Cogniphany

If you haven’t read Dr. Robert Cialdini’s, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” you need to. I’ve heard talk about that this is a great book for sales and marketing people.

Not true.

It’s a great book for anyone who has anything to do with business. Think about it. How many times a day do you have to persuade someone to do something you need done. If you’re a leader, that’s all you do. How many times a day is someone trying to convince you to do something they need you to do?

Cialdini talks about the pieces of our brain that respond to these tactics as the “click whirr” portions. They’re very automatic, unless you understand them. If you know about them, you can circumvent them (most of the time) and you can use them to your benefit and also to the benefit of those around you.

He’s got a total of 6 principles that he talks about in-depth and I’m not going to cover all of them here, but I’ll give you enough of a taste that you’ll want to go get the book yourself.

For instance, in the book, one of the principles Cialdini talks about is “Liking.” That is, we respond better to people we like. That seems logical, doesn’t it? If it’s so logical, why is it that a lot of people seem to think that you can get better customer service by being brusk and abrasive? Give it a shot the next time you’re on the phone with someone at the cable company.

• Be pleasant
• Use the CSR’s first name
• Say “Thank you.”

Now, if you really want to be cooking with persuasive gas, do it at work. If you’re a leader, apply all that to your employees. I’m not saying that you have to become best friend’s with them, but if your reputation is like Donald Trump, try making them like you for a while. You’re very likely to see your production numbers soar, and when you need extra effort from them, you’ll get it without too many complaints.

Another of the principles, and one of my favorites is “Reciprocity.” It’s all prevalent in human society. In fact, it’s what a lot of what makes human society work, and you can see it every day. It’s the concept of “if I give you something, you owe me.” It’s a lot more subtle than that, but it’s very true, and we’re geared to automatically respond to it. I’d try to give this a detailed treatment here, but there’s really a lot more to this than I can cover in a blog post, so I’m going to give you enough to see the value in buying Dr. Cialdini’s book.

We’ve all been in a situation that he talks about. A co-worker needs you to help with something that they’re in a dire situation with, and they’ve begged you into helping them. You’ve helped them finish it, and you’ve saved them from a horrible day at work. Bring the last time you were in that situation into your mind. Close your eyes and think about it. Your co-worker says to you, “Thanks, a lot. You totally saved my bacon on that one.”

How do you respond? If you’re like most people, you say, “No problem,” and you leave it at that. Cialdini points that out as the moment that you’ve lost the power of reciprocity. Instead of just leaving it there, tack on, “…I know that you’d have done the same for me if I were in that situation.” That doesn’t sound any worse, but it activates the “click, whirr” part of the brain, and gives you a better chance of persuading that person when you’re in need, without ever having to overtly refer back to the situation.

Now, like I said, there’s a lot more to Dr. Cialdini’s book than I’ve presented here. I’ve not even scratched the surface. Go get it. Read it. You’ll be better able to succeed in work and life after reading it.

I saw an article in the news yesterday that made me start thinking about some of the concepts in psychology that influence my behavior that I take for granted. I take them for granted because I know about them and understand them, whereas most people probably don’t. It’s much easier to change a behavior, or influence something when you’re aware of why it happens.

Staying in the Loop – Human Resource Executive Online

The article I read dealt with helping HR managers understand how to better connect with their employees. It’s a good article, but it really leaves something out. As I read the article, I started to realize that after it would present a topic, it also presented some ideas of how to handle things. It felt too much like a checklist. If you’re reading my blog, I want to give you good information that you can process and use. I want to give you knowledge that you end up using. I don’t expect you to walk away with a degree in psychology, but if you understand some principle or theory better and it helps you at work, then I’m happy.

“Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.”

I’m not sure I got the proverb perfectly, but it’s really the intent that’s important. So, over the next few posts, I’m going to work on teaching you to fish (metaphorically, of course).  It’s my birthday today, so this is how I’m choosing to celebrate. I’ll give you all the gift of knowledge.

To start todays post, I want you to make sure that you do NOT think about pink elephants. Just don’t. And every time you do, I want you to make a mental note that you have.

Research is really clear on this topic. In the US, employees want to feel like their opinions are valued, they are valued, and that they’re involved. When you’ve got that going, your employees will be highly productive beyond your wildest dreams.

But… what is really important is that it’s sincere. In my series last week, I talked about how leaders can fail badly if they start to think that there’s a real class difference between themselves and their employees. Everything you think will come through in your actions and your behaviors. This is what social psychologists talk about as your implicit and explict attitudes.

Implicit attitudes are those little thoughts that nibble around at the back of your brain can (and do) come to visit when you’re not attending to them. If you don’t believe me, visit and play around with the IAT. But, keep in mind, the point of this test isn’t to tell you how many racial biases you have. It’s just to make you aware of the power of implicit attitudes. Don’t walk away from it thinking, “Wow… I’m a bigot.” Walk away thinking about how implicit attitudes can affect your outward behaviors. That’s how you defuse them.

The problem with implicit attitudes is that you can’t constantly attend to them. If you pay too much attention to them, you end up falling victim to them. The old trick for this is what I put at the beginning of the post about not thinking about pink elephants. How many times did you? You did it, because you were lured into it. By trying not to think about them, your brain does it anyway. It’s a catch-22 that can send your brain into a fit.

If you’re not sincere about your desire to be an involved employer, your employees are going to notice. Your brain will always tip your hand to them, no matter how much you act and try to pretend. So, how do you deal with it?

Get involved. Start thinking about your employees as people. See them as individuals. When you think about them as individuals, take note of what other thoughts come up associated with them. That gets down to how your neural network is arranged and it lets you see what implicit attitudes are being activated when you think of them. When you start thinking about those things and sincerely examining them, you’ll change how your neural network is structured.

Then act on it. Get involved and change.

Now that I’ve posted 10 ways that you can be a better leader, I’m going to change gears a little bit. This time I’m going to give you some behaviors to avoid and how to avoid them. A lot of these things are really easy to fall into, but if you keep up with them, they can be avoided.

So, now I’m going to tell you how to can become the worst leader possible, and in some cases (if you’re the boss) how you can make the worst leader possible.

1. Make sure that you think of yourself as completely different than, and if at all possible, better than your employees – I’ve seen this a number of times and it’s really disturbing to see. One job that I was at had a number of family members working in upper echelons of the company. This group of family members really started to think of themselves as though they were of a different class than their employees. After telling all of the employees that the company was losing so much money they couldn’t afford to give anyone pay increases, each of the executives showed up with brand new, very expensive cars. It didn’t take long for the employees to start performing worse, and theft of company property to increase. So, make sure that if you want to ruin things, start thinking of yourself as different and better than the people who work for you.

2. Have different rules for you and your employees - One thing that can happen (especially in industrial settings) is that your employees might be paid as hourly employees and you could be a salaried employee. If you really want to make sure that you can get your employees to rebel, if they’re scheduled to show up at 7 AM, be late a couple of times a week. You can also ocassionally take a late lunch every week. Employees don’t make the distinction between salary and hourly, so consequently, when you do this, you’ll insure that they feel like you believe point number 1, even if you don’t. Generally, I’ve found that employees will accept hard adherence to rules, as long as you’re just as rigorous yourself. But, if you try to enforce rules that you don’t follow yourself, then you’re going to get a lot of pushback.

3. Promote the wrong people for the wrong reasons - This can really take two forms. If you’re promoting someone into a leadership position, don’t think of it like it’s a form of reward. Too often, people who perform well in a line position are offered promotion into leadership without regard for what’s needed to be a good leader. When you do this, you could be setting a star employee up for failure. If you’re going to promote someone to a leadership position, make sure that they’re really management material. If they need help, make sure to train them to be a leader. Don’t just dump someone into management who’s never been a leader. The second form that this can take is with a supervisor who doesn’t want to lose a star performer. Change is never easy, but if if you won’t let someone advance, who really wants to because you don’t want to lose their productivity, you’re going to set yourself up for failure. Eventually, the employees who can’t get promoted will stop performing and those who see that the way to advancement is mediocrity will either perform at that level, or they’ll just move on to another company.

Today I’ll be continuing on with my list of my observations that can make or break a leader. Again, these are my own observations and opinions. I’ll probably toss in any research that I know of that supports those opinions, but in many cases, these are just my own feelings. Also, these aren’t really in any specific order. They’re just here as they come to me.

6. Be Fair and Honest with your Employees – When a new person would come on board with me, I’d always take a couple of minutes to talk to him or her about this. I’d always say, “I’ll be honest with you. I will probably be the best boss you’ve ever had, or the biggest jerk you’ve ever dealt with. If you’re on the up and up with me, I will be too.” The key to this is that you have to check your worries about your career at the door. Expect to get into a tangle with upper-management or your peers, but if your employees have earned your protection, give it to them like a pit-bull. One of my experiences involved a confrontation with a vice-president who’d gotten me to promise a group of employees a free lunch, if they worked a 12 hour shift at a point when we really needed them to, in order to get a shipment out. Then he turned around and reneged his part of the deal in a meeting with me. When I stood up to him and said, “Someone’s buying my shipping crew lunch tomorrow, and if it’s me, you can be damned sure they’ll know that.” It made life harder with him, but I found out later that it bought me points with his boss.

7. Be willing to be wrong or make a mistake - A lot of young managers get into this cycle of stress. A new manager is going to make a lot of mistakes in their job, but they feel like they can’t let themselves be seen as being wrong in front of their employees. However, you’re human, just like the people who work for you. If you allow your employees to make mistakes and learn from them, when you fall down, they’re going to be willing to forgive you. When something breaks, start fixing it. Don’t start trying to figure how to keep anyone from seeing that it happened. When you need help, go get it.

8. Recognize that all of your employees are different – This sounds really easy, but it’s dismissed too quickly by many managers. All of your employees are going to have different strengths and weaknesses. Learn to leverage those best. I’m not saying to molly-coddle your employees, but if an employee is really deficient in one area and it’s not absolutely necessary that they be exemplary there, don’t force them to be. You also need to learn what motivates each one of your employees. Earlier, I talked about intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. You need to figure out what motivates who and use that to your advantage.

9. Do not rely on your own memory - I don’t care how good you think your memory is, it’s not good enough to remember everything that every employee has done over the last year. There are two psychological artifacts that you can remember that will help you understand this. One is Recency (the natural tendency to remember only the most recent things) and Primacy (the natural tendency to remember the first thing you were presented with). This means that if you rely on your memory, you’ll only rate people based on your first impressions and on what you recall in the last couple of weeks. If your employees are bright, they know when their performance evaluations are, and they’ll be perfect angels about two weeks before them. Do yourself a favor and carry a pad of post-it notes with you while you’re working. When you see something (positive or negative) make a note, write the date, then stick in a file at the end of the day. When the review rolls around, you’ll have a lot of information to draw on.

10. Be aware of the signals that you send - I’ve not been all that great on this one in the past, but it’s something I’m working on. If you’re talking to an employee, be in that moment. Don’t look at your watch, or appear to be ignoring them. Even if you’re really not interested in what they’re saying, at least look like you are. If you’re fiddling with something and not paying attention, employees will pick up on that. All of this also goes into how you carry yourself. If you’re not happy with a fellow supervisor or manager, keep that hidden. If you send the signal that there’s dissention, that will let your employees think that it’s okay for them to fight amongst themselves, or–worse–play your fellow manager off against you.

I was reading an article today about effective leadership. The author included what he considered to be the 20 top ways to evaluate if a leader is going to be an effective leader and manager. I’ve never really put pen to paper and given points to each of the things that I feel to be important. So, I’m just going to start typing and stop when I think I’ve covered all of them.

1. Treat everyone around you with respect – This goes for everyone. Your employees. Your fellow leaders. Those above you. For the most part, this is infectious. If you’re treating everyone that you work with respectfully, then you’re probably going to get similar in return. This isn’t meant that you should take abuse, but to foster a good working relationship with those you deal with on a day-to-day basis.

2. Follow through on what you say you’ll do – Again, this goes for everyone. If you say you’re going to do something, do it. I’ve seen a number of managers fail because they end up saying “yes!” far too often. They have the right intention in mind, but they forget to think before they engage their voices. If an employee asks you to do something, unless you’re absolutely sure that the outcome is completely in your power, hedge your bets. Say you’ll look into it and get back to them, but then… make sure that you do. The number of times that you fail to come through on things that you promise to do are probably directly proportional to your success as a manager.

3. Know and be able to do the job that your employees do – When I was working in an office furniture company as a plant manager, I came from the manufacturing floor. So, every so often, when we were in a time crunch, I’d tuck my tie into my shirt, grab a file and work. I may not have been the best line worker, but you can gain a lot of respect by being interested in what your employees are doing. Also, you’re a lot less likely to take them for granted if you feel the pains that they do. Additionally, you can’t buy the effect that you get by the level of respect this sort of thing garners you. For a long time, every supervisor that worked for me had to know (and be able to do) every job that was in their departments. I didn’t expect them to be terribly productive at it, but I did expect them to be able to do it.

4. Say “Thank you” to your employees – This is a big deal to me and it says a lot about the person. When I see a manager never thank their employees for a job well done, it sends a signal. And if it sends a signal to me, you can bet that it sends a signal to the employee. A lot of employees are motivated more by intrinsic (thanks, pats on the back, etc) rewards than extrinsic (money, time off, etc.) rewards. This is counter to what a lot of us believe, but you can get a lot more out of a group using respect, honest thanks than you’ll ever get by waving money at them.

5. Be willing to train yourself right out of a job – One of the jobs I held at an industrial film-processing plant had a performance management system that competively placed all of the plants against one another. I held the #1 ranking in my region for a very long time by making sure that I cross-trained as many people as I possibly could. I also made sure that I had employees around me who could step in and do my job if they needed. Too many managers are worried that if they train their employees to be too good, they’ll lose their jobs. That is a definite possibility, but if you ever want to be promoted, it’s critical to be able to show that your department can be handed off to someone else, without an hiccups. Have the confidence in your own abilities to teach your employees not to need you, then aim for the next promotion.

I’ll continue with this theme in the next post, and possibly the next one after that. So, I hope you enjoy it.

This is a fairly hot-button topic for me, especially considering my field of expertise. The author of this article is right, HR people used to just be the people who handled payroll or on-boarding, but now HR is becoming a field that has a position with the executives. How can you be sure that you’re hiring someone who really knows what they’re doing? There is the possibility as he points out that you can ask for some sort of certification like what SHRM has, but depending on how test design and the training/experience of the test-taker line up, you can’t be really sure that you’re getting what you pay for.

As a part of this article, the author brings up the topic of attorneys and lawyers being licensed. An interesting twist of laws exists that makes it technically illegal for someone trained in I-O Psychology use the words “psychology,” “psychologist,” or “psychometrics” when describing and advertising their services unless they’re licensed. However, the licensing procedure is heavily skewed to those people who have Clinical psychology training, and makes it nearly impossible for someone with an I-O degree to get a “license.”

As it stands, most I-O psychologists simply are very creative with the language they use to talk about what they do, and the laws that exist appear to be very difficult to enforce. Additionally, these laws were initially put in place to protect clients from disreputable people claiming to be psychological therapists. However, the power differential that exists in that relationship is flipped when one considers how an I-O psychologist functions. There’s really little in common between a client seeking psychological intervention and a business seeking to improve its selection of new employees. One has a great deal of power to sue a disreputable psychologist and the other is on the other end of the power spectrum.

So, how do you gauge for HR proficiency? Another article shows that many businesses are beginning to rely less on specific degrees and more on assessing for the abilities needed. Other companies are using custom-built cognitive ability tests to determine if executives are suited for positions. While a license for HR and I-O psychology professionals might be useful, there are a lot of questions and issues that would need to be addressed before it would be possible to successfully implement that process.

On to another PersonnelToday.com post.

I like what they’ve done with the psychometrics theme. I’m a big psychometrics geek. I like statistics and math, but I really think that test construction and application is really fun.

That’s why I really like this article from them.

Psychometric testing… how to prepare for a test

While the last post was really good advice for an employer, this is really good info for someone who’s looking for a job. As frustrating as it may be, these really aren’t the kinds of tests that you want to try to “pass” just to get the job. As bad a rap as consultants can get these days over how they herald a layoff, these are the kinds of tests that HR pros use to try to make sure that people get into jobs that they’ll enjoy and succeed at, what I-O psychologists call good person-job/person-organization/person-environment fit.

So, how do you prepare for these tests? This article really has the best advice I’ve seen.

• Learn as much as you can about the test beforehand – Just learn enough so that you know what to expect. Is it filling in dots? or an interview? or short answer? You don’t want nuts and bolts, just enough so that you’re not totally surprised.
• Give your mind regular workouts – Do a crossword puzzle. Play some Bookworm. Play Sodoku. This is a really good idea in general anyway. Research has show that keeping your mind and brain active help to ward off Alzheimer’s disease.
• Prepare for the day ahead with a good night’s rest – Sometimes when you’re trying to get hired somewhere, you’re going to be nervous, but simply getting a good night’s sleep and being rested for the next day can make all the difference in your performance. And you want your performance on any test to be representative of what you’ll be like on the job, not what you’ll be like after staying up all night worrying.
• Always be honest in your responses – This is key. All psychometrically designed assessments are constructed to eek out those pieces of your personality or whatever construct they’re designed to measure. They also have lie/attention scales built in. If you trigger those, you could invalidate your whole test. So, it’s really better to just pay attention and answer every question as honestly as you can.
• Make sure you seek feedback – If you’re able to (especially in the case of a performance based test) ask if you can see how you did. Research shows that with feedback, you’re able to learn from mistakes and do better the next time you take a test. Research also shows that without feedback, you’re likely to remember incorrect responses, as correct, just based on familiarity with the response. Feedback can really help to avoid that problem.

So, there you go. This isn’t a checklist of how to beat the tests. I’d be a really irresponsible purveyor of tests and the like if I let you see behind the curtain. But, if you follow the steps that are here, you’ll be able to give the best and most accurate picture of who you are to any potential employer.

I’m beginning to like PersonnelToday.com more and more. I’d love to get a subscription to it, but it’s a little too costly for me to consider right now. I really like it, because of the number of really good and pertinent stories they’ve been publishing.

Take this one for instance.

Psychometrics: trade secrets – going global with assessment

This is a really great piece that highlights a lot of problems that can occur when you start moving a business into a global market without really thinking about all aspects of it.  Globalization is something that is taking place and we’re not going to just ignore it, and this article shows some of the really important HR  pieces that need to be taken into account.

Basically this comes from the viewpoint that you can’t compare employees and recruits from Mesquite, Texas with those that come from Banaglore, India. It’s just not a fair comparison. As a responsible employer (and saavy businessperson) you want to make sure that you’re comparing apples to apples. If you’re not, you’re going to do serious damage to your business, and probably open yourself up to some legal liability.

Probably one of the best examples and the one that provides the best evidence is that point that the author defines as “Make sure that things don’t get lost in translation.” This is something that even the most well-trained I-O psychologists forget. In one example, a study into acculturation asked participants to answer questions independently. However, the Russian participants took to reading the questions aloud, collectively deciding on a response, and then all circling the same answer. While it is an interesting view into how a collectivistic society works, it certainly can confound a researcher.

The same thing can happen when you simply take a job or organization satisfaction survey and have it translated into another language. When you lose something critical in the translation, your picture of job or organizational satisfaction can come out to be very different from reality. Then, if you start making changes based on your skewed picture, you can end up with serious damage.

So, just take some time to make sure that whatever you’ve decided to foray into with globalization that you do some education first and make sure that you’re making the right choices about how to do it.

When psychologists talk about how a person thinks about their own thoughts, they call it “metacognition.” It deals with the accuracy with which a person can evaluate how they’re thinking about something, and then use that knowledge. So, when someone asks you how you’re feeling, you’re making a metacognitive evaluation of your emotions.

We take a lot of the work that goes on inside our heads for granted. We assume that when we see something that’s it’s exactly as we remember it. We saw it. How could it not be exactly that? That’s the dilemma. It all appears very seamless, but there’s a lot of filters that it all goes through, and our metacognitive evaluation of an event can be very poor.

All of this works into the topic of business risk assessment very well. Human beings are traditionally very bad about being able to properly assess levels of risk. It’s ingrained into us. When we see something bad happen to another person, we tend to assign fault to the person. When we see something good happen to another person, we tend to assign the reason for that to fate or luck. However, it’s flipped when it’s happening to us. When a bad thing happens to us personally, we tend to want to believe that it’s out of our control, and when it’s good, we had complete control over our success.

That all feeds into how we assess risk. We worry about things that have relatively little chance of happening to us, and then ignore the things that can happen to us with greater frequency. That is, we fear things that are generally out of our control, and ignore things that we can control. Richard Restak, gives a great treatment of this in the first chapter of his book, “Poe’s Heart and the Mountain Climber.”

To sum up his ideas, if you take some of the things that people are really worried about (struck by lightning, killed in an earthquake, dying in a plane crash, eaten by a shark, etc.) and compare them to other “bad things” most people who worry about these things should really just hide under their beds.

“Statistically, a specific air traveler would have to get on a commercial airplane daily for more than eight thousand years before falling victim to a multiple-fatality airplane crash.”

• Car Accident – 1 in 18,000
• Bus Accident – 1 in 4, 400,000
• Train Accident – 1 in 5,050,000
• Motorcycle Accident – 1 in 118,000
• Walking – 1 in 45,200

And really? The home is the second most dangerous place in the world.

And how this all fits into the business of risk assessment, is in just being aware of your inability to properly assess risk on the fly. If you let your brain decide for you without carefully thinking about it, you’re probably not going to make the best decision. Use evidence-based strategies and make sure that you’re making the best decision, and don’t react from the hip.