terrible, at least the employees only had to endure once a year. So sure, by making the process more regular, more frequent, and less formal solves most of that 'recency' problem.

But more and more regularly scheduled feedback does not by itself make anyone or any manager actually better at giving said feedback. And if more feedback simply adds up to or is interpreted as more criticism, then 'modern' performance management won't be much more effective than traditional performance management has been. 

Make sure you are not setting up managers (and yourself) for failure simply by taking an ineffective process, changing its name,  and asking people to do it more frequently. 

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 obligatory Amazon take

By now you have read (or at least heard about), the New York Times' blistering takedown of life working at Amazon, your favorite online shopping destination for just about anything you'll ever need, (and lots and lots of things you don't). If you are interested in work, workplaces, culture, and performance, the piece is definitely worth a long read, and it just might make you pause for a moment before you order your next shipment of stuff from the giant retail machine.

Most interestingly, the Times' piece largely focuses on working culture for Amazon's white collar or professional workers, and not on the many, many thousands of Amazon employees and contractors that toil away in their massive distribution centers, often in extremely harsh conditions. Most Amazon customers already know how tough the warehouse workers have it at Amazon, and judging by Amazon's continued revenue growth, we have shown that we really don't care about people in the warehouses all that much. We just want our stuff faster.

The responses to the Times piece have more or less fallen into two camps - one; Amazon is a horrible, terrible, dystopian place and shame on them for not (for some inexplicable reason), treating their white collar professional staff 'better' than their front-line warehouse staff; or two, creating a high-performing organization demands focus, dedication, long hours, and most importantly, no tolerance (for long anyway), for average performance. No exceptions. And as the Times reports this lack of tolerance for anything less than high performance and an almost singular dedication to the Amazon cause can look really cold, ugly, messy, and heartless.  

So where does the 'truth' lie in all of this? Kind of hard to say unless you have direct experience working at Amazon. Chairman and Founder Jeff Bezos issued a kind of non-denial denial of the Times piece. Something along the lines of 'This is not the Amazon I know. This can't really be true or no one would want to work here.' That sort of thing. Note he didn't really say 'This is NOT true, just that it probably can't be true.'

And ultimately, like in most other complex situations the real truth is somewhat blurry, inconsistent, and as always very, very subject to interpretation and bias. What do I think? Well since it is my blog I get to share.

I think that any organization that, at least for a time, was willing to subject any of its workforce to the kind of brutal conditions like at the 115 degree Pennsylvania warehouse where workers had to be carried off by paramedics, has pretty much determined that performance, or rather the ability and willingness to sacrifice in order to achieve high performance, is what matters most. 

Amazon is/has been willing to push warehouse workers to the point of heat exhaustion and collapse, why should we be surprised (and angered), that it is willing to push its professional staff into 80-hour weeks, emails and texts at all hours of the night, and has, if the Times piece is true, to have persistently pushed employees to think of their work first, last, and at every time in between?

I think, more or less, this 'outrage' against Amazon is at least a little misplaced. Most of us, by virtue of how we spend our money, (and let's not even talk about under what conditions our iPhones are assembled), don't really care how badly most companies treat their workers. 

We only start to care when these workers begin to, uncomfortably, look a little too much like us, and do the same kinds of jobs that we do.

WEBINAR: The Difference Between Performance and Potential

A couple of weeks back I wrote about a fun and hip way to re-imagine the traditional 9-Box grid that is commonly used by HR and Talent pros when assessing talent. But since most of our organizations are neither fun nor hip, it is pretty likely most of us are going to stick with 'Performance v. Potential' approaches to talent reviews and assessments.

And that is cool, I am, ahem - hip to that.

But just because we all are familiar with the concepts of Performance and Potential, that doesn't mean we are getting the most value from these ubiquitous grids, and that we can't learn a thing (or nine), about how to make them, and the process itself more valuable to organizations, leaders, and employees.

That's where my friends at Fistful of Talent come in, with the latest installment of the surprisingly popular (and FREE) FOT Webinar, this one titled The Difference Between Performance and Potential: A 9-Box Primer for Smart HR Pros to be held Wednesday, March 25th at 2pm EDT.

What will you get for an hour's worth of your Wednesday? Read on...

The gang at FOT will show you how to take the next step in your performance management platform by sharing the following goodies:

1. A rundown of how smart companies create 2-dimensional performance management systems using performance vs potential, and how that approach sets the table for a host of talent management activities using something called the 9-Box Grid.

2. A deep dive into the differences between performance vs potential in any company, including a roadmap for how any company just getting started with performance vs potential can begin building the process to consider both inside their organization.

3. We'll break up the seriousness of the topic by considering where Individual Members of the Jackson Family, the 3 Versions of Van Halen and Husbands/Boyfriends of the Kardashians fall on the performance vs potential scale.  You know, just to help you relate.  And to stop taking ourselves too seriously.

4. Since most of you have more experience with performance than with potential, we'll share some thoughts and data related to common traps and derailers when you build out your definition of potential at your company (hint - the more you tie it to what it REALLY takes to be successful at your company across all positions, the better off you are).

5. We'll wrap up our time together by sharing a list of 5 Things You Can Do From a Talent Management Perspective Once You've Launched Performance Vs. Potential/The 9-Box.  Hint - All of the things we'll share make you more strategic and less transactional as an HR pro, and they let you have high level conversations about talent with the leaders of your company.

You've been aware of the ying/yang relationship between performance and potential for years - why wouldn't you want to help your company get started to understand the same set of truths?  Join FOT on Wednesday, March 25th at 2pm EDT for The Difference Between Performance and Potential: A 9-Box Primer for Smart HR Pros and we'll give you a great roadmap to refreshing how your company views performance and talent.