The Innocent World of Comfortable Ideas

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Discomfort of Innocence, by Mohammed alalawi - Copy
Discomfort of Innocence.  Photo by Mohammed Alalawi

Why do you hang out with people like you?  Because you have to be friends with your friends’ friends.  Society does not give you permission to dislike (or not know) your friends-of-friends.  It’s called the forbidden triad.  There is a complex quantitative puzzle involving triangles with plus and minus signs, all coded and ready for an elaborate statistical analysis.  You can peek at the math in this October 2016 overview of the research by Dustin Stoltz, a PhD candidate at University of Notre Dame.

But back to people.  The main problem is cognitive dissonance, that feeling you get when you are obliged to maintain two contradictory opinions at the same time.  An example may be that you both love and hate a particular family member, politician, or manager in your workplace.  Cognitive dissonance makes you uncomfortable, and you aspire to greater comfort.  Therefore, you will choose between contradictory opinions and let one prevail over the other.  So, you decide that you like that complex person.  If you then meet a third-party who dislikes that person, you have to even-out the triangle.  You will be motivated to change the third person’s mind, change your own mind, or just stop hanging out with the third party.    If everyone does this, friendships and world views will evolve within cliques that are internally consistent, comfortable, and smug.  But that’s not so clever.

That is because social networks are held together by people who choose to maintain contradictory opinions.  They foster civil dialogue, cultivate plurality, and agree to disagree.  It’s not so much that they are smarter, although that may still be the case.  It’s that the exploration of the best information and the most diverse opinions guarantees contradiction.  You will find attributes that seem contradictory but not mutually exclusive, such as sensitivity and courage.  You will find rival facts, such as the prevailing research on global warming and colder winters in your own locale.  And there will be facts that change quickly, such the price of oil or a change of government.

Workforce Analytics and the Workplace Culture of Curiosity and Discomfort

If you place comfort ahead of maximum information, then you have to insulate yourself from contradiction.  Yet this can be a big mistake in the modern world.  How could you possibly choose a stable mindset when the amount of information is exploding, technology is disrupting everything, and ideas and opinions go round the world in a heartbeat.  It’s a wild and crazy world we live in.  You must choose discomfort, and reject the allure of smug.

In workforce analytics, there is a great divide between colleagues and clients who are curious about new information and those who are not.  It often feels like I exclusively support those hungry for the new, who like the challenge, who want to pick up a few tricks.  Yet those who are more settled in their views or slower to change need to be brought along for the ride.  That is because at the center of the social network people are obliged to commit to, and support, prevailing views.  They tend to agree with one another just like you might do with your own friends.  Looking outward to the fringes of the network, you might see a wider variety of irregular opinions, trends, and opportunities.  The fringe is full of people who are removed from the network in some way, be it marginal legal status, geographic isolation, exclusion, or just looking different.  To bring diverse views from the fringe to the center (and vice-versa) obliges us to maintain contradictory opinions.

The prescription that we must become uncomfortable applies equally to social trends, new technology, and disruptive workforce analytics.  In your workplace, you may have had one opinion for a very long time.  When you are presented with change or new evidence, it is one thing to simply obey orders or comply with the data.  But if you really want to be clever, it is far better to hold onto that moment of discomfort for a while to get a sense of what everyone else is going through.  Only then can you talk to diverse people who think and live in different worlds.  And only then can you fine-tune new evidence to make it presentable to a broader audience.

If we are to disrupt normal ways of doing things through emerging information, we must stand at the bridge between two worlds, be prepared to disrupt ourselves, and get used to discomfort.

Sorry Sir, I’m Just Not Feeling Motivated

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Scream. Courtesy of Crosa.
Scream. Photo courtesy of Crosa.

What is the trade-off between a compassionate workplace culture and strong corporate performance?  Surprise, there isn’t one!  Corporate performance is subordinate to organizational culture and the emotional intelligence of senior leaders.

This article by Travis Bradberry of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 fame describes an interesting conundrum.  A large number of top corporate leaders have poor emotional intelligence.  The highest emotional intelligence is found amongst front-line managers and then each management level upward the leaders display increasingly diminished emotional intelligence.

Bradberry attributes this phenomenon to two factors.  First, corporate boards are selecting for leaders who deliver the numbers, such as profits, sales volumes, and stock price appreciation.  Second, the work environment of senior leaders impairs emotional intelligence and inhibits its growth.  Severe stress, lack of rest, regulatory enforcement, and a low-trust and blame-heavy environment can drag anyone into an emotional stone age (and keep them there).

What is fascinating is that corporate leaders with high emotional intelligence, although fewer in number, still perform better than others.  It may be that organizations will select the occasional gem of a leader, but otherwise we are mostly recruiting and promoting lower-functioning leaders into senior roles.  So how do mean bosses even get the job in the first place?

It is reminiscent of Jeffrey Pfeffer’s book Power: Why Some People Have it and Others Don’t.  Pfeffer provides endless examples of how an executive’s career prospects are often inversely proportional to their performance.  In brief, being a cold and calculating savage will motivate people to not mess with you.  It is possible to rig your career towards a poisoned and under-performing work environment where you still reign supreme.  When corporate leaders spend all day making power plays, there appears to be no beneficiary of this behavior other than the leader.  Look directly at these kinds of leaders.  How are they doing?  They seem to be doing well.  It’s just everyone around them who is falling apart.  It’s all of those people who just can’t play the game and can’t keep up; they aren’t able to deliver corporate performance.  Of course, the punchline is that downstream inability to perform is a hallmark of inferior top leadership.

There is another consideration; do major corporations have sufficient protections against leaders who have personality disorders?  The best-known personality disorder is psychopathy, which is well-documented in Robert Hare’s Without Conscience.  The other disorders are important, but psychopaths are special.  When you get to know the type, it sounds like the personality of someone who perfectly reflects the values of an emotionless profit-maximizing corporation.

Indeed this was well documented in The Corporation, a movie by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan.  Their critique is that the behavior of major corporations (as institutions) ticks all of the boxes on the checklist of psychopath behaviors for people.  If we promote leaders who reflect corporate values, and the corporate values are that we should act like psychopaths, then who is going to end up in charge?

There is a lack of insight amongst psychopaths, corporations, and many corporate leaders, and this lack of insight is at the root of poor emotional intelligence.  Let’s face it, if you got cut off in traffic by some jerk on your way to the office, and then a colleague cuts in front of you at the coffee station, it’s easy to get snippy.  Do you keep control? Are you even aware that you’re just carrying-forward a residual emotion from an hour earlier?  I mean, if it’s possible to carry-forward quarterly accounting indicators, surely it’s possible to carry forward emotions.

How can corporations be unaware of the need for a compassionate working environment?  I think it’s because hierarchy diminishes the two-directional information flow up and down the chain of command.  If the board wants numbers, executives commit to deliver, and the rest of the hierarchy snaps into line, this reveals an opinion that the best opinions come from the top.  However, this might not be how the world really works.  It is an organization’s history, geography, and people that determine the culture.  And it is the culture that determines the customer experience, the spirit of innovation, a healthy attitude towards rules, compassion during crisis, and discretionary effort amongst staff.

One does not simply demand good numbers.  Rather, we harvest good numbers from a well-cultivated culture.

It’s About Policing Numbers, Not Number of Police

Posted on by Stuart Murray
The Police, by Luca Venturi
The Police.  Courtesy of Luca Venturi.

Can big data reduce crime?  Yes it can.  This is a great TED Talk by Anne Milgram about using analytics to improve the criminal justice system.  The talk from October 2013 describes how Milgram successfully attempted to “moneyball” policing and the work of judges in her role as attorney general of New Jersey.  Hers is a great story, and has many features in common with the Moneyball book and movie.

The speaker describes how she built a team, created raw data, analyzed it, and produced simple and meaningful tools.  Her most impressive outcome is a risk assessment tool that helps judges identify the likelihood a defendant will re-offend, not show up in court, or commit a violent act.  She and her team have successfully reduced crime.

Baseball players and police officers alike have a culture of bravado and confidence which may be critical when handling conflict, intimidation, and credibility.  Yet what police officers and baseball players often need is a safe space to question their assumptions, assess whether they could do better, and decide that they will do better.  These types of vulnerable moments don’t play out well when a player is at bat, or when an officer is handling complaints from the perpetrators.

In Milgram’s talk, where others see cool math tricks, I see a change in mindset and demeanor.  The speaker expresses curiosity about the information, enthusiasm for unexpected findings, modesty about baseline effectiveness, a lack of blame, and a can-do attitude about trying to do more and do better.

It’s a great metaphor for business.  In those workplaces where managers fiercely claw their way to the top, there may be a reduced willingness to talk about shortcomings in a manner that requires trust and collaboration.  Yet making exceptional decisions require that leaders choose an entirely different mood and posture while they explore an uncharted area, allow information to out-rank instinct, and aspire to a more subtle kind of greatness.  Put posture aside, and just do good work.  The way things are changing, those are the only kinds of people who will stay on top.

I Like Your Style, You’re Just Like Me

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Apostrophe Absent. By Michael Derr
Apostrophe Absent. Photo courtesy of Michael Derr.

Are you compatible with your organizational culture?  I sure hope not.  You need the freedom to break from the pack in order to pass along new information and adapt to disruptive change.

In the 2011 book Connected by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, the authors describe the way opinions and behaviors spread through social networks.  They describe a Three Degrees of Influence rule: we influence and are influenced by people three degrees removed from us, most of whom we do not even know.

You might know one hundred people, but those people may know another one hundred people (each), and so on.  This could result in a million people crowd-sourcing shared opinions.  You would pick up many opinions from this extended network.  The reverse is true as well.  You could spontaneously assert that we should have all better table manners, and a million people might change their behaviors.  Or maybe they’ll just talk about having better manners.

The implication is that you do not entirely experience independent thought.  You might control what time you arrive at work, what garments to wear to the office, and how you respond emotionally to what  your manager just said.  But the allocation of housework in your household, the social norms in appropriate dress, and the organizational culture of two-way conversation could all be things that have significant third-party influence.  You’re not exactly an autonomous hero in the workplace; you are a team-player in an environment where culture runs deep.

This critique has been revisited in a recent book review in which Yuval Harari summarizes The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach.  Sloman and Ferbach posit that individual thinking is a myth, and that we actually think in groups.  With modern civilization we have come to rely increasingly on the expertise of others.  This crowd-think has mostly been good for us, but it also has a downside.  People “…lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming newsfeeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged.”

Group loyalty and pride in our presumed intelligence causes us to stick to the normal way of doing things.  This is a challenge to those of us who produce or consume new information.  New information and new ideas disrupt stable group environments.  If we are trying to change the workplace so that things are done differently, we must exchange discomforting opinions.  We must propose ideas that will be rejected.  We must try things out that won’t work.

You Can “Say” Team, But Do You Feel It?

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Soccer Practice. Courtesy of woodleywonderworks.
Soccer Practice. Photo courtesy of woodleywonderworks.

Does life get in the way of your workplace productivity?  Typically, it’s the opposite.  Your personal life determines how you show up.  When colleagues talk about life, and make their work meaningful to their lives, that’s when they become a team.

This is a great story from a colleague of mine from graduate school.  Alyssa Burkus describes the time she was working on a project for an organization (Actionable.co), and started seriously to consider an offer to work for them full-time.  During a team check-in about people’s weekend she announced to team members that she had achieved a milestone anniversary in surviving cancer.  There was an outpouring of sympathy and support.  She felt it.  She had found her tribe.

If you listen closely in your own workplace, you might hear other moments like these.  Some moments are better than others.  When people “have a specialist appointment” how much time do we give them?  When people have a death in the family, do they tell us, and do we have their back?  When two people talk about their kids having learning disabilities, how long are they allowed to talk?  At my current employer I had to delay my start date because there was a minor complication with a scheduled surgery.

The reason these scenarios are powerful is that many personal topics are simply more important than work.  As an employer you don’t so much own people, you just borrow some of their time.  When employees develop a sense of self-respect and a pride in their contributions, they willingly rise above what is expected from them in the job description.  I love going above and beyond for people whom I respect, and who have respect for me.  This feeling is stronger when employees forget about their salary, which is the dream of every well-informed compensation team.

The ability to have these conversations is part of a healthy workplace culture.  It turns up in employee surveys as a determinant of workplace engagement.  It drives turnover statistics and the amount of steam people put into discretionary effort.  Missteps in these areas are often at the root of conflict, harassment, and grievances.  When an employee expresses physical or emotional discomfort, the degree to which others care and take action is a major factor in accident claims, absenteeism, and long-term disability costs.  With equity and inclusion the emerging practice is to bypass categories and go deeper into individual perspectives.  With employee communications, people mostly read the personal stories.  And the best source of information for leadership development in the eyes of the employees who are following your lead.

I do a lot of math about workforce analytics and I can confirm for you that according to my calculator, emotions are the boss.

I think the reason vulnerability and compassion are so powerful is that it’s really hard to fake it.  You can tell when people mean it, and you can tell when people don’t.  As Alyssa puts it, “…this isn’t a call-to-action to start creating ‘meaningful moments’ initiatives, where the word from the top is leaders need to be more personal, or where HR tracks ‘connection point KPIs.’” It’s about authenticity.  Perhaps we need to develop metrics to guage that.

Missteps Make for Better Analysis

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Oops. By Malcolm Slaney
Oops.  Courtesy of Malcolm Slaney.

A major voice in people analytics just advocated for the professionalization of my field.  An April 27, 2017 blog post by Max Blumberg and Mark Lawrence suggests that workforce analytics regulate itself under a professional association.  The authors have a good point.  The explosion of alleged experts in my field is making things really confusing for lay audiences.  We have no idea if someone claiming to have expertise is truly knowledgeable.  There is a gold-rush mentality in workforce analytics, and we can barely distinguish those on the cutting edge from the outright con-artists.  Bad experiences and false starts are causing skepticism.

I agree with this assessment of the current state of affairs.  I decline the vast majority of conferences, webinars, and software on offer.  Being strong at workforce analytics turns on having daily exposure to the data itself.  I have yet to hear a provider offer something more interesting than that thing we just figured out last week, by ourselves, with in-house staff using excel.

However, I have to disagree with the proposal that the field should be regulated.  You see, the main opportunity is to democratize the skill set and bolster the overall number of people who read the data and create simple calculations.  If you can get one-tenth of a human resources team to tool-up with a small amount of learning and experimentation with the data, that’s a huge boost in organizational capacity.  There is one specialist for every five or 10 people in the earliest steps of the learning curve.  Tinkerers and new entrants are half of the equation, and sometimes they are the most important half.

There is another problem.  We don’t yet know what excellence in workforce analytics looks like.  Sure, getting the attention of the c-suite, saving money, having clean data, and making your findings presentable are really obvious signs that you know this stuff.  But mysteries abound.  The information is disruptive to those with power, so how shall we deal with the office politics?  The data improves every day, so how do we maintain composure while discussing last-year’s erroneous data.  We’re supposed to align to strategy, but strategy and leadership change is constant.  And how are we to negotiate the boundaries between the professions when accounting has their own cost model, and marketing researchers are experts in employee surveys?

The mystery, confusion, emotional drama, flashes of growth and pride all bring the field to life.  Workforce analytics is a mosh pit.  Our outputs are a meal thrown together from what is leftover in the fridge.  Our first attempt at everything looks like a Pinterest fail.

Let’s keep it messy.  We’re more honest that way.  Besides, we work harder when we’re having fun.