5 Ways to Mess Up Organizational Change, #2: N.I.I.F.M.

A great conference presenter I know once began a talk on organizational transformation by asking the audience what mattered most to them during times of change.  Some said looking after their direct reports, others talked about the success of the initiative, a few mentioned being able to sleep at night and one harassed-looking executive admitted his top priority was maintaining EBITDA. 

“You’re all lying,” said the presenter.

The audience reacted just the way you would expect.  People frowned, sat up, shook their heads as if they must have misheard.

“You’re all lying,” the presenter repeated.  “What matters most to each one of you when you are going through change is YOU.” 

He was right.  Especially at times of uncertainty, our number one priority is ourselves.  What’s in this for me?  Unfortunately, time and again change architects and implementers forget this truth and use statistics, grand statements, over-detailed presentations and myriad resources to send one simple message: There Is Nothing In This For You.

Why should businesses care whether they are stroking their employees’ self-interest?  Because change lives and dies by how it is implemented, and the ultimate unit of implementation is the individual.  Over a third (38%)  of employees in companies going through change don’t accept the need to change, and almost half (44%) report not understanding exactly what they are meant to do differently. 

Put simply, they don’t see what is in it for them.

Many change leaders start scratching their heads at this point.  But we told them! they say.  We gave them the big picture, we talked about the impact on individual divisions and functions.  What more do these people want?

They want you to notice that they matter.  Part of this is about making sure you don’t use the tone deaf one-track communications I talked about in a previous post.  The rest is about reassuring people’s fears and engaging their hopes – fears and hopes as perceived by them, that is, not by you.

The fears part is easy to map out.  Just about everyone embarking on organizational change is concerned about job security, about their future prospects with the firm, about what exactly is going to be asked of them and whether they are better off seeing how things evolve or starting immediately to look elsewhere.  These concerns are real and urgent.  They demand honest, factual answers, or facts about when you will be able to provide answers.  Crucially, answers should not be presented ready-wrapped, but arrived at through discussions with your people where you contribute the big-picture goals and milestones then talk through and agree the details together.  People who feel more in control feel less fearful, so think guidance and facilitation rather than barking out orders.

Engaging hopes is trickier, because motivating discretionary effort is highly dependent on aligning perceived incentives with cultural expectations, and cultural expectations are very organization-specific, sometimes even workgroup-specific.

In some companies, people feel good about themselves when they are coming up with innovative products or processes; in others, high value is placed on operational efficiency, or customer satisfaction, or contribution to the team.  Some teams take pride in internal competition; others get motivated by using the latest technology or a sense of ethical contribution or social prestige.  Every organization has its own unique cultural blueprint, and you will most effectively motivate people to get enthusiastic about change if you leverage the factors that culture prizes.

How do I figure out my organization’s culture? 

If only more change leaders asked that question!  Too often, a leader assumes that everyone in the organization or work unit shares her cultural values.  The best way to find out the unspoken assumptions, values and motivators is to ask.  

There are good, quick-and-easy-to-administer surveys based on research into the aspects of culture that have been proven to motivate high performance.  The best ones  look not only at how individuals perceive the culture in which they work, but also at what they personally would prefer, so you can get a map not just of what’s generally valued, but of what specific individuals are most likely to respond to.  While you don’t need everyone in the organization to complete a survey, you may find it useful to get this detailed personal data on key employees, especially those who have a high degree of influence over others, so you can tailor your communications and implementation towards energizing change champions, deepening the day-to-day connections between your strategic program and how employees actually go about their work.

But what if the organizational change you are involved in aims at changing the culture? 

Good point.  Here it’s a case of looking for continuities.  Your culture change initiative is not going to involve completely reversing the existing culture – if that is your plan, for goodness’ sake change it immediately as there is no way it is ever going to work.  Look instead for the aspects of the existing culture that should be maintained, even strengthened, in the new organization.  Use those cultural factors to get people engaged with the change program and, as with combating fears, make sure you get them to take an active part in setting goals, in implementing, in assessing progress and adjusting plans.  The more involved they are in terms that resonate with their values, the more they will feel there is something in it for them and the more successful your change process will be.

So, to improve your change outcomes, avoid NIIFM and instead pull those cultural and emotional levers to get people truly involved in the change process.  But don’t forget that there are other ways in which it is all too easy to mess up change.  Next up: Talking Stats, Not Stories.

5 Ways to Mess Up Organizational Change # I: One-Track Communications

Despite all the time, money and thought leadership that has been thrown at the problem, short term success in major change initiatives has scarcely advanced beyond coin-toss odds and long term success evades three quarters of all companies.

There are dozens if not thousands of ways in which things can go wrong.  But five common approaches stand out in terms of the severity of their negative impact and their enduring popularity with change agents across all sectors.  Surprise, surprise: they all have to do with people.

Each of my next few posts will deal with one Huge Change Mistake in detail.  First up, One-Track Communications:

1.     One track communications

Sometimes, it feels like there’s simply too much communicating when it comes to change.  Employees get so deluged with strategic messages, videos, speeches, emails, texts, social media posts that it’s no wonder that almost two-thirds of respondents to the recent Katzenbach survey complained of change fatigue.

But the problem isn’t actually the volume of communication, it’s the direction.  The vast majority of organizational change communication comes from management to employees.  The most effective change communication is usually the other way around.

Think about a time when you were asked to make a change.  Maybe it was at work, maybe at home, maybe – if your family name is Van Winkle – it was back when you were at school or college.   No doubt you were told you needed to do things differently, or asked politely to make adjustments.  Perhaps someone explained why you had to change, or set out the benefits you would get from changing.  But if they didn’t listen to you, if they didn’t get you involved first in talking about the change, then in making it happen, it is very unlikely that you changed in anything more than a superficial or temporary way.

We all know this truth about change when it comes to ourselves, but somehow when we get thinking about organizational change we forget the human fundamentals.  By the time we remember that employees are people like us with questions, concerns, fears and differences of opinion, we have often effectively communicated that we as leaders are out-of-touch, uncaring and disengaged with the lifeblood of the company.  Not a helpful starting point – or midpoint, or end point – for successful transformation.

Two-way communication so rarely happens not because leaders are stupid, but because they are scared.  Leading change is tough, exhausting and nerve-wracking.  Deep down, most leaders know that opening up the lines of communication from employees during change will mean having to deal with anger, with fear, with uncertainty and the deep resentments that surface in times of stress.  People are going to feel destabilized and vulnerable.  They will ask tough questions and expect perfect answers. 

Yes, you’ve got it – leaders are frightened not of what their people might say, but of their own capability to answer those needs.

It’s time for leaders to grow up.  If change is scary at the top, it’s terrifying at the bottom.  Your job as a leader is to, well, lead.  That means being one step ahead, emotionally as well as in terms of planning. 

Emotionally, you have the huge advantage of being prepared.  Think through the objections and concerns your people are likely to raise.  This should not be difficult – people are typically concerned for their own jobs, for the jobs of their friends, for how they will be measured, for their long term future with the company, for what they will have to do differently short term, what support they will get and what the change is meant to achieve, by when.  It’s easy to highlight the issues most likely to provoke anger or fear – just think about what people care about the most.  Practice ways of restating sensitive questions more neutrally:  for example, Joe asked about whether we’ll keep the same jobs in the division is a less emotionally-weighted version of, Are we all going to be laid off?  Recasting questions not only gives you valuable thinking time before you respond, it lowers the negative energy in the room.  The more open, authoritative and calm you appear, the more people will start taking an active part in the process instead of giving vent to emotional outbursts.  You want to lead a discussion, not a shouting match.  Keep control of the emotions – starting with your own – and you will be halfway to success.

Of course, you also need to be prepared in terms of substance.  Make sure, so far as possible, that you know the facts about the change goals, process and timetable.  Break complex questions down into simple, key answers.  It’s fine to admit that you don’t know something, so long as you can give people an honest overview of the change goals and process, and so long as you take down any specific questions and concerns and find answers – or explain why there are not yet answers – as soon as possible.   Plan for immediate follow-up to any communication, either by face-to-face meetings, by Q&A sessions on social media, by newsletters, by online resources, by virtual versions of the good old suggestion box (accompanied by answers) or by a dozen variations on these themes, targeted at particular employee groups and particular areas of concern.

The best way to make sure your communications run smoothly is to think of them as an ongoing conversation throughout the change process.  Don’t let yourself start thinking, What do we need to communicate at this stage?.  Instead, think,What are our people concerned about right now?  What do they need?  Your change implementation plans should be flexible to take account of what your people are looking for at any one stage.  Be prepared constantly to measure progress, listen to different groups and interests, adapt messages and tactics and sometimes even the timetable for implementing particular stages of change.

None of this is business-as-usual – that’s why it’s called change.  But by seeing change communication as a two-way street,  you have the foundations for long-term success…

…unless, that is, you mess things up by committing one of the remaining four Huge Change Mistakes.  Next up: #2: NIIFM (Nothing.In.It.For.Me)

The Emperor's New Performance Management

Performance management has suddenly become hip, possibly for the first time in business history.  Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Deloitte and even GE are tearing up the rule book and radically redesigning their processes.   Some changes are smart, some are brave, some are interesting, but all are missing the point.

Why PM?  Why now?

A recent survey of several thousand international business and HR leaders  found that 89% had recently changed or were about to change their approach.  

Why the rush to innovate?  Because businesses have finally realized that traditional performance management does not do what it says on the can.  Instead of managing how employees perform, too many processes are:

• Bureaucratic – forms! forms! forms!
• Time-consuming – Deloitte calculated their in-house process took 30+hrs per employee
• Demotivating – 90% of conversations are focused on what went wrong  in the past, leaving employees defensive and disengaged
• Downright useless when it comes to improving performance

Everyone has known this for ages, but companies still stuck with idiotic policies like rank & yank partly from laziness, partly because there was no obvious alternative, partly because the impact of performance management was only vaguely measured, if at all, so nobody saw quite how bad the situation was.   Fast-forward to today where HR is at last starting to embrace evidenced-based management, and it has suddenly become obvious that performance management needs an overhaul – in the large survey cited above nearly 6 out of 10 executives believed their current approach drives neither engagement nor high performance.

So, what’s been brought in to replace the traditional Performance Reprisal?  New flagship systems generally focus on three things:

1.  Agile, future-focused feedback

Instead of cramming a year’s worth of performance into a single annual review session, the new performance management – PM 2.0 – spreads the discussion out over anything from quarterly to weekly or even daily sessions, either face-to-face or via internal social media.   And most of the talk is intended to be about the future, not the past.

There are a lot of good reasons for making performance management continuous.  It avoids recency bias, where evaluations focus unfairly on what has just happened.  It provides a wealth of data to mine for trends and correlate to specific circumstances or events (the impact of an especially demanding project, an intensive training course).  It enables problems to be spotted early, and just-in-time support offered.  And – hopefully – it makes both manager and employee more relaxed and business-as-usual about the process, avoiding the catch-me-if-you-can system gaming which research by The Corporate Executive Board found explains a full 2/3 of alleged top performance.

It also makes sense to focus on the future.  Crying over spilt milk or slapping backs while reminiscing about glory days are a waste of office hours.  How can I help you do better? is a question far more likely to provoke genuine reflection, engagement and determination to change than the usual variations on  Well done! / What went wrong?

2.  K.I.S.S.

A recent survey by the Human Capital Institute found that 78% of HR and executives believe their business processes have become too complex.   PM 2.0 tackles this challenge head on.  Gone are 56-item checklists and forms as thick as old-style telephone directories (remember those?).  Instead, think elegant simplicity or the rather coarser acronym above which I’m not going to spell out in a public forum. 

Such simplicity is often radical.  Deloitte has reduced its process to just 4 questions, two of which ask managers not what they think of the employee but what they would do with the employee (how much they would pay & whether they would want them on their team again).  Other companies have held back from prescribing any content and instead trust managers and employees to work around general guidelines such as “set expectations, offer feedback and recognize strong work”.  The hope is that not only will this removal of complexity increase commitment to the process (Wow - it’s so easy!), but that it will also free up more manager and employee time for actually getting work done.

3.  Talk about pay another time

Finally, HR has woken up to the slew of research that shows highlighting pay in performance discussions makes most of us nervous, defensive, avaricious, aggrieved and thoroughly disengaged.  Companies like Adobe are experimenting with beyond-financial reward approaches – shout-outs on social media, project choice, extra responsibilities and other ways of recognizing value.   Even those who stick to a traditional salary increase/bonus approach are decoupling the paycheck determination from talking about performance and how to improve it.  Not that they’re sure exactly how they are going to tackle the reward issue.  As a Deloitte spokesman said, we haven’t resolved this issue yet …

So, what's not to like?

Don’t get me wrong, many of these changes are good news for business and for employees.  Measuring performance in real online or offline time is clearly superior to the once-a-year showdown, especially for Millennials who are used to constant feedback and attention.  Focusing on the future is likewise a no-brainer; as those ads for mutual funds always say in their footnotes, past performance is no guarantor of future returns.  Stopping pay rows discussions from infecting the rest of work can only be a good thing.  And anything that removes bureaucracy and cuts down on the time people need to spend filling out forms is always a winner.

But there’s something missing from all these new approaches.  Can you guess what it is?  Take a look at the title of this post for a clue.

Yup, you got it: PM 2.0 is missing out on managing performance.  Here’s what’s gone wrong:

1.  Not combating bias

One of the biggest criticisms of traditional performance management was that evaluations were often subject to rater bias – ratings varied on the basis of who was doing the rating, rather than who was being rated.  Bias increased with non-specific rating methods such as the popular graphic rating scales that asked raters to judge people in terms of ill-defined factors like “Leadership” on generic scales from “Very Poor” to “Excellent”.  Instead of reflecting on and evaluating an individual’s performance (a complex and mentally taxing process), raters answered with their general impressions, many of which reflected their own values and self-image rather than the employee’s actual work. 

PM 2.0, by removing much of the detail of the process, takes us back to those bad old days of rater bias.  Cognitive psychology – see the wonderful book by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow – reveals that, given the choice, human will always opt for the easier thinking challenge.  When it comes to performance management, we dodge complex questions such as evaluating an individual’s contribution in favor of easier judgments such as Do I think this person is great?.  This would not matter if the complex and easy questions were essentially the same, but by asking the wrong questions we unsurprisingly often get the wrong answers.   Being thought a great guy or gal has very little correlation with actual business results.

By substituting unstructured brief conversations for a more formal process, PM 2.0 is risking exactly the kind of bias performance management was designed to remove.  There are good and time-efficient ways to fix this – developments in technology and psychometrics have made the very accurate Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales (BARS) and Behavioral Expectation Scales (BES) easier to implement, for example.  But leaving it up to individual managers is almost certain to derail any systematic management of performance, and may expose the company to the risk of being sued for legally-indefensible decisions.

2.  Omitting what actually improves performance

When supply chains were reinvented back in the 1980s, businesses saw huge returns on eliminating unnecessary activities and focusing on the essential steps – and only on those steps.  While PM 2.0 does away with a lot of inessential paperwork and meetings, it does not succeed in focusing on what really matters – the core drivers of high performance at work.

What all the performance management re-engineers have forgotten is that we know – with a very high degree of certainty – what drives success at work.  While the individual details vary from job to job, what’s generally needed is for employees to like the type of work, have sufficient smarts to meet the thinking challenges, deploy the half-dozen competencies that strongly differentiate the best from the rest, and enjoy working in the organization’s culture.  Bringing this into performance management means a focus on no more than a handful factors.  If performance management focuses on improving employees’ capability in these areas, performance will improve.  If performance management focuses on other things, success is much more of a coin-toss.

It really isn’t hard, or time-consuming, to focus on what matters.  It isn’t as sexy as thinking up your own metrics, or as fun as free-wheeling conversations, but it does have the advantage of being proven accurate and proven to work in developmental terms.  Too many of the new specifics – where they exist – are unproven and therefore high risk.  Deloitte claims, for instance, that asking managers what they would do with employees rather than what they think of them is valid because the question has higher internal consistency.  I’m sure it does, but concept consistency is only one part of assessment validity.  What’s missing is any proven causal link to performance.  One might accurately observe, as Deloitte did, that top performers enthusiastically agree with the statement At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day, but only deep, longitudinal, outcome-focused research can show whether the relationship between that agreement and high performance is causal and, if so, in which direction the causality works. 

If performance management was a fringe business process, perhaps this kind of freestyle experimentation would be okay, but with people being one of if not the major driver of competitive advantage, it looks at best foolish and at worst reckless not to use reliable data as the basis for core management processes.

3.  Forgetting the human factor

Finally, the new performance management systems just don’t speak to what people at work need. 

Employees want help in getting success and fulfillment.  For older workers, this often means career advancement; for Millennials, career passion and coaching is more important.  In nothing I have seen written about PM 2.0 has there been explicit instruction to include these issues in performance discussions, despite the fact that 2/3 of respondents to a recent HCI survey reported that they are currently in the process of updating their engagement and retention strategies, and that 87% see culture and engagement as a top challenge.

Employees also want to know where they stand.  Deloitte admitted that people had liked its old system for its predictability and obvious fairness (similar attitudes have been found across companies and industries that use structured, behaviorally-based and future-focused systems).  The company unsurprisingly found that employees were unsettled by the vagueness of the new system when it came to sharing ratings or detailing exactly what information was going to be taken into account in setting pay or promotions.  A big risk of all these new approaches is that too much is left to be worked out during implementation, and that employees will be left in the dark, disengaged, while that happens.

Ironing out such wrinkles in PM 2.0 is likely to fall to managers, who may well as a result find they are spending as much time as ever on performance management meetings.  And if they are not stuck in meetings, they are having to be trained in career management, as Adobe found after it abolished formal performance assessments in 2012 only to find two years later that both managers and employees required extensive training in instigating and acting on personal development plans.  Without clear guidelines and structures, both sides understandably felt under-equipped to deal effectively with complex, high-stakes conversations. 

There’ s a great story in Daniel Kahneman’s book (page 229ff of the paperback) about his early experience evaluating performance in the Israeli Defense Force.  When Kahneman arrived, interviewers had been used to assessing new soldiers’ potential for high performance on the basis of a general conversation covering a range of topics.  Everyone liked the process, but follow-up research had found the performance predictions were almost totally useless.  Kahneman instituted a new approach based on a structured evaluation of a small number of discrete personality traits, followed by a general judgement of success potential.  The interviewers hated it – they called the process robotic, boring and insulting.  But when the results came back, it turned out that not only did the structured evaluations pretty accurately predict the soldiers’ future performance, the interviewers’ overall judgements became stunningly more accurate than they had been under the old free-for-all system.  

Following a structured process did not replace human intuition, it super-charged it. 

There’s a lesson here for performance management.  To get a great result for employees, managers have to work a little harder, and in non-intuitive ways, while keeping interactions simple and agile.  Too much of PM 2.0 seems designed to lessen the burden on managers, rather than to improve employee performance.  If PM stood for Pauses for Managers, that would be fine, but so far nobody has suggested that is a core business improvement process.

Given the mixed bag of good progress and silly ideas that is PM 2.0, we really should be thinking about Performance Management 3.0.  In a future post, I’ll talk about what that might look like.

Don't hire the perfect candidate

Everyone dreams of hiring the perfect candidate – someone who’s already a star performer, who has the ideal background, qualities and qualifications for the job.  Job descriptions tend to be explicitly based around perfect candidate descriptions, and ATS systems filter candidates based on how well they match this keyword summary of perfection.

There’s only one problem: hiring the perfect candidate never works out. 

Here’s why…

Not every kind of perfect matters

One of the biggest mistakes in hiring is looking at too many factors.  Not only is it hugely complex and time-consuming to pull together different sorts of data, but much of the information commonly gathered in the search for a perfect candidate is actually destructive to your chances of ending up with a high-performing employee.

It’s all about relevance.  If you base your hiring decisions on irrelevant data, you may as well write each candidate’s name on a piece of paper, drop them all into a glass bowl and pick one at random, Hunger Games style.  Letting in any irrelevant data will weaken the reliability of your candidate selection, skewing your results further towards the chancy end of the predictive scale.

Let’s look at an example.  Most recruiters salivate if the résumé of a candidate who has already done the job in question lands on their desk.  But when you look at the research into high performance, you’ll find that prior experience of the job is a pretty weak performance predictor, with a correlation of only 0.13 with future success .  It’s better than using graphology (the correlation coefficient there is 0.02) but it’s nothing like as high as the 0.71 or better correlation you get if you focus on the most highly predictive factors.  

No wonder nearly half of all new hires are gone within eighteen months, if their recruitment was based around such weakly predictive selection methods.

But some other common selection tools are even worse than the résumé.  How relevant to someone’s job performance do you honestly think their Facebook photos are going to be?  How relevant is their height or hair color?  Their face shape?  Their answer to a question asking them to describe their closet?  

There’s worrying evidence that these sort of obviously irrelevant things are often taken into account in candidate selection, but there’s not a single research study out there that shows any link between these factors and genuine high performance.

We’re all biased

Why, then, do we continue using these random factors when we’re choosing future employees?

Because we’re human, and humans aren’t always logical.

We all have treasured values and beliefs, some of them so deep we hardly know how to put them into words.  But we have no problem putting them into action.  Malcolm Gladwell tells a lovely story about a screened orchestra audition where the head of the Munich Symphony was so enraptured by the performance of a French Horn player that he leapt up and yelled out “We’re hiring that man!”, only to nearly faint from shock when the screen was removed to reveal a woman. 

The whole reason the Munch Symphony was conducting screened auditions was because the head of the orchestra wanted to make sure there was no gender bias in hiring.  I’m sure if you had asked him in advance whether a woman could be as strong a French Horn player as a man, he would have agreed vigorously.  Yet when it came down to it, he heard an excellent French Horn player and immediately associated a bunch of other qualities with that individual, including the possession of a Y chromosome.

It’s easy to laugh at such anecdotes, but we are all biased.  If you think you are not, just take one or two of these short tests which reveal the implicit prejudices many of us have on a whole range of issues.  Choose the tests that focus on areas where you are sure you are not prejudiced, for maximum impact.

How come we’re all so prejudiced?  It’s not – usually – because we’re terrible people.  Many scientists suspect instead that many common prejudices simply reflect outdated thinking.  Back in the Stone Age, for instance, it might have made sense to choose the biggest person in the tribe to be the leader.  But as the nature of leadership challenges morphed from “Kill the saber-toothed cat before it eats the baby” to “Improve shareholder value”, height simply became less relevant.  Maybe in another few thousand years our instinctive reactions to leaders will have changed, by which time perhaps leadership itself will demand very different qualities.

We also develop biases based on the information we receive.  Most of the stories we hear about salespeople feature charming, back-slapping characters, the type of fun and energizing person whom everyone likes to be around, the life and soul of the party.

The thing is, evidence from high performing salespeople in real jobs shows exactly the opposite.

It turns out that great salespeople, particularly for high-value sales, tend to be introverts.  They listen more than they talk.  They get their energy not from being in the thick of social interactions but from reflecting and planning alone.  Glad-handing does not result in higher sales.

I could cite multiple examples from other fields of work that prove the same point: when it comes to looking for perfect, most of us see only what we want to see.  Our gut feel in hiring is often (even usually) wrong.

Perfect candidate ≠perfect employee

There’s another reason why you should never set out to hire the perfect candidate, even if you focus only on factors with proven relevance to performance and rigorously take steps to eliminate your own biases. 

It’s because the perfect candidate is very, very rarely the perfect employee.

Of course every business wants great employees.  But the way to get them is not to look for perfection in a candidate, even if you are only considering the factors whichare proven-relevant to performance on the job.

The reason you don’t need perfection is that two different types of factor predict job performance.  The first group are Baselines, the second Differentiators.

Baselines: pass/fail courses

Baselines are the technical skills, knowledge or qualifications that a candidate has to have to be credible in a specific job – a clean driver’s license for a chauffeur, knowledge of HTML for a website programmer, Series 7 and Series 63 qualifications for a stock broker.  Every job has its own specific baselines, and in many jobs if you don’t have the baselines, you can’t even get your foot in the door.

But baselines only take you so far.  When researchers looked at the differences between top performers and the rest, they found very little evidence that superior baseline mastery predicts superior work performance.  Some top performers have high-level baseline skills, it’s true, but others scraped through at the third or fourth attempt.  It seems that baselines work like pass/fail courses in college – what matters is covering the ground, not whether or not you excel.

Differentiators: what it says on the can

Differentiators are, well, different.  They tend to be more complex constructs than Baselines – behavioral and thinking competencies such as Strategic Thinking, for example, rather than a Baseline like passing the GMAT.  They encompass not just an individual’s capabilities but also his or her preferences and motivations.  They dig beneath the surface of technical skills to profound truths about how people solve problems, how they work with others, how they get things done.

Differentiators genuinely do differentiate performance.  Research over decades has shown strong correlations between the level of mastery of a particular Differentiator and success in at work.  Each job has its own set of predictive Differentiators, corresponding to the consistent differences research has found between the best and the rest.  The more proactive and decisive a salesperson is at work, for example, the better his or her results. 

While different things matter for different jobs, there are three broad Differentiators that are highly predictive of performance:

• Cognitive ability – how you process information and solve problems
• Competencies – the ways of working that lead to high performance
• Culture fit – how well the working environment engages and motivates individuals

Every job will draw on a different mix of these three Differentiators.  Some have high requirements in terms of cognitive ability, for instance, while in others success is driven much more by competencies.  There is no reliable way to guess these requirements; you have to look at real data from high performers, or use assessment methods which have already incorporated such data.

The real trick is to know what is a baseline and what is a differentiator, and measure them differently.  If a factor is a baseline, just make sure your candidate checks the box.  If it’s a differentiator, look for depth of mastery and make sure it is relevant for your particular job. 

Check your perfect

So, instead of hiring an all-round perfect candidate, focus on just two things: the baseline requirements and the specific differentiators for that particular job, and measure them differently as outlined above.  This doesn’t add up to many factors – maybe ten in total.  Most can be easily and accurately measured by assessments and a half-hour focused interview.  Using this approach will cut the time and effort that goes into hiring, and get you, if not the perfect candidate, then as-close-as-you-can-get-to-perfect employees.

The trick is to resist the temptation of perfection.  It’s tempting to think that we should consider all the factors, that we should trust our gut feel, that we should always look for more and more data.  This only leads to more work for worse results.  Don’t do it.

Also, remember that people can change.  You aren’t going to get a perfect future employee.  You’re going to get someone who has great potential strengths, but might need to develop more competence in a couple of areas.  Then it’s a matter of what the person wants to do – are they willing to develop the mismatched characteristics, do they genuinely want the job and are they ready to start work?  So long as you get someone with good potential in the most important drivers of performance in the job, and with the motivation to work hard to be really good, you can work on the details.  You will probably increase their engagement by doing so – high performers usually want to learn from each job, and what better learning than increasing their capability to do well?

Nobody’s perfect, and in the end that’s a very good thing for employers and employees.

Is hiring all in the brain?

Applying brain-imaging science to hiring sounds cool and cutting edge – exactly the sort of thing we ought to be doing in the 21st century.  High-profile startups argue that neuroscientific recruitment and selection is more strongly predictive, more reliable, less biased and easier to implement than traditional methods.  

But can brain imaging research really be applied practically in the workplace?  And can it solve America’s multi-billion-dollar mis-hire problem?  

Let’s take a look at the evidence…

Hiring today: a $$$ no-brainer

One thing everyone can agree on: hiring today needs some serious fixing.  Almost half of new hires don’t last even eighteen months in the job.  The costs of these thousands of mis-hires – and they happen even at highly regarded companies – are frightening.  

No other core business process would be allowed to get away with these kinds of inefficiencies.  It’s time to get hiring to work.

First, though, we have to understand why hiring isn’t delivering great results.  It is unlikely to be because of under-investment – hiring costs continue to rise year-on-year  and are up by 7% in 2014.  Much more likely is that too much time and money is being spent on activities that do not accurately predict performance in the job.

Hiring, after all, is making a prediction – choosing in advance the best performer from a pool of potential candidates.  There has been a lot of research into which factors predict success at work, and many common selection inputs such as the résumé, the traditional interview, a candidate’s years of experience have been shown to be at best weakly reliable pointers to future success.  

Of course, it is not only recruiters who are getting things wrong.  Not every job candidate has great self-knowledge.  It’s easy to get seduced by the idea of being a leader, for example, even if you rarely demonstrate the characteristics and abilities that typify great leadership in action.  And if we know ourselves only partially, we hardly know jobs at all.  Most of us have limited and distorted ideas about what different jobs and organizations are really like, about which factors reliably drive success and which are less relevant.

Neuroscientists are convinced they can do better.  They point to the scientific research behind their approaches and to the ease and accuracy of assessment.  Let’s take a look at what they do:

The case for neuroscientific hiring

We may not yet have the technology to create the World’s First Bionic Man, but using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and other new approaches we can see with increasing clarity what’s popping in our brains.  

Researchers have peered inside people’s heads while they play games, make decisions, solve problems and experience emotions.  They have also looked at the interaction of brain processes with physical actions – how people’s faces or pulse rates change when experiencing specific emotions, for example.  From these experiments they have found evidence for four broad categories of neurological activity: mental processing speed and accuracy, memory, executive control, perception and social cognition. 

Companies have taken these research findings, and the experiments which reveal them, and used them to assess job and career fit.  Candidates take anything from two to twelve assessment exercises that feel like 1980’s videogames or lab experiments.  They get feedback, which is sometimes quantitative (“You solved the problem faster than 60% of our peers”) and more often qualitative (“You’re risk-averse”; “You’re a quick thinker”).  Results are matched against jobs and careers, based on profiles determined by an employer and/or by data from similar jobs.   Typically, an individual is given career recommendations and perhaps development suggestions while an employer gets presented with the profiles and contact details of candidates who match well to the job.

Neuroscience companies claim that this approach solves key problems with the hiring process: assessments that rely on candidates’ limited and often inaccurate self-knowledge, assessments that can be gamed by savvy candidates, and assessments that are subject to bias on the part of recruiters and hiring managers.  By using brain-games, they say, they can get at the real truth about a candidate to help individuals go beyond their prejudices to find the right career and help employers identify the right, high-performing new hire. 

Does it work?

Before we look at the specific claims made for neuroscientific hiring, I have a more fundamental question: does what is revealed by the neuroscience tests genuinely predict performance at work?

The evidence is mixed.  When we compare neuroscience data to other research linking ways of thinking to work outputs, we find some overlap, but also some differences.  Cognitive ability – mental processing speed and accuracy – is a big area of neuro-investigation and has been shown to be highly predictive of future work success.  But the evidence is much less clear when it comes to other factors.  We can measure someone’s short-term memory capability quite accurately, for example, but it’s much less clear how important short-term memory is for success at work, or success in particular kinds of work, or how it operates outside the calm, one-on-one conditions of a laboratory experiment.  It may well be that short-term memory ability really does distinguish the best from the rest, but so far nobody has proved it.

There is also an issue of whether the tests are measuring what the researchers think they measure.  It’s a fascinating idea that we can peer into someone’s brain and see what they are thinking – including which celebrities they obsess over  – but the reality of brain imaging is a little more complex.   

Take emotional states.  Recent meta-analysis has found no reliable evidence that the brains of people experiencing an emotion all react in the same parts, or in the same way.  Brain scans of people experiencing fear, for instance, show different patterns and intensities of electrical activity.  Back in 1996 Daniel Goleman coined the catchy term Amygdala Hijack to describe an overwhelming fight-or-flight response, but more recent research has suggested that he got it wrong. 

Only a quarter of studies since 2009 showed an increase in amygdala activity during fear, and many studies showed amygdala activity increasing during non-emotional thoughts and experiences.  Even more significantly, individuals whose amygdalae have been destroyed can often still experience full emotional lives.  The seductive idea that we can measure electrical activity in the amygdala and thereby discover the intensity of someone’s terror is just not true.  People may experience the fight-or-flight response, but that experience does not happen only or perhaps at all in their amygdalae.

These mistakes variations in the experimental data exist because the brain is extraordinarily adaptive.  Different parts of our cerebral cortex cantake on different functions well into adulthood.  The reality – so far as we currently understand it – is that the brain is a bunch of multi-purpose networks that come together in a variety of ways to make our minds and bodies work.  Mapping those networks and pathways is work still to be done, and perhaps needs more advanced imaging technology to be feasible.

It’s not just brain imagery that has been often misinterpreted, but all kinds of other physical-response-derived neuroscience data.  We may kid ourselves we can recognize lying and emotions by micro-analyzing facial expressions, but the evidence just isn’t there.   Big-data comparisons of facial analysis research studies find no consistent emotional facial expressions – different people experiencing the same emotion will show a range of expressions (and a range of other physical symptoms such as heart rate). 

Given the uncertainties around the research on which these games and tests are based, and the lack of solid evidence linking their results to actual successful performance in specific jobs, they cannot demonstrate that they get around candidate self-ignorance or lying, or that they are less subject to bias than other recruiting methods.  You may believe they are better, but there is simply no evidence either way to justify that belief.

What really works

When it comes to something as important as hiring, we really should trust the evidence and not our prejudices.  There have been decades of research into predicting work performance, and the right combination of assessments can get you correlations with future performance of over 0.7 – an outstandingly high predictive value which some selection experts believe can be increased to over 0.8 for certain roles when supplemented with the right mix of focused interviewing and other techniques.

Of course, assessments don’t sound quite as cool as neuroscience games (and neuroscience gaming is a real market competitor with the likes of Candy Crush, never mind the fact that earlier claims around developing brainpower or protecting against Alzheimer’s have been proved false).  But would you rather have a fun recruiting approach, or get genuinely business-transforming results? 

I know which I’d want used when it came to my career.