Talent Assessment – Influencing and Problem Solving by Mike Lehr

Talent Assessment Archive

Leadership as a Dependent of Conditions

By Mike Lehr

If we awoke one day with amnesia with life totally scrambled, would we have the same leaders? In his article, “The Turnaround Trap” (The New Yorker, March 25, 2013 edition), James Surowiecki discusses the ouster of Ron Johnson as CEO of J.C. Penney after his very successful stint at Target and finds that psychologists recognize:

. . . “the fundamental attribution error” – our tendency to ignore context and attribute an individual’s success or failure solely to inherent qualities.

Additionally, Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, Boris Groysberg, and Nitin Nohria include in their article “How to Hang On to Your High Potentials” (Harvard Business Review, October 2011 edition) under their heading “Align Development to Strategy” this conclusion:

. . . flexibility is key . . . companies that set rigid goals about the type or number of high potentials, instead of taking a dynamic approach, become complacent and don’t get much out of [high potential] programs.

If strategy is conditional and talent is conditional to strategy, then leadership talent is conditional too. However, we tend to ignore this. That’s why great players on losing teams are unlikely to receive “most valuable player” awards, why future CEO’s strive to lead hot, growing divisions, and why employment candidates from good companies receive preference.

We like to believe we have more control than we do. Attributing success directly to a person gives us comfort, security and certainty, providing clarity without having to integrate life’s fuzzy truths.

Thus, in rising to leadership do not underestimate the power in “being at the right place at the right time.” Surowiecki states this more negatively by concluding with this quote from Warren Buffett:

When a manager with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for poor fundamentals, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.

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Assessing Creative Problem Solving: Outlier Technique

By Mike Lehr

Identifying creativity isn’t easy, but it is possible and can be done without assessment tools. It begins with identifying outlying answers to our questions. There are differences between people who give standard answers and creative ones, and differences between people who can solve problems and people who are problem solvers.

In other words, when we ask people questions, we should to anticipate their answers. The more different they are from the ones we expect the more creative they might be. Of course, different is necessarily creative. For example, someone gives a different answer to a question, but when we ask, “How did you come to do that?” and they answer along the lines of, “Well, some friends suggested I do that,” the act might be different to us but was not creative to the person.

This technique is similar to polling, meaning we need several questions on divergent topics to use it well. We also need to adjust for cultural and environmental differences. For example, people might give us different answers because their culture is different from ours and we have little experience with theirs. Thus, while their answers might be different from what we expect, our expectations might be too narrow.

On the other hand, their answers can’t be unconnected to our question. For example, if we ask, “How do you normally get to work?” and they answer, “Breakfast,” while it’s different, there isn’t a connection, and we’ll need to ask for one.

Nevertheless, in the end, the more different we find people’s answers are from our expectations and from what we could expect from their situations, the greater their creative potential is. That brings up another point: most people don’t realize how creative they are so they haven’t developed it.

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Style Trumps Content Once Again

By Mike Lehr

My October 13, 2011 post, “Eloquence Trumps Honesty in Trust & Likeability Wars,” discussed how style affects our assessment of talent. Now, in the November 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review, the article, “It’s Not What You Say but How You Say It,” cites the research of Timothy DeGroot’s team from Midwestern State University indicating the attractiveness of leaders’ voices influence our perceptions of their effectiveness.

Again, the challenge is that we often don’t realize this influence is occurring. Moreover, we tend to believe other people are influenced but we aren’t. Combining this with the way labels influence our perceptions of content and how beauty and attractiveness influences us, we begin to see easily how incompetent people can receive promotions especially if they are confident.

In combating this influence, it’s important to begin with two perspectives:

Acknowledge that style influences us (“That includes me!”)
Remain focused on more intrinsic indicators of talents such as process (how a person works, thinks and interacts)

Often, we erroneously focus on results when we don’t factor in extraneously factors such as the team, timing and situation of the person’s experience. Perhaps the person was just along for the ride. Culture, processes and tools can also affect outcomes. When we fail to account for these, we tend fall into the trap of believing people are “winners” if they come from “winning organizations.”

In the final analysis, what makes assessing talent difficult is not the intrinsic analysis of it but rather being able to do so while trying to navigate the murky cloud of our own perceptions and biases. Many forces intuitively influence us on a subconscious level to stir up this mud.

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Downside of Focus and Rise of Situational Awareness

By Mike Lehr

Classical business literature emphasizes focus: set goals, plan, and then focus on execution. However, it’s relatively void of focus’ downside: obliviousness to peripheral threats and opportunities.

In the mid-1900’s, when conditions didn’t change as dynamically as today’s, extensive research, planning and focus worked. Today, most research is outdated upon completion. Consequently, situational awareness (SA) becomes more important as part of an adaptive business strategy.

SA is the degree to which a person or company can be aware of surrounding conditions while focused on a task or plan. Ironically, SA came of age with aerial combat; you need to know where you are in the sky while focused on engaging enemy aircraft. If not, you could crash your plane from flying too low or from enemy fire simply because you were oblivious to those factors.

Context strongly influences our planning; however, if conditions forming that context are dynamically changing, that means our plan – the object of our focus – might become invalid by new threats and opportunities, and our focus and poor SA might cause us to overlook them. Psychological influences such as anchoring and optimistic planning will create additional pressures to keep us focused and ignorant.

These will also influence our assessment of talent by tending to make it too static and historical. Rather than basing it on people’s potential within new conditions, we will tend to base it on performances under old conditions. We will tend to believe that successes and failures transfer rather than assess actual skills and actual aptitudes within a new set of actual conditions. More simply, this is pigeonholing.

Technology and the internet strongly influence today’s dynamic conditions. Our focus shouldn’t blind us. SA will help us see the many threats, opportunities and talents that will influence our success.

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Information You Know Is Wrong Still Influences You

By Mike Lehr

How Intuition & Anchoring Impacts Thoughts

Previously, I listed some unconscious biases we have in decision-making. What I witness is that people just don’t believe that known wrong information has any affect on them.

For example, research in “Before You Make That Big Decision” by Daniel Kahneman, Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony* which appeared in the June 2011 Harvard Business Review showed that dice rolls “suggesting” sentencing decisions to judges did in fact influence their final decision even though they knew these decisions were made by dice.

Cognitively and psychologically, we call this “planting of a seed” in our minds as anchoring. We experience its negative side when someone is locked on a thought based on incorrect information that we tried to expose for them. As with the judges, this erroneous information assumes a frame of reference for their decision on a subconscious level.

As the writers indicate, anchoring’s real danger is “that people always believe they can disregard them” because the information is incorrect. They don’t believe it. However, it affects them in the same way that intuition affects our thought processes. However, since people don’t realize it, they will shop for rationales to attribute elsewhere this influence on their decisions.

Anchoring also affects our views of people and contributes to the unconscious pigeonholing of people. This can tremendously affect our ability to assess and develop talent. This is why the gossip and unfounded opinions of others will still influence us even though we “ignore” them to form our own opinion.

We need to raise our awareness concerning the influence this has on others, and more importantly to us. We can’t believe we are immune; we need to make conscious adjustments or else we will fall prey to the influence of known wrong information too.

*Olivier Sibony is a director in McKinsey’s Brussels office.

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Stock Gambling & Poker Investing: Lesson in Skill & Outcomes

By Mike Lehr

The May 21, 2011 edition of The Economist had two articles casting a cloud over the skill inherent in successful stock market investing. Why is this important to intuition? It’s because we tend to have an emotional bias that overweighs outcomes in the evaluation of skill.

In fact, the article, “Poker-faced”, cites Steve Levitt and Thomas Miles of the University of Chicago as having found more skill present in poker than in stock investing. Simply stated they found that historically good poker players tend to do better than those without a history of success do. However, such a correlation didn’t exist with stock investing, and thus, they concluded there is “little evidence of skill” in stock investing. Thus, we could claim that poker is more like investing and the stock market is more like gambling.

The other article, “The Missing Link”, reinforces this unpredictability of the stock market by surveying several studies saying there is no correlation that a good economy translates into rising stock prices. Yet, in spite of these articles, we often see investment professionals tout their historical performance to attract additional clients.

Nevertheless, we know that top poker players don’t always finish on top; it’s not unusual for them to go home early. Moreover, poker is more self-contained, more controllable than the stock market. Everyone plays with the same, small, finite deck of cards and, depending upon the tournament, the same amount of money. By comparison, the stock market is anarchy.

We like to believe there is a direct link between outcomes and skills as opposed to having outcomes linked to a myriad of forces beyond our control. The belief gives us security in an uncertain world. Yet, it will encourage us to see more skill in stock investing than in poker.

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Labels Influence Our Evaluation of Content

By Mike Lehr

Designer labels encourage us not only to believe that the wearer has status but also trustworthiness, talent and many other positive attributes. In fact, the label is more important than the clothes themselves.

In the article, “I’ve Got You Labelled”, appearing in the April 2, 2011 edition of The Economist, Rob Nelissen and Marijn Meijers of Tilburg University in the Netherlands reached this conclusion from their research. While initially far-fetched, we find that a piece of art can fluctuate enormously in value depending upon whom people think painted it even though the art itself does not change. It’s also why people persistently knowingly buy knockoffs; they want the label.

One of the needs labels address is security. As we saw in my posts, Is Freedom for Everybody? and People Follow Leaders Not Facts, not all people are comfortable making their own decisions; they want others to make them for them. Status labels do exactly that; they help people determine what is good. The attributes of what makes clothing good such as the material, stitching, design, fabric, dyes, thread, etc., can make a qualitative determination daunting.

What is fascinating from Nelissen and Meijers research, is that this qualitative stamp not only influences our perceptions of the clothes but also the wearer. The qualitative effect is transferable, and it occurs on a subconscious level.

From an intuitive perspective, this means we can upgrade ourselves simply by wearing the right labels. This is what politicians do when they try to tie themselves closely to their country’s flag. This is what manufacturers do when they invest huge amounts in the packaging of their products. Presentation strongly influences our evaluation of content; plating affects our food’s taste. Thus, this principle holds true for the presentation of our ideas.

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How We Unconsciously Pigeonhole People

By Mike Lehr

When we pigeonhole people, we are defining their talents by their jobs rather than looking at their talents. The most obvious example of this is the resume. When we define someone talents by their experiences, we are essentially pigeonholing them. We are relying upon their experiences to tell us what their talents are; we are not relying upon our assessment of their talents to determine what their experiences could be.

Furthermore, we will tend to view any additional talent we come across within the context of those experiences. For instance, we will tend to assume that the attention to detail that an engineer displays will only tend to exist within a mechanical realm and not within an artistic one. This also works in reverse. If a job does not require extensive interpersonal skills, we will tend to believe that the person has few.

Figure #1 shows the influence context can have on our decision making. It asks, “Which dot is the darkest?”

: Figure #1: Which dot is darkest?

The right one seems to be; however, what Figure #2 shows is that not only is there more than two dots, but they are all the same color. It’s their contexts that either make them lighter, darker or invisible. Similarly, we can easily miss people’s talents because they don’t come into play within a particular job.

: Figure #2: All The Same

This came to me when a 7-year stock broker was hired as a banker. His employer still sent him through the same basic investment training that all the other bankers went through. This also happened with a 3-year investment manager who managed multi-million dollar portfolios.

As an exercise, try assessing people’s talents without asking what they do or looking at their resumes. You will see how dependent we’ve become on relying upon those contexts to determine which dot is darkest.

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Categories: Analogies, Arbitrariness, Career, Context, Decision Making, Employees, Experience, Job, Management, Perceptions, Talent Assessment, Unawareness, Unconscious
Tags: arbitrariness, assessments, context, experience, pigeonholing, resumes, Talent

Is Confidence an Indicator of Incompetence?

By Mike Lehr

“In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” -Bertrand Russell, from his essay ‘The Triumph of Stupidity’, published in 1933.

Professors Justin Kruger and David Dunning provide supporting research. Their findings are categorically called the Dunning-Kruger Effect (DKE). In my earlier post about lying, we saw liars using confidence to encourage lies to take hold. Since confidence is a feeling that taps into our security needs, it naturally attracts us. Thus, a mother’s embrace is to a child what confidence is to an adult.

It seems natural though that those who are most competent should have the most confidence; but why does DKE claim the opposite? The incompetent don’t really know what they don’t know.

Imagine two generals. One sends his scouts out and finds no enemy forces. Another does the same and finds a force twice his size. Which general is going to feel more confident about his situation, the one with no enemy around or the one with? However, we then find out that the first general only sent his scouts out five miles while the second fifty miles. Which now? The answer doesn’t change because the first general didn’t know his scouts should have gone out fifty miles.

However, measuring competency isn’t as easy as measuring how far scouts ventured. The potential problems that concern the competent are staging far beyond a horizon the incompetent can’t see or don’t know exists. Thus, ignorance is not only blissful but confident.

Want proof? Next time you’re before a group of CEO’s ask how many of them believe their earnings growth over the last year is in the lower half of the group? You’ll get a number far less than 50% . . . maybe even 25%.

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Good Sales Managers from Good Sales People

By Mike Lehr

We often hear that good sales people don’t make good sales managers. While incorrect, the transition is admittedly difficult. However, few give reasons. I have identified three major attributes that distinguish a good sales person who can be a good sales manager from one who can’t be: patience, adaptability and introspection.

Good sales people by habit are not patient; if one prospect says, “no,” they go onto another. We can’t rollover sales people as quickly as we can prospects. As for adaptability, good sales people usually find a workable style and stick with it; they rarely need to try others. Contrastingly, as managers, we have to deal with multiple selling styles. Lastly, many good sales people will run their processes without knowing why they work; often they don’t need to know. Sales managers need to understand the “why’s” so they can solve problems and duplicate successes.

As a result, good sales people who become sales managers tend to have developed little patience, adaptability or introspection. They will tend to push their people into a single style, usually the one that worked for them, and reprimand those who don’t implement quickly or successfully. In effect, they are sales administrators not coaches.

Experientially, this means that the best sales managers who were good sales people are likely to be those who had to struggle to be good. Perhaps they had to try a lot of different things until they found their style. This might have included a real close look at what they were doing and why some things worked and others didn’t. Finally, they learned to have patience with their own development.

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Expat 21 posted on November 11, 2010
I never thought about these things before. But when I think back to the people I knew when I ...

Categories: Career, Change, Competence, Experience, Learning, Management, Motivation, Nurture, Organization, Performance, Personality, Processes, Quality, Sales, Standardization, Talent, Talent Assessment, Training
Tags: adaptability, analysis, employees, experience, introspection, management, patience, Personality, quality, sales, solve, struggle, style

Influencing and Problem Solving by Mike Lehr

Talent Assessment Archive

Leadership as a Dependent of Conditions

Assessing Creative Problem Solving: Outlier Technique

Style Trumps Content Once Again

Downside of Focus and Rise of Situational Awareness

Information You Know Is Wrong Still Influences You

Stock Gambling & Poker Investing: Lesson in Skill & Outcomes

Labels Influence Our Evaluation of Content

How We Unconsciously Pigeonhole People

Is Confidence an Indicator of Incompetence?

Good Sales Managers from Good Sales People

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