But, this is the part that I really like… 

“Arguably one of the administration’s most important challenges is creating a strong organizational culture with a “high purpose” that reigns in selfish motives and fosters organizational citizenship behavior. Such cultures have internal governance and learning systems that enable “truth to speak to power.” SIOP members have completed research and models for corporate culture, decision making, and knowledge transfer, to name a few.”

It’s not often that I get to really explain what I do, or what I want to do in the future. But, that’s the differentiator between “us” and “them.” The “them” are the people who work in HR who just got business degrees. Straight business degrees usually just teach people how to do what’s best for the company in the short term, and usually that just involves dealing with the symptoms of a problem, and not the problem itself. We’re trained to start digging and go after the problem. 

To use a medical model, HR people with straight business degrees are like general practitioner doctors. They’re the ones who prescribe something for you when you have a cold or the flu. We’re the surgeons who work to eradicate cancer in a patient. 

One really telling experience is when we were in our first year and taking an organizational behavior class with a bunch of MBA students. We were 6 of about 25 or 30 students, so we were totally in the minority. We had to do projects as a team of 3, where we dealt with some sort of organizational problem. The one that my team had was a problem employee on a team. We talked about using methods of communication, conflict resolution, and trying to find out if the employee had a problem that was affecting his work life (since it had been noted that his abrasiveness had increased over the last year). When it came time for Q&A, one of the MBA students lit into me about how “you just can’t deal with people like that,” and that “you just have to fire them and get a new person in there,” and how “all that psychology just takes too much time and money.” When I looked around, a lot of the other MBAs were just nodding their heads in agreement. I really just wanted to hand her a business card and tell her to call me in about 6 years, so that I could buy a new Ferrari on what I’d make off of her screw-ups. 

But, that’s the difference. “They” are the people who will ignore your past performance and fire you with a “what have you done for me lately” attitude; we’re the ones who will look deeper to see what lies beneath the surface, because not only is it the ethical thing to do, it’s also best for the company in the long run.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Franchises…

Risk Management…

Success…

This morning, I was doing some research for a project that’s coming up, and I wandered onto a follow-up editorial style piece in reference to the WSJ article about the failures that the Cold Stone Creamery franchise is running into.

One piece of wisdom I’ve found in business is that people are really interested in success stories. But, really the gems of wisdom are in looking at failures, especially when failure is far more common than success. In the franchising business, 70-75% of franchises fail. And that’s not the franchisee. That’s the franchisor. There’s a lot tied up in how those businesses fail, but looking at the anatomy of a failure is the way to go. Success can have some luck tied up in it, but generally, with that many failures, you can disect how it happened and look for common themes.

Additionally, there’s a third point in that article that should be addressed. And tied up in there, is why you want to examine the successes too.

3. Will the product survive a downturn? A $4 scoop of ice cream is fabulous business when most folks are feeling flush. It isn’t such an easy sell when people are cutting back discretionary spending. Ask yourself how you’d market any franchise during tough times as well as good times. And prod the company about how much leeway you’ll have to shop around for better deals on supplies.

I’m not sure I totally agree with this. I agree with the idea that you want to walk into a business decision with open eyes. But, you should never completely shy away from a business decision just because there’s some risk. This point led me to think of a couple of different things. One is an episode of “The Big Idea” with Donny Deutsch that I caught. It featured a number of risk experts, one of which was Tim Sanders.

Tim is a grand guy, and a joy to talk to. At the end of a conversation, you feel like you can take on the world. In this episode, he talked about “risk” and what it means in this economy. The people who, not only survive, but prosper in an economic downturn are the ones who see it as a chance to make money. If all you see is the chance of the sky falling, then you’re going to hide your head. If you take some chances (albeit calculated and careful chances), then you’re much more likely to be successful.

When I thought about this point in the editorial and what Tim had talked about, I started thinking about a local St. Louis favorite, Ted Drewes frozen custard. If you come to St. Louis, I’ll make sure that you get to visit this place. Beyond it just being an excellent dessert, it’s a marvel to watch from a business standpoint. The number of customers they process, in what looks like controlled chaos, is absolutely incredible to be seen. Additionally, they survived the Great Depression…all while selling ice cream frozen custard.

So, while there’s a point to be made about trying to sell an extravagant commodity in an economic downturn, it’s not impossible. And if you abandon all but the safest of bets, you’ll just blend into the rest of the sheep. When you look like the same person down the street, then you might survive, but you’re not going to excel. The person who diversifies and makes calculated risks is much better positioned to win the game.

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.

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.