Cogniphany

I didn’t really plan to do a lot of business-plugging on my blog, but my friend, Tim has a really good one here. He’s talked about this in a number of his books and this business is one that’s desperately needed out there.

EMail A to Z

People tend to forget that email is instant communication, it leaves a paper trail, and it’s really not best to send an email when you’re still in the ire of the moment. If I had a dollar for every time that I’ve heard a story of someone having regrets about sending an email when they should have sat on it for 24 hours… I’d have no need to work ever again.

So, kudos, Tim. This is an excellent idea.

I really like small town newspapers. The big ones, like the New York Times and WSJ, are good for keeping up with world and national news and topics, but the little ones almost always end up with some gem of insight that shouldn’t be missed. I sometimes think of those larger papers and outlets as how you can feel the main pulse of the nation or the world, but if you want to see the details, you need to keep up with the smaller outlets.

That’s why I really end up liking little articles like this one from Binghamton, New York.

“Wanted: The good employee – Hiring and retaining quality employees is vital for success”

If you go read the article, you can find that smaller businesses worry about the same problems as larger businesses. Everything may be on a larger scale, but they’re still problems. And this little story presents good information about how to get good employees and use techniques that the big boys do.

Just because you’re a smaller business doesn’t mean that you can’t implement good evidence-based practices. If one of the problems that keep you up at night is how many employees that you’re losing to your competitors in their first year of employment, then use that to guide your hiring practices. As William Ritter says in this article, look for the red flags that will inevitably pop up in someone’s work history. Past performance is a very strong predictor of future performance. If you’re looking at a resume that shows a person stays at a job on average of at least two or three years, then you’re probably pretty safe assuming that they’re not going to job-hop.

While larger companies have realized the benefits of retaining quality employees and have enacted programs to do so, many small businesses don’t recognize the cost benefits of retaining current employees versus recruiting and training new workers, Ritter said.

“Some of the large companies have been doing these things for years,” Ritter said. “Small companies never seem to get around to it.”

The nature of our mobile society means employees will leave a job if they don’t feel valued, he said.

These are some very true words that even small businesses can embrace. One of the first jobs that I left, I left because the company didn’t understand this. No matter how many pieces of machinery they purchased, if they lost all of their skilled employees, they’d be crippled and lose their market positioning. In the end, that’s exactly what happened. They failed to keep the best people, and were bleeding all of their talent out into the market. So, in the end, their competitors gobbled them up,  even though the competitors were far smaller.

Just because your business is a small fish in the pond, there is no reason that you can’t use the same evidence-based practices that larger businesses do. Sometimes, that’s how smaller businesses become larger businesses.

Your people aren’t your greatest resource; they’re your only resource. Without them, your place of business becomes a storage facility, holding all of the equipment that does nothing without them.

“Our employees are our most important asset.”

Everyone, at some point in their careers, has heard some advanced representative of a company they’ve worked for utter these words. And, if you’re like most employees at most companies, you’ve groaned inwardly. Those words have become tinged with a negative reaction because many companies say them, put them on their website, and put them on slogans around the office. But when it comes time to actually put those words into action, they balk.

There are numerous reasons for companies stopping short of actually considering their employees to be their most valuable resource, but the effect is the point of this post. The inward groan I mentioned earlier has become almost automatic. In the wake of layoffs and jobs being moved to where cheaper labor can be found, there should be little surprise that the burden of proof for this value proposition is on the employer.

Actually treating employees as though they are your greatest asset takes a lot of work and money, and that’s why many companies fail to do so. For a lot of companies, it’s very hard to look beyond the next quarter, much less the following year, or the next decade. And it’s the long look into the future where the companies who do embrace the idea of employees being their greatest assets have the most impact. When they keep their eyes on the ball and don’t waver from it, they find great success.

If you want to see it in action, go take a look at Fortune’s list of top 100 companies to work for. Specifically, look at the top 10 companies in that list. These aren’t a bunch of philanthropic organizations that barely scrape by. At least half of them are brands that almost every person you encounter will recognize instantly. Every single one of them have yearly revenues that are well in excess of a billion dollars. Cisco Systems (#6 on the list), has conducted numerous buyouts and mergers over the last few years. Mergers and buyouts have been statistically terrible for many businesses, but Cisco has managed to be successful and be one of the best companies to work for.

It is possible to be successful and treat people as though they’re your greatest resource. It’s not easy, but it is the path to success.

Don’t trust your brain.

There are some very systematic ways that the brain is designed to be able to function, but it’s not helpful to you in life and business. Here’s some examples based on known psychological concepts and theories that can help you make better decisions.

Primacy and Recency – Your brain is wired to remember the first and last things that you’re presented with. So, if you’ve heard the old adage, “You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression,” then you know that it’s definitely got some truth to it. Recency, is the basis of one of the biggest problems in performance management, the halo/horns effect. Not only are these really bad things to do to your employees, but it doesn’t make much sense to make important business decisions based on someone’s bad day.

Faulty Memories – We all feel like our memory is just about like a video camera, where we can rewind it and review what we’ve seen. But, in reality, our memory is relatively faulty. That’s why, even though we tend to think that eyewitness testimony is very reliable, the experts know that it’s not terribly useful. Generally, your memories are fairly patchy, even for things that have happened recently. When I was working in managment I’d keep a file for each employee. Every work shift, I’d write notes for myself with dates on them about what each employee had done (good or bad) and then at the end of the night, I’d stick those notes in each employees file. When it came time for an employee’s annual review, they were convinced that I had a memory like a steel trap. Actually, I just knew what my weaknesses were and planned for them.

Conformity – Human beings really don’t like to stand out, as a general rule. In the 1950’s, Solomon Asch performed some very interesting experiments. He was able to show that if a person was presented with a group who differed in their opinion, they would almost always conform to the group, even if the group was obviously wrong. This is really important knowledge to have when you’re a leader. If you gather a group of people together and try to get individual opinions, you’re very likely to miss out on that perspective. People are much more likely to be honest, if you’re speaking directly to them.

Overall, you need to be aware of how the brain works and what it likes. The more that you know about this, the more that you’ll be able go against what your brain is used to and get more accurate information.

There was an excellent survey conducted by Adecco recently, and the results are really compelling.

To summarize the findings, diversity is something that a number of companies are giving lip service to. They talk about it, but employees are still feeling like they’re being discriminated against. In particular, age discrimination seems to be the one that many people are feeling the most prevalent.

The really nice finding? More diversity = More productive

“Not only do the majority of workers think that a diverse workforce makes their organization more successful, half of respondents (53 percent) felt that the more diverse their company, the more productive a worker they’d become.”

What I personally find really interesting are the methods that they mention as ways to improve diversity in your organization. Each one has some powerful I-O psychological concepts in them.

1) Gain senior management commitment – Training research has presented evidence that when you’re going to have a program, people are more likely to engage if they feel that upper management is invested in the success of the program. If you’ve got senior management buy-in, you’ll get more trainees to buy-in as well.

2) Engage employees in the process – This really is a no-brainer, but it’s been proven through research. If you want employees to disengage with and torpedo a program, force it down their throats and make them feel like they don’t have any say in it. You want success? Let them be involved.

3) Support local/community diversity groups - This is a really good way to help gain your employees’ trust, especially in terms of a diversity training program. Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) can really drive a diversity program. Additionally there are concepts in social psychology and in particular, the work of Robert Cialdini, that apply here. When employees see that you’re really dedicated to diversity, they’re much more likely to do the same thing.

4) Provide diversity training – You can’t just talk about something and expect change. If you want to change behaviors, you have to apply all of the other methods in social and cognitive psychology for creating behavior change. But you also have to give your employees the tools and the methods to learn how to do it. There’s also a bit more here from Cialdini about social proof. When you get a group of people in a room to agree that diversity is important and needs to be given attention, they’ll have a hard time going back on that.

5) Promote open communication - This really goes back to what I mentioned about including your employees in the decisions. If they’re engaged and involved in the decisions, making sure that you have honest, open communication is going to feed that engagement. This also allows you to eradicate a society where discrimination is tolerated. If people feel comfortable coming forward with a complaint, they’re probably going to come to you, before they go visit with the EEOC.

This is a really nicely presented research report and I love the psychology imbedded in it. Excellent work, Adecco. Bravo!

You’ve seen them out in the business world. When they start talking, you’re reminded of late-night commercials that purport to tell you that the perfect knife set can be yours for only $19.95, satisfaction guaranteed. But, wait… there’s more.  They’re the modern snake-oil salesmen.

My grandfather had a lot of good sayings, and I’m well aware that most of them are ones that he’d lifted from somewhere. But that doesn’t make them any less accurate. One of his favorites was, “If something seems like it’s too good be true, it probably is.”

That’s really the key to avoiding the snake-oil salesmen of business topics. When you’re watching them, reading something they’ve written, or talking to one of them, and the hair on the back of your neck stands up, pay attention to that. There are psychological processes in our minds that tend to make us react unconsciously even if we don’t react consciously. When those call out, then it’s best to at the very least pay attention to them.

But, you don’t always want to react that way. If you do react every time you feel slightly skeptical, you’ll rule out even the honest people. So, you can usually ask some questions that’ll help you decide which business propositions have some merit and which ones are designed to separate you from your money.

1) “Can you share some documentation about how this works?” – When you go to buy a car, it’s best that you don’t just take the word of the salesman about how well the car works. You drive it. You kick the tires. You look under the hood. If someone is trying to get you to spend a part of your budget, you need to be just as interested in the inner-workings. If you don’t understand what they give you as evidence, then seek out an expert and ask their opinion.

2) “Do you have some case studies I can read and/or some references I can talk to?” – Anyone who’s not willing to let you talk to the people they’ve done work for, should give you pause about handing them any money. Furthermore, use Google. In the Internet age we’ve got the ability to perform some of our own background checks. Let you fingers do some walking and see what you can find out about them.

3) “Are there other people who are using the same sort of idea?” – Asking a question like this allows you to get an idea of what sort of theory this person is using. It’s also a good way to get a sense of whether you’re dealing with a passionate advocate of an idea or a snake-oil salesman. A snake-oil salesman is going to try to make sure that you think they’re you’re only resource; a passionate advocate will want to talk to you about their ideas and how they came up with them.

This isn’t necessarily a complete list of what you’d want to ask, because depending on the exact situation, you may have specific details you want to cover. But this list gives you an idea of the kinds of things you want to try to get at. Cast some light around. The average snake-oil proposition is going to wilt in the light of day, and you’ll be able to feel better about walking away from such a deal.

“It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.” – Niccolo Machiavelli

I started out working in management in the early 1990’s, and even then I still experienced a lot of pressure from upper management to make sure to keep an iron hold over my employees. Essentially, there’s a lot of weight given to Machiavelli’s idea about being feared and loved, with a lot more weight given to being feared.

Take a look at the people who popular culture likes to look to as management icons. We put people like Donald Trump on television and they end up popular by insulting and berating their employees. But is that what it really takes to direct people? Do you really have to be that nasty?

The answer to that is, “sometimes.” Or more accurately, you need to make sure that when you push, it’s at the right time, with the right amount of gusto. Roderick Kramer has a great article on this topic called, “The Great Indimidators.” He presents the idea that the difference between being a bully an intimidator is careful planning and vision. A leader who uses intimidation to lead makes their decisions to turn up the heat based on their vision and goals. There’s a lot that can be done in an organization with persuasion, but sometimes it does have to be with a pretty firm hand.

But, being an intimdator can be its own minefield. As Kramer points out, when you do it right, you can get far; when you don’t, you’re going to go down quickly. A lot of that is because of the sort of job market we have now. Employees are more mobile. They have more connections. And the unemployment rate we have is relatively low when compared to history. The control over the employment equation really is more on the side of the employee.

While the job market may not be ideal, it isn’t anything like it was near the beginning of the industrial revolution. When your boss is a bully, while it might be a hardship, you can get up relatively easy and find a new job. So, the best leaders today end up using strategic tactics of persuasion that make them somewhat more like salespeople. It takes a lot more work than scaring employees into submission, but the rewards end up creating a sense of loyalty amongst your subordinates. That sense of loyalty will serve you well as you work on moving up in the organization.

I’ll spend some more time in a later blogpost talking about the details of persuasion, but for now, I think we can edit Machiavelli’s quote for the modern age.

“If you cannot be both feared and loved, it is better to be loved.”

Since I’ve recreated my website and my blog, this post isn’t entirely indicative of what my blog is frequently going to feature. But it is one of my favorite posts from my old blog, and I think that the information it presents in regard to research as well as evidence-based business practice is important. So, in an effort to keep a small link from the old to the new, I wanted to include it here.

Enjoy!
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I had my own cogniphany today, and thought I’d share it. But, before I share it, I’ll have to speak about one of my favorite quotes of all time, because it’s very pertinent.

“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” – Edmund Burke

I think it’s pertinent because of some of the problems we’ve seen in the recent past in regards to issues such as Vioxx and Cold Fusion. Scientific thought is a process that began in the not-to-distant past, after we stopped drilling holes in the heads of patients to release the evil spirits who were making them act in ways perceived as unacceptable.

I learned something today that I’d not previously heard of. I learned about Sir Francis Bacon and the four idols he wrote about that can ruin scientific endeavors. While there is contention about Bacon being the grandfather of scientific thought, I’d posit that he is easily one of the people who first thought about how to properly conduct research in an ethical manner. I’d also go so far as to state that he should be read by anyone aspiring to be a researcher, as well as current researchers, or those who believe in evidence-based business practices to remind them of important concepts.

Bacon outlined these idols in the Novum Organum:

• Idols of the Tribe (Aphorism XLI)
• Idols of the Cave (Aphorism XLII)
• Idols of the Marketplace (Aphorism XLIII)
• Idols of the Theatre (Aphorism XLIV)

Bacon states that the Idols of the Tribe are those situations where one cannot trust their senses to provide them with an exact answer about an observed condition. That is to say that we shouldn’t observe a condition or situation and assume that we know the answer because of what our eyes (or any other sense) tell us. This could easily be thought to be the precursor to the idea that correlation does not equal causation. If Sir Francis Bacon were to notice a relationship between the increase in ice cream sales and the murder rate in summer, he–unlike his medieval predecessors–would not assume that ice cream causes people to murder one another.

His passage about the Idols of the Cave state that scientific endeavors are damaged greatly by the influence one’s own feelings, experiences, and desires. It tells us that we risk making severe mistakes if we fail to understand our own limits and thoughts. While reading this passage again, I’m struck by how much his words remind me of the idea of experimenter bias and the danger to scientific research, when one forgets to remain outside of his/her study. I’m also curious about whether or not Dr. Zimbardo was acquainted with Bacon’s writings.

While I was attending class on 17th century prose in the Spring of 2006, it was pointed out to me that Bacon’s passages about the Idols of the Marketplace was based around his ideal language. Apparently, Sir Francis was of the mind that we should return to a point in language where each word had a single meaning, instead of a confusing place where the sound of “pear” could mean a fruit, a couple, or to cut something into thin slices. Bacon’s ideas were based strongly within language and specifically around getting back to an “Adamic” language, or that perfect language spoken by God’s first living creation. However, if one looks for a more scientific basis of his/her ideas, we could easily look at the idea of using very specific language and jargon to describe research outcomes and processes in journals. Because, in this case, how could one mistake the cerebral cortex for a fruit?

His last class of idol is the Theatre, and its description points to the dangers of becoming complacent and simply accepting what we’re told. He speaks of previous breakthroughs and how such things can have a dogmatic effect on those who come after them, leading to what can only be described as the failure to remain skeptical of discoveries. The bulk of this passage could be say much the same as our own ideas about the need for a study to be able to be replicated, in order to prove that a finding is not a fluke of luck or random chance.

While I think more deeply on these ideas, I have to consider whether Sir Francis Bacon truly was one of the first to think in this manner, or by my reading this much into his words, wonder if I am creating a chicken and egg argument about his logic. While it is entirely possible that I am creating far too much from the words of a man thinking in the seventeenth century, I take the position that he was on the same track as many of our present-day scientists in questioning the wisdom of accepting far too much as fact. Even though he may not be the grandfather of scientific thought, I will hold my ground on my belief that those wishing to work in the field of science would do well to read his works and remember the spirit of his words and ideals.