Adam Grant & Marcus Buckingham: Nine Lies About Work | 2019 Wharton People Analytics Conference

Marcus welcome to Philly morning morning morning so I have to tell you yes I don't think you know this but two decades ago I was one of the first participants in one of your surveys are you serious yeah when I was an undergrad did we have to pay you for that oh he still has the check in the mail sort of a thing no I had to do it for course credit but I feel like now it's only fair to turn the tables and so I'm gonna ask you to participate in a little bit of research today so I prepared a little survey first question is Marcus do you have a best friend at work I do scale of one to five five okay yes second do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day you know it varies but I gotta say most days I do certainly today I mean this is a this has been a there's been a strong day for me already well we'll see right yes it could go downhill these things go up and down these are states note rates you know Adam so these rightfully so and then I'm sure you're tired of these questions by now but tell us what are your top strengths well in terms of strengths finder originally I have a futuristic past context we call it out so I missed the present but that's fine ideation in selection so I really want to be able I don't want to be completely by myself right now but it's fine and in individualization so I like the fact that people are different and in terms of the standard assessment which is more of a situational judgment test than a self evaluation create a simulator so I I like thinking pushing which I guess isn't a corollary to ideation pushing through to the core and then I like sharing I do actually like having parts of my life that are this yeah so those are the right strengths if you keep working and taking the assessments you'll find out you can have the right one I'm joking so I'm gonna try to do some simulating today yes I want to just start by asking a little bit about why why did you spearhead this Strang space movement because it's some level for me this was the early days of people analytics right I didn't see many companies trying to measure engagement and you came along and said look we can we can actually crunch the numbers on on these what seemed like really fluffy concepts and we can figure out how to predict that and how to increase it yeah how did what led you to that and then how did you go from there to saying we should be more strengths focused than we are well my my grandfather was in HR he was at London School of Economics right after the Second World War and his focus was demobilization my father was in HR as well and his focus was on collective bargaining about the 60s and the 70s and 80s particularly in the UK and in Europe there was a lot of management work a conflict but as part of that he became the CH ro of Allied breweries and his job there was they had 7,000 pubs and so his job there was to try to figure out how do you given that the beer as the beer as the beer as the beer as the beer whatever pub you're in one of the differentiators is the quality of the pub manager and so he began a search to try and find what are the most reliable ways and in the end ways that have some sort of criterion-related validity to them to measure the talents of a power manager and of course inevitably he found a company in Lincoln Nebraska who knew nothing about pubs but they came at it with a really clear sort of white paper frame of mind and started doing concurrent validity studies to try and identify the talents of pub managers as compared to the contrast groups and Don Clifton professor zahn dr. Dolin Clifton who was the became the chairman of Gallup spearheaded that work and so when I was 16 when everyone else was on their vacation going to South of France or wherever we went I went to Lincoln Nebraska which for me was super glamorous and weird and flat and huge and and then I went back every year while I was at university as well and and of course Don's focus at that time was on how do you reliably measure things that you can't count but can be measured initially on pre-employment selection assessments moving into then how do you measure engage but how do you measure engagement the heck is engagement anyway how'd you do it in a way that's reliable where you could begin to understand relationships between that metric at this time and then something else that you're interested in like lost workdays or accidents on the job or whatever so we did all that and then want to see some of the people that we focused on were good managers and when you interview good managers and ask open-ended questions you do actually find although they're different they have some of the same sorts of responses and two of them just have always stuck with me as we try to build instruments to measure managerial talent the first question was how close he should people be supervised and their answer was although every manager was different if you took the study groupers to the contrast group everyone is study group had the same sort of answer and they all said some of them said it shortly some of the said it in all paragraphs but they all said the same thing which you might now be thinking of or what's the right answer to how close he should people be supervised and of course the best managers all said it depends and then the next question was what is the best way to motivate somebody and they all instinctively said it depends they didn't say beer they didn't say well well some of them said beer but what that begins to help you understand is the best managers individualize and therefore what they're really doing is looking for a particular person has a source of strength and then they're leveraging and intelligently they don't fight against who you are and try to remediate you and and and fix you because you're not broken they're pretty in a sense pretty pragmatic going who's the uniqueness of you versus you versus you and have you get the most from you from that came an inevitable way of saying what are the best managers have in common they focus on people strengths and manage around their weaknesses which is sort of like a derp when you say it but at the time there was a lot of remedial deficit thinking well intended but it was super different from what you actually heard from real people talking about how they get the best from themselves with their people and then obviously from that came well we better go out there with this with this work which began as a research paper in it and it ended up being first pick all the rules and so do you believe that we have a hard time even knowing what our strengths are yeah some of the tricky things about a strengths right first of all we think that a strength is what you're good at and a weakness is what you're bad at which is not there's not the right definition obviously because you're quite good at some things that you hate we or we're all quite good at some stuff that if we never had to do it again it'd be a day too soon so we have our definition wrong if you define it as strength as an activity that strengthens you if you define a weakness as an activity that drains you or drags you down even if you're good at it then all of a sudden you actually are the best of you you are the best source of truth about your own strengths cuz you know like if I if I focus on the particular activities that strengthen me and one of them turns out to be finding patterns in data then you as my teammate or my boss could go well you got to find a better way of showing the pattern or you got to find a better way to explain it to people so mate well you better find patterns that are useful like you could say all those things but what you can't say is no you don't you don't love that at all because I'm the I'm the truth teller about what strengthens me you can be the truth teller about how to navigate it into something useful but but I'm actually the source of truth about my own strengths if we define strengths in that way sometimes of course we're so close to our own stuff like the New Yorker who don't you can't hear the sirens or the horns anymore because you just it's just you're so close to it you don't hear it so yeah sometimes it's helpful with assessments for example I'm a big fan as you would imagine if of talent assessments that are reliably incredibly made and they can be incredibly helpful in helping you step back a wee bit and giving you a new nomenclature for describing some of the best of yourself so one of the things that I worry about as I've worked with a lot of organizations that have embraced the strengths-based movement right we've seen McKinsey and Facebook and lots of others say you know we we already have lots of critical feedback and we need to really encourage our managers to make sure that people are told what they're good at and encouraged to do the things that they really do feel the strength in them yeah I feel like sometimes a side effect of that is people overuse their strengths in situations where they're not appropriate and so you know I think about there's some research by Rob Kaiser and his colleagues which show that actually one of the the ways that you can have a weakness is to to overdo a strengths right so I have a colleague who's extremely charismatic and that strength becomes a crutch and he never prepares for giving talks on stage and then the talks are really rambling and you know they go way over time and that feels like a strength overused right he feels strengthened by relying on that crew charisma but it hurts his performance what do you think of that I would so I would disagree I would I would strongly disagree I thought you were only gonna give me positive feedback here oh come on Marcus come on I'm just giving you my reaction who knows what the feedback would be but a strength is just an activity that strengthens you it's not good or bad it's morally neutral you can use it for ill and you can use it for good if somebody is strengthened by the fact that there's 50 people that are watching them and they like they get energy from this and and they then ramble on because they haven't prepared then then the appropriate reaction is for you all in the room to go we we're all like this in which case we can come back to this person this friend of yours and go look they fell asleep yeah there's super grumpy with you rambling on that doesn't mean you've got too much charisma you can never have too much of a strength you can only use it poorly what we're talking about here is intelligence you can use your strengths done intelligently there are many leaders on the world stage today even perhaps some leaders here in the US who have got a lot of certain strengths and use them on intelligently in the sense that they don't get the outcome that we want them to have that's not too much it's interesting if you think you can never have too much of a strength your coaching men sounds like this be less of yourself Adam turn yourself down and for you you're like how that how I metabolize that well if I say to you listen you've got a great strength in maybe you're super assertive stop pissing people off and start using that to persuade them to do something they didn't intend to do and then then you leave and go how do I do that now all of a sudden oh my well I don't know here's what I would do but I tell you what what you might try now all of a sudden it's you're leaning into yourself not to quote Cheryl but like you're leaning into yourself and that's that just feels better than me going turn yourself down turn it down you're at 11:00 turn it to 6:00 and you're like I can't like oh you're too empathetic no you can never be too like if you've got empathy you're empathetic our challenge with you that is how do you leverage that intelligently to create the outcomes that you want you can't be crying all over people all the time but that doesn't mean you have too much it means we're gonna help you channel that productively it's a different it leads to different conversations great so I think I think I'm unborn help me apply this in my own life so apparently when I when I took the strengths finder I took an earlier version of it and one of my strengths was that I was logical and data-driven and I think you have a term for that now logical and data-driven annoying thank you you you are literally all about strength I was hoping so well analytical would be one yeah and I think there was a little bit of maybe it was woo winning over others yeah so I I sort of took this as feedback and said okay this is probably gonna be a useful skill as a teacher and a few years ago I had a student who called me for some career advice and I gave her a bunch of advice and at the end of the conversation she said you're a logic bully you were a logic bully yeah and I was like what does that mean and she said well you you just overwhelmed me with rational arguments and I don't agree with them but I can't fight back and I said good that's my job right and she said well no because I actually want to own my decision and I realized that I had sort of failed in at least my vision of my role as a mentor or an adviser right which is I wanted to help her see how I would think through a situation but not tell her what I thought the right answer is and so I'm trying now not to quote-unquote overuse that strength and not be a logic bully but still introduce her to some logic how should I think about that so that's super interesting you you you obviously every strength has a dark side if you will I mean you say to someone I'm I just have incredibly high standards and I just there was a high sounders that I have and somebody else behind your back is going stupid perfectionist just anal you know like every oh I'm super assertive aggressive like every strength has that kind of dark side you're a logic bully and thought of that by the way that's a great word combination logic bully but weirdly I would if I was coaching you I go people follow you because of that people thought don't turn that down turn that up because people follow you because of that so turn it up step into it and and bully you more well more like learn how you can leave space for people to model what you're doing as they make their own decisions is it true or that in general people tend to want to own their own decisions because their learning is emergent yes is it therefore true that you telling them exactly what to do removes from them the opportunity to learn yes are you also a teacher yes so therefore if you want people to learn you've got to use your logic bully nurse to help them step into their own intelligence like that's and you would find lots of tricks and techniques to do that but I would say to you I bet one of the people that one of the reasons why people are drawn to you is because you were so purely you and hopefully over time intelligently you and we know you're not perfect there's a whole bunch of qualities that teachers and professors and so forth have that you don't have but these ones that you do have a really distinctive and elevating for people and my challenge in helping you grow would be to say do you know what those are do you feel able to channel them in a way that helps and benefits your students and what are the ways in which it has worked for you in the that's why that whole feedback piece in the HPI was like well I want to help you uncover what works for me to say stop bullying people that's just a weird thing to say to you because you're like I didn't I didn't think I was bullying you almost immediately you're out of the conversation I am and it's sort of intellectually you're doing this he's an idiot he thinks I'm bullying them I'm not bullying like you you go there so instead we would step into this and go what outcome do you want oh learning ah well given who you are and how people gravitate to you how do you help him learn that's a super unique and interesting question for you to grapple with your entire freakin career it is so that's a great segue to your new book 9 lies about work yeah which is so provocative and so interesting and one of the lies that that you take on I'm not sure I agree that's a lie I want to talk about that but you say it's a lie that we need feedback at all which is sort of blasphemy right for a group of people who have lived their lives saying the only way I get better is to get feedback so tell us what you mean well this is a people and a little analytics conference right so we have to know from an analytic standpoint when and how do people get better and certainly we got to look at people's behavior in the real world it is an irony that that many companies will point to people's need for feedback by saying gosh those Millennials they love that feedback we need more feedback because the miletti can't wait for the once a year performance review they got to have it all the time all the feedback and yet over the last three years we've seen the growth of a social network who's very appeal is the fact that there's no there's no feedback on it at all and by the way for those who wanted to start a social network it's hard the network effect is really strong so path and Ning even the relaunch of MySpace I mean these none of that worked it's tricky to but snapchat went bang and snapchat went bang I don't mean it's making money I don't know how it's businesses but people are drawn to it because there's no feedback in it at all what people want isn't feedback in fact my my job my daughter's huge on Instagram and and feedback for her is they're the haters right they're the haters what you want when you go on snapchat and now as feet as Instagram tries to become more like that you want an audience you want attention so what human beings want from one another unquestionably we develop in response to another human being we do I mean if you want to kill us ignore us the worst thing of all of course is is have no friends be lonely your health will suffer your state of mind will suffer humans like to be around other humans no question but then that begs the question what do you want from that human the underlying assumption of fiebag the two big challenges with it are number one and by the way to your point and you and I've had a conversations about this if I get a fact wrong you tell me the fact if I submit a peer-reviewed journal to you and you go this isn't it then you should be telling me that absolutely so facts oh well don't worry steps to if you missed a step if there's a step of giving a safe injection I miss step three you're gonna don't miss step three but as we all know excellence in any job is not really a function of getting the facts right or the steps right there's a whole bunch more you can get the facts right in the steps right and still be really really average so in terms of excellence excellence is a manifestation of each individual being excellent you can't define comedy by saying in general comedians are like this unlisted bunch of competencies which we then try to measure through a 360 no I mean you've got Eddie Murphy you've got you got a Jerry Seinfeld you've got Sarah Silverman you've got Chris Rock and they're all weirdly different the only thing your comedian has in common is that people are laughing you can't separate the comedian from the comedy right so in that in the context of feedback then me telling you who you are me telling you I'm gonna rate you on strategic thinking no I'm not who made me the authority on strategic thinking the only thing I'm a source of truth on and this is true as we think about the tools that we build the analytic tools that we build I'm a source of truth about my reaction only which is why Minich my kids had a surgery for deviated septum last November my son had it first and there might do it had it the next day the day after the surgery the same doctor same surgery similarly doctor comes in and of course as you know the question that he asked them both the day after the surgery is on a scale of one to ten with ten hi how's your pain rate your pain my son said five my daughter said three I was in the room both times upon hearing that the doctor did not say to my son that's not a five I know five I've done this I've done this surgery four thousand times over five we've done a consensus meeting in a calibration session for the other patients down the hall your five is actually a three besides you've run out of we've run out of fives we're done with fives I'm got anymore I'd give you a four but with that like we didn't he just when you got five and my daughter got three and all he knew the doctor knew for sure is that if my son then said four or three he was feeling better yeah we are a source of authority only a source of truth only of our own of our own experience so you can ask me about if you want my reaction to stuff Adam I'll tell you my reaction but me rating you me even giving you feedback on your executive presence or your business acumen is absurdly arrogant on my part second of course me giving you advice is the oddest thing in the world because for you to excel anything is going to be an emergent property of your own natural reactions and the way in which you've channeled those reactions productively I Ashley a my co-author and I were doing the audiobook and I've done eight of them and he's done precisely none of them so I thought I'm gonna I'll be helpful here I'll tell him how to do an audiobook and so I was I did my audio book I read I have to read half the chapters because there's two of us but obviously um and I said I sat him down I said listen this is gonna take a while and the best way to do this is imagine you're talking through the screen to the producer right next door it's a very intimate thing and reading a book and hearing and someone so imagine you just talking to them imagine you're just reaching through and talking to them Ashley goes in he comes back the next day and he you go I'm like how'd it go and he goes it was amazing I'm like what did you follow my do you follow my advice did you talk to he goes nah not at all it didn't make any sense to me I'm like well what do you what do you do because I I imagined I was sight reading the piano he's a he's a pianist I'm like you imagined you a sight reading a piano yeah so I write I forget I realized with sight reading you're always slightly ahead of yourself and when you're reading your own book you always have to be slightly the moment I realized I was sigh reading everything worked I'm like okay I would never of the thousand pieces of advice I was about to give him that was a thousand and one and so that's the only point to make about feedback how do we learn we add more buds on existing neural branches we don't take our own branches and insert them into your brain and I'm not saying all fear and slightly overstating the case but we've made a God of the wrong thing we need to make a God of individualized attention yeah not critical feedback it's arrogant so do you think then that I don't need to be told to work on my weaknesses and that I don't need negative feedback because I think of going to facts I think of the Kluger Indonesian meta analysis from 96 where they review a century of feedback research and they show that whether the feedback is positive or negative is irrelevant what matters is whether the feedback is actionable and so part of what I worry about when you say look people don't really need this feedback especially in the negative domain is we're just kind of assuming that people are automatically defensive or they have fragile egos and I you know what I actually believe people are stronger than that yeah don't you I would I would - I think people incredibly strong and they're their most strong when they're standing in their strength what I'm talking about here in terms of helping someone get better is you're leaning into the question of well and it's not a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset I know we could talk about that to a blueness face the very few people are going to go you're fixed almost all of us have a growth mindset the question is where will you learn and grow the most if you're doing something that's really stupid I'm probably going to tell you stop doing that yeah but if I tell you to stop doing that I'm gonna take you from minus six to zero if I want to take you from zero to infinity that is a different conversation so and by the way that's a challenging conversation Adam like as you know as a writer your editor they they were all over your piece right I hope there were some parts and of your book where they were like that I don't know ha you ripe whole chunks like that people will want to read stuff you or read stuff that you write I mean it boy that's um so yeah just I just copy pasted that section for so and that's not soft that's not me going like this it's me going like this the best coaches that any of you have ever had yes there may be some places where someone went to stop doing that and that's totally legit if you're doing something just a the steps around the facts are wrong or you're just treading on your own tongue then okay stop that that's so fine but please that when you do there please don't imagine you're helping that person Excel you are preventing their failure which is okay if you want to help them Excel you are helping them to uncover what elements or aspects of them are really effective and and then helping them to refine those more of it and you're helping them by basically going I don't know I can't tell you how I can ask a series of questions I can point out when it really works and this isn't to make you feel better it's to make you go if you want to make a dent in the world there's only one person that can make your dent and I as your coach or your mentor or your team member or whatever I want you to step in and make the bloody best then you can that's not soft but it's the hard prescription of excellence versus the hard prescription of remediation those things are different we're not careful we have school where you know frankly a lot of the what we get toward is that once you get the you're fine and we need you no more than 70% of parents in America will go AAA F and we focus on the F and so we've been inculcated and this is true around the world we've been inculcated with the idea that the hardness the sort toughness is to deal with the fact you've got an F and actually the toughness should be Aston a okay how much more awesome contributed amazing and beautiful could that be there lies contribution here lies remediation so it's I'm not saying this is yeah don't not do that it's just that doesn't get you here really does it so this is this is really fascinating because you then complicate this idea and you say but I don't believe people have potential Wow I'd say this is a measurement issue listen so line number seven is people have potential it's a lie people don't have potential here's how potential is played out in the world of work Adam you have a bucket in the bucket is a big thing it's called potential and if you have a lot of potential in your bucket we give you a name we give him a name don't we we give him a name we call him a high potential he's a hypo and then over here you have a bucket too but maybe has a hole in it or I don't know something but there's not much potential you're a low power high post and low post about 15 to 20 percent of our company a high post the rest are low post I'm so sorry he's got a golden ticket there's a thing called potential that he takes with him wherever he goes and it somehow turbocharged is everything well I'll tell you we haven't been able to measure that try to measure that go to any people analytics tool anywhere ever that can show that you can measure something in Adam but independent of context or situational role is called potential and that he has a lot of it and you have none of it it's made up we just made it up we've taken a truth that's true in one small set of circumstances namely does Adam himself have potential to grow and get better which is true and then we've scaled it to everybody and turned it into a lie that all of us maybe it's somebody who's still in university and bumped into this yet but you go into any big company there's hypos who get all the goodies and there's everybody else who doesn't we've created an apartheid in our companies and it's morally sorry or what but it's morally reprehensible every single human can grow and learn and get better everyone can and when we cut a lazy time for those of you in measurement you know this that's a lazy to prove to me that potential exists measure it it's like leadership measure that yeah best of British luck on that one imagine a leader share you measure it one time and I'll show you a whole bunch of leaders who's where all the qualities seem to be optional it's like no we can by the way we can measure followership so met this measurements so interesting because it pushes you to be to be really humble first I think and precise about what are you saying leadership's a thing no followers ships that thing because we can actually measure people's willingness to give their breath to you okay that's interesting we start measuring traits of leaders the first thing that strikes you is just how many leaders don't have them anyway sorry yeah no that actually was where I wanted to go next so you you do take on leadership as your last lie which is especially fun because you're often described as a leadership expert do you so it at least in in the organizational psychology and organizational behavior world one of the ways we measure leadership effectiveness is we just measure the success of the group or team that you're leading and ideally we get the Delta right so we measure their performance before you came in and then after and we look at okay you know trying to control for whatever you had before you know how much did the leader move the needle and that basically is measuring a version of followership do you cut but would you accept that that's leadership or do you think we should move away from that altogether well that is followership so we have two challenges with follow mission number one can we actually measure something in followers reliably and then do any sort of time when to time to comparison of improvement and can we perhaps actually show some sort of criterion-related validity of the movement of that to the move it is something else that we care about that's in it that's interesting to do that work is ongoing a lot of people are trying to understand that it's all good because we're measuring things that people can report on their own experience as a team member of this person the other aspect of that that's a little trickier Adam is that at the moment we have no reliable way of measuring knowledge worker performance how it is that today by the way today right now when anyone says this thing we did drives performance at the level of the individual it's all made up why because we have no reliable way to measure not knowledge worker performance other than ratings that we know are more reflection of the rater than their eighty we know the idiosyncratic effect undermines the fact that your rating is a reflection of you so anybody who's saying anything about this thing drives performance is making it up and then all of your alarm bells should just go off having said that we can see the performance I mean a you know your level of engagement time one to time two might change and it does make sense to infer that if we bring a new leader in and it moves it's like hard that must be a function about that leader so followership exists the challenge is then when we look at leaders themselves I mean let's me do it let's say we do a concurrent validity study we have a whole bunch of study group we have a contrast group and we try to identify and by the way I spent the first eight years of my career doing exactly this how do you measure the traits not staged the traits that exist in this group IRS's this group the only thing we could ever find a Gallup the only thing and we must have done those concur malignity studies I must have done 100 myself let alone the rest of my colleagues did the only thing that predicted group membership was total score it wasn't the configuration of particular traits it was that you had some traits strongly ok that's really interesting that implies that leaders are good ones are idiosyncratic and that average by the way this is probably true across the board average is homogeneous or homogeneous average is same excellence almost in anything is unique as heterogeneous and and the data shows us that in in my language when you when you do pre-employment selection assessments and you try to say all the best people have all these you actually look at the data they don't they have a big total score but they've got peaks or spikes and it's like okay that's annoying because you want Richard Branson to look and act exactly the same way is Warren Buffett but he doesn't and you know in the real world if you were to say to Warren well to grow as a leader we've defined the leadership competencies you're missing a bunch there richard has to grow you should be more like Richard when I say that it sounds stupid because it's stupid but yet we've created a fifteen billion dollar in three that in many cases Adam is you know does exactly that that there's a leadership thing that if you could just to learn it and in by bit you've become a leader and that's there's no data on that in fact most of the data pushes exactly in the opposite direction yeah Marcus I agree and I think you know it's interesting because I guess it's some level you could do a fuzzy set analysis and try to come up with archetypes of you know different different models or prototypes and what a good leader looks like but there would be a lot of them right and you wouldn't encourage people then to try to just become one you I think you pointed out something else interesting though which is there are three tech companies represented in the audience right now where I've started and then stalled on research projects because we wanted to measure performance and they said well we can't all right we don't have objective performance data and I'm like but you have software engineers they write code you can tell whether the code works or breaks you can tell whether the code is elegant or complex and they're like no not really our engineers I'll disagree about this we can't measure it precisely but we still have to figure out who's doing a good job and who's not in order to promote or pay people yes what do you advise them to do instead because I've really been at a loss for how to navigate that well this is a longer thing than we could talk about today but it is if any of you are interested like if you and I were to do a research project together one of the things that we should absolutely tackle and then give away is how do you reliably measure knowledge worker performance in a way that doesn't I mean we've crunched you know hundreds and millions of pieces of data ratings data over four or five years to see whether they relate to anything and of course they don't relate to anything useful because they wobble all by themselves they have no reliability to them so they're flapping around so no wonder flapping around here doesn't relate to anything over here because it's just all over the place the only thing they predict a we've found that they predict by the way you're rating this year seems to at least half of its need to protect your rate rating last year okay so once you're a three that three is on your back four and you walk around with it's hard to shake the three and and by the way if you're a five it's kind of like you can mess up a bunch more times because hey look I'm a five you know so the solution probably is and I don't have it like right here because otherwise oh I don't know I would be a happy bunny but um the answer probably lies somewhere in the same way that it lies with health today no one says are you healthy instead they say what's your weight was your body mass index what's your cholesterol so health has become a sort of a daft oversimplification of something which we've broken it down into some things we can reliably measure right which lead to actions performance is going to be that way to there'll be some aspects of Poorman of performance where we will ask your team leader by the way that raises the question who's the team leader because there's a bunch of dynamic teams going on but anyway to ask a few questions not about you but about their reaction to you why would we do that because we're trying to make decisions about what to do with you so why wouldn't we ask the person who's proximate to you what they would do with you is that performance no it's what I would do it it is only what it says it is which is a summary of what a particular team leader may feel that then becomes one data point you might then take code and it's Darwinian strength in terms of how long it survives as we know that's a good way to measure the usefulness of code whether the world sort of agrees to shove it away or go over build on that so I think in every role we'll have some aspect of performance that will be reliable measurement of person closest to you should that be peers I know there's a bunch of apps out there we're going to peers they're going to rate each other I think you've got a data insufficiency problem there well I just don't bump into you enough to have any of my data points be anything other than I like Adam basically but I think we're gonna have we're gonna break performance down into a few reliably measured things so when we design the nine boxes of the future it won't be performance and potential a potential stupid B performance is stupid instead we're going to have reliable measures of a few things and then we're going to humbly say look Adams strong here he's got a bit more here and in the book we talk about that as momentum what people don't a potential they have a momentum which means they've got some things about themselves they probably take with them into every situation traits like things and they've got some things that probably change according to the particular part of the world they're in they're their skills their experience the performance state like things yeah now that's an if you if I confer on you you're low potential that's a conversation ender but if I say what's your momentum suddenly that's a conversation starter and we can start asking ourselves well what is your what's the level of your momentum what's the direction of your momentum you know change of now that's an that's an interesting you know language is important momentum is a better word than potential yeah it's some of it I think it's what every managers job is to create yeah how do I help establish momentum for the people who work with me yes so should we take some audience questions sure let's see what they are we what your feedback so Marcus you mentioned that you're a fan of talent assessments that are reliably made and that are valid yes what are the pitfalls that you see holding a lot of talent assessments back well and I'm sorry if I'm preaching to the choir you some of you know this far better than I but the very first thing you need to establish when you build a psychometric tool of any kind is reliability know reliability know anything else so we got to start with reliability so the one thing I would say that does hold many of these assessments back is we haven't started by saying what are you a reliable rater of whether you're the test taker asking answering questions about yourself or whether you're a 360 participant completing a survey on someone else I am only a reliable rate of my own experience we better build tools that are based upon what we know humans are reliable raters of I am NOT a reliable rater of you on anything and that is systematic error and that's not random error the more data points you add as some of you know systemic error the more error at the more data points you add to systematic error the bigger the error gets you don't remove it by adding you know noise plus noise post noise plus noise doesn't equal signal it just makes more noise so a lot of these talent assessments I don't think is starting with humbly going what can a person reliably report on whether I'm reporting on my reaction to you or whether I'm just reporting on me you get that wrong everything else sort of goes skew e you get it right you're on the beginnings of understanding what's knowable another question that I think is incredibly interesting is one of the places that people do have reliable information about us that we don't have is our blind spots right so other other people see strengths we don't recognize they also sometimes see weakness is that we probably do need to remediate I know if I worked with Steve Jobs the first conversate I would have had was about his weaknesses what do you what do you recommend saying to people when you do spot a blind spot again language is important blind spot is weirdly arrogant a it implies that you are seeing someone else that someone else doesn't see and B you're implying that it's relevant you can only report on one thing I'm not obviously people do need to be around other people as I said but you can only report on one thing what's my reaction it's like I can't tell you that you're a logic bully I can tell you that I felt like I couldn't make a decision the moment I flipped that I know it seems like a small thing but the moment I flipped that you you are removed from arguing with me because you're never gonna I felt bullied you go I know I felt bullied and that's it's a beautiful flip because it's like I'm not telling you that you've got a blind spot for bullying how the hell do I know that all I know for sure is that I felt like I couldn't make any choices and that you'd serve logic to me into a corner I'm really sorry by the way no that's okay but I'll carry around with me but if those small things I think are quite important to get right agreed one more question what what do you think about the the question of whether potential is measurable in some settings so when that comes up here is athletics could we say that at LeBron James is a better prospect because we know he's taller he's faster he you know is more he has more dexterity right there's a there's a Draft Combine where you try to measure all these qualities and then translate them into you know some indication of potential which I realized as noisy and limited but as we move to more objective qualities do you think there is some indication from a current measurement of those qualities of future potential to perform well of course I don't I don't know but it's know a bull some of these things are know a bull you know if you get well you know all basketball players need to have almost Marfan syndrome where they need to have that weird stretch of you're 6 or 7 but you play like 72 okay that's not not interesting that to be interesting to know about a person but then you don't get Muggsy Bogues so then you miss that and then you don't get Isiah Thomas because he didn't have that so you lose all sorts of really cool people now you get LeBron because he does have that and you get Kobe but you miss Kobe's steel like there's a thing about Kobe it's a different thing right so all of these things that are knowable and I think this is why this conference is so important because we you know HR we are not data fluent in HR and a discipline is it has respect based upon the quality of its data and most of the data that we've put in our HCM systems our human capital management systems is bogus it is not measuring what it says and and so everything falls apart beyond that I'm not saying when you started or your salary or when you last promoted countable things that we put in these systems are good but an awful lot of the stuff that is not countable beings to bleed into feedback potential competency lists all that sort of stuff and it's all rubbish like from a data standpoint it should make all of you twinge and so this sort of a gathering like this is so important because we want our children to come into workplaces and feel as though the whole focus on people is reliable knowable humble and then valid in some way at the moment we're just making it up and it means that there's no foundation so in terms of potential should we start going well what can we know about a human that's a that's a great question my sister was a ballet dancer for the Rob for the raw ballet at 11 she had her wrists measured to measure the gap between her bones because they didn't want to hire people at 11 who were going to be more than 5 foot 5 well they measured her bones they said the potentials good and they brought because they had a measurement and they brought they they brought her in as it turns out she was five seven and a half and grew too big to be a ballet dancer for the robotic company my point in saying that is they did have a measurement yeah now that they could go as you know retrospectively go back and see whether or not there was any predictive validity to what they selected for to the subsequent performance and now we can start to add one little piece of knowledge that's rely gathered onto another little piece of knowledge and their lies progress there lies wisdom which is why this is scosh is what you will doing is so important well in closing what I want to do is very low-tech survey can I just have you all in the audience can you hold up the number of fingers for the number of times that you have been challenged or stimulated by something Marcus said this afternoon okay so Marcus I have to say we are arbiters of that truth this is not an idiosyncratic rater effect you lived up to those strengths thank you thank you so much [Applause]

Channel: Wharton School

Views: 28,216

Rating: 4.9305553 out of 5

Keywords: Wharton, The Wharton School, Wharton People Analytics Conference, MBA, People Analytics, HR Analytics, Talent Analytics, Marcus Buckingham, Adam Grant, work

Id: XEXOWJkyRcE

Length: 42min 57sec (2577 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2019