Data Democracy, For Better or Worse

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Vote Here. By Andrew DuPont
Vote Here. Photo courtesy of Andrew DuPont

Do you wish that there was more equality in our access to information?  I do.  In the past (i.e. a few decades ago) it used to be far more common for information to be more tightly-held by those with power.  However, major employers are pushing data downward into the hands of more people within their organization.

Here is an interesting article about data democratization, a buzzword that warrants some clarity.  Author Bernard Marr, in his July 2017 article in Forbes, describes data democratization through general themes.  An organization’s internal data is no longer “owned” by the Information Technology department, rather the data is put into the hands of diverse users.  Everyone has access to the data and there are no gatekeepers creating an access bottleneck.  People from varied ranks and diverse professional backgrounds can use the data to advance their goals.  There are down-sides, including redundant efforts by distributed users, concerns about data security, the fact that some data still exists in silos, and misunderstandings by those who don’t deal with the data every day.

It’s important to take this phenomenon seriously as a trend that is building steam, and which is probably here to stay.

In my opinion, the word “democracy” is problematic.  For example only those with digital literacy who are inside the organization can take full advantage.  Those with more power can use the new information more significantly to their advantage.  There also tends to be a winner-takes-all outcome, where the person with the best information and the most sophisticated ability to use it tends to come out ahead.

While you might think that these phenomena imply data is undemocratic, guess again.  Electoral democracy, although pure in spirit, tends only to involve between one-half and three-quarters of voters who cast a ballot.  Those who are powerful (i.e. business owners and property owners) have a strange ability to get more out of elected governments than others.  And those who are the best at politics will tend to win all of the power, leaving others in the dust.  Much like parliamentary democracy, data democracy works best for those who have the upper hand.  In both cases, the system is a pseudo-democracy of established interests choosing amongst themselves who they will share power with.  I think that’s called aristocracy.

Chasing Your Tail, Finding Your Soul

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Chasing his tail. Courtesy of Lil Shepherd
Chasing his tail. Photo courtesy of Lil Shepherd

Do you want to get promoted?  Here’s a quick tip… you probably don’t want to get promoted.  It’s extremely common for people to attribute their hopes and dreams to the single most common solution to their woes, which is a promotion into a higher-paying job.  But that’s not how our souls really work.

The “long tail” is a theory attributed to Chris Anderson of Wired and TED fame.  The long tail theory is that for many cultural products – books, movies, and music – we over-rely on a small number of great works that are immensely popular.  But there is also a very large amount of product that you might have enjoyed, if only you knew about it, it was easy to access, and you didn’t care that much what others thought about your taste.  If you want to get geeky, the long tail web site describes this concept using a power law distribution (1/x), where the popular goods are at the peak on the far left, constituting the “big head,” and the lesser-known goods tail off to the right, going on forever into smaller and smaller numbers, hence the “long tail.”

Bricks-and-mortar storefronts prefer to sell large volumes of popular goods, in order to reduce production and storage costs.  By contrast, things sold over the internet can be stored at low cost and sold in low volumes at reasonable profit.  The internet opens up your access to a greater diversity of concepts, allowing you to bypass overly-popular mainstream content.

It’s important to keep our eyes on consumer data, because consumer-based big data is about one decade ahead of human resources analytics in terms of maturity.

For those in human resources the long tail phenomenon is a good metaphor for career advancement concerns of employees.  Consider our societal obsession with vertical career movement and the opportunity to make more money by working longer hours and enduring greater stress.  Contrast that mainstream goal with the possibility of thousands of careers to choose from, a wide range of work-life balance concerns and solutions, and unusual combinations of hours of work and locations of work.

When people meet with career coaches, the employee will often name career advancement as their primary goal, typically to the rank of Director.  But after some inquiry, it often turns out that there is a deeper personal objective which is more important to them.  It could be energy level, the challenge, pride in craftsmanship, helping others, or greater independence.  But each of these individual objectives can be achieved through more targeted efforts.  Promotion is only one way to make life better, and in some cases it makes life worse if it takes us further away from the deeper goal.

Career decisions and deeper goals will occasionally line up with the mainstream.  For example, it’s usually an all-round good idea to get a degree.  But if your motivations are unique, think of your life choices as the equivalent of an obscure garage band with a cult following of two hundred people.  Sometimes it doesn’t matter if everyone else is doing it.  But it always matters if you’re doing what’s right for you.

Bias Bad for Business

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Hiding, by Wes Peck
Hiding.  Photo courtesy of Wes Peck

Bias is bad for productivity.  Here’s an overview of a study that came out in July 2017.  The findings are that perceptions of bias have a negative impact on idea-sharing and job commitment.  “Of employees who experienced bias, 34% reported withholding ideas or solutions in the last six months and 48% said they looked for a new job while at their current job during the same time period.”

Perceptions of implicit bias are reduced by an inclusive environment. “Employees were 64% less likely to perceive bias at companies with diverse leaders, 87% less likely when they had inclusive leaders, and 90% less likely when they had sponsors.”

The methodology was to compare self-assessments of employee potential to those employees’ estimates of how they would be rated by their manager.  Larger gaps were interpreted as an indicator of bias.  There’s room for debate about the methodology, but the findings ring true.  That is, that managers who favour people like themselves discourage the productivity of a diverse workforce.  Bias is simply malfunctioning thinking.  Leading an organization with malfunctioning thought would presumably be a hindrance to workplace effectiveness.

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.

Breathing Life Into Your Work Team

Posted on by Stuart Murray
I love bubbles. So much. by Sam Wolff.
I love bubbles. So much. Photo courtesy of Sam Wolff.

In 2011 Google released the results of Project Oxygen.  Project Oxygen was Google’s effort to identify what makes a good manager.  They put analysts onto large volumes of data from 10,000 sources to find what is at the center of the puzzle.  Their results are:

  1. Be a good coach
  2. Empower your team and don’t micromanage
  3. Show interest in employees’ successes and well-being
  4. Be productive and results-oriented
  5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team
  6. Help your employees with career development
  7. Have a clear vision and strategy for the team
  8. Have key technical skills, to help advise the team

In the New York Times article summarizing these findings, a few things jumped out to me.  Five of these items (numbers 1-3 plus 5-6) imply a compassionate, nurturing, and transformational leadership style.  It is a rebuke to the notion that managers need to assert control, maintain discipline, and establish themselves in the hierarchy.  However, managers are also not allowed to be weak or wishy-washy in terms of results and clear vision.  While new managers step away from alpha-dog dominance to lead people in a “different” way, the alternate style cannot be deliberately passive.  You still need to actively cultivate, intervene, and get the information out.

It’s some stellar research.  For most of my work, I manipulate numbers.  By contrast, this is an interpretation of large volumes of text and I know this is hard, specialized work.  The findings are also contrary to many vested interests.  When the client and the analysts themselves are great at technical analysis, and they declare that technical skills are not the most important thing… you know they’re not feathering their own nest.

However, I would like to highlight a couple of vulnerabilities about these findings, just to keep everyone on their toes.  First, these findings are specific to the time and context, and findings can shift from one dataset to the next.  It’s likely the list looks a little different if you don’t work at Google, and it may even change within Google over the years.  Remember, this is not a representative sample of all organizations throughout time.  It is good practice to give research findings the benefit of the doubt within context, and be skeptical or critical outside of that context.

For example, what if everyone at Google is really good at certain things and therefore those attributes don’t have a correlation with anything else?  Examples might include having a university degree, getting access to information, receiving a decent salary, and vitamin D.  You need a data sample where some people are bad at certain things to build out the lower-left corner of a scattergram.  Otherwise a perfectly plausible driver of success will drop from statistical significance.

In the discussion about this project’s findings, people tend to go on about how technical skills are “dead last.”  Not so fast.  Wasn’t this a list of dozens of attributes, and they dropped all the attributes below number eight?  As presented by the analysts, technical skills still make the list.  Also, consider how you can blend technical skills with career development, empowering your team, and being productive.

I think it’s still the case that sleep, diet, exercise, and a good mood are the major drivers of focus, emotional intelligence, and energy.  As individuals we need to take care of those home-front items in order to break into the next level of performance.  However, if you botch the home front, you might not even get the job in the first place, never mind being good at it.

This brings us to the fact that they chose a fitting name for this project.  What is the one thing you need above else to determine your success at work?  Oxygen, of course.  Lots and lots of oxygen.  Good luck motivating staff without it!

An Ode to the Number Pad

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Number Pad. By Tony Cuozzo
Number Pad. By Tony Cuozzo.

Everyone who doesn’t use their number pad is taking orders from someone who does.  Just placing your middle finger on that nub on the number-five key will increase your professional drive.  If you’re right handed, you’ll see that the thumb on your right hand is hovering over the arrow keys, allowing you to easily navigate your territory on a spreadsheet. Your pinkie rests on top of the enter key; moving onward after entering some numbers is effortless.

If you aren’t using the number pad as a course of habit, try a little data entry.  Maybe at home you can key-in a column of questionable expenses that you saw on your bank statement.  Or maybe there’s something from a web site or a PDF that isn’t cutting-and-pasting so easily.  Just find a good excuse to do ten minutes of data entry.

If it’s your first time using the number key, you’ll notice that your fingers will start to remember where things are.  Your speed will pick up, your accuracy will improve.  Even better, you’ll learn your own margin of error, which gives you the ability to control trade-offs between speed and quality.

With your hand sitting on the home row, everything you need is in reach.  At least, every number you need is in reach.  By contrast, it is the use of words that takes extra effort.