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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.