Research: We're not very Self-Aware, especially at work {Guest Article}

By Erich C. Dierdorff and Robert S. Rubin

If you’ve participated in a training or development program in the past two decades, chances are you took an assessment designed to increase self-awareness. While you may have discovered your “type,” “profile,” or “style,” it probably did little to make you a more effective leader or team member.

Put simply, self-awareness is understanding who we are and how we are similar to or different from others. One key facet is self-knowledge – how we see our various personality traits, values, attitudes, and behaviors. But another aspect is being aware of how consistent (or inconsistent) our self-view is compared to an external appraisal – how other people see us or against objective data. The latter is essential for transforming self-knowledge beyond mere personal introspection into accurate self-awareness.

Yet in talent development practice, companies spend millions of dollars and countless hours every year on self-reported assessments that only target self-knowledge. The core problem is that we’re notoriously poor judges of our own capabilities. A 2014 study of 22 meta-analyses (containing over 357,000 people) found an average correlation of .29 between self-evaluations and objective assessments (a correlation of 1.0 would indicate total accuracy). And the correlation was even lower for work-related skills. So my self-reported profile may suggest that I see myself as a persuasive speaker – but tell that to the audience who just fell asleep.

The punch line is that with no external data, the results of self-knowledge assessments are presumed to be accurate, when instead they may reinforce inaccurate perceptions of ourselves. The net result can be harmful to development and performance and, as we observed, the effectiveness of teams.

For teams to perform effectively, each member must possess a combination of technical and interpersonal skills and constantly adjust their contributions to meet the team’s needs. Correctly understanding one’s capabilities relative to others is therefore paramount.

To illustrate, we recently collected data from an executive development program at a Fortune 10 company. With 58 teams and more than 300 leaders performing in a dynamic and competitive business simulation, we tested the extent to which accurate self-awareness was related to team effectiveness, which was evaluated across a number of business metrics like market share, ROA, customer awareness, productivity, and so forth. Levels of team coordination and conflict management were also assessed. And what we found was striking.

First, when individuals were less self-aware (i.e., there was a large gap between the assessments of their own behavioral contributions and the assessments of their team members), the teams substantially suffered. In fact, teams with less self-aware individuals made worse decisions, engaged in less coordination, and showed less conflict management. These findings held even when we controlled for teams’ overall levels of teamwork.

Second, the most damaging situation occurred when teams were comprised of significant over-raters (i.e., individuals who thought they were contributing more than their team members thought they were). Just being surrounded by teammates of low self-awareness (or a bunch of over-raters) cut the chances of team success in half.

It’s clear that talent development interventions need to go beyond self-knowledge to be effective. So what should leaders and talent development professionals do? We see three tactics that can help people build accurate self-awareness.

Use self-awareness tools that are linked to performance. It’s no secret that many of the most popular developmental assessments used for gaining self-knowledge, such as the MBTI, DiSC, The Birkman Method, and The Core Values Index, woefully lack evidence linking their results to actual learning or job performance. Whatever instrument, exercise, or intervention you use must capture and deliver results that truly predict something of value. Use external benchmarks: measure how someone’s self-view compares to others’ views and measure how assessments directly relate to outcomes like increased learning and job performance.

Create a line-of-sight between self-awareness and personal job success. A wealth of research shows that when individuals see learning as valuable to their careers, they’re more motivated to learn and apply new skills to their roles. This means that we must directly communicate why the capabilities on which individuals are receiving feedback are actually relevant. Don’t assume that individuals already recognize the need for accurate self-awareness: substantial research shows that those most in need of improvement are the most unaware.

Teach self-development skills in addition to self-awareness. Acquiring accurate self-awareness is only the beginning – true personal development builds the capacity to take action. Most talent development efforts unfortunately fall short of teaching self-development skills, leaving behind a “knowing-doing gap.”

Research shows that multiple strategies can be brought to bear. For example, self-management training can help people plan, apply, monitor, and adjust their newly learned competencies. And by reinforcing that mistakes are natural to any learning process, error management training encourages deeper learning and the transfer of that learning back to one’s job. At the very least, demonstrate how imperfect self-views block the way to real and lasting behavioral change.

Will Rogers rightly once quipped, “It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.” It’s time for talent development professionals to focus their development resources on the forms of self-awareness that matter most.

Erich C. Dierdorff is an associate professor of management in the Driehaus College of Business at DePaul University and co-director of BusinessEducationInsider.com

Robert S. Rubin is an associate professor of management in the Driehaus College of Business at DePaul University and co-director of BusinessEducationInsider.com

Why Mandela Won {Guest Article}

By Robin Sharma

#1 bestselling author of The Leader Who Had No Title

My fascination is with Icons. Titans. Heroes. And Legends…

…the great souls who accept the call to greatness we each have on our lives and rise up to their best.

On a visit to Johannesburg to deliver a leadership presentation a while ago, I had the privilege to have a private conversation with someone in Nelson Mandela’s inner circle.

I learned more of his visionary nature, his rare-air discipline and his longing to be a force for good in an increasingly chaotic world.

What has stayed with me most is that I heard Mr. Mandela only became Nelson Mandela during his years in prison. In other words, it was the solitude, degradation, devastation and inhumanity of that time in confinement that made him who he became.

Here’s my real point…

…it was the time away from the world that allowed him to lead in the world.

While he was on Robben Island, he read the books of the iconic leaders. He studied the habits of the great souls. He reflected on the key moral virtues. He transmuted hostility into opportunity. He transformed his anger into forgiveness.

And as the gorgeous result of his inner work, when he was made president of South Africa, his jailers were invited to the ceremony. When asked why, he replied that if they were not there, he’d still be in prison (because his mind would still be in chains).

And so, I ask you with true respect…are you longing to work and live at wow in the world but walking through your days with a mind shackled by chains?

Nothing is more important than building your inner architecture of undefeatability and greatness.

Nothing is more important than strengthening your character, elevating your thinking and releasing your fearful beliefs.

Nothing is more important than cleansing your heart of resentment and forgiving those who have wronged you.

Nothing is more important than shifting from selfish to selfless–and donating the rest of your life to a mission that is bigger than yourself.

I guess the idea I’m really inviting you to play with over the next few days is that your outer world is a beautiful (or messy) reflection of your inner world.

Victims blame everything on everyone. But to really LEAD your life, you and I absolutely must own that all that’s in our lives right now is the result of our own actions. Every movement we’ve made has created a consequence. Every cause has had an effect…

…and as we make the rise to excellence of thought, performance and being, all we do rises with us.

Anyway, hope this relatively quick piece I’ve just tapped out in a burst of inspiration and desire to serve is helpful. And that it reminds you of your truest nature…as well as the potential within you asking to be expressed.

Make today epic. This IS your time. And I’m here with you on this ride.

From www.robinsharma.com 

Over-optimism can kill you..... literally.

By Dries Lombaard

Director: Strategic Engagement; The Strengths Institute

The Stockdale Paradox is named after admiral Jim Stockdale, a United States military officer held captive for eight years during the Vietnam War. 

Stockdale was tortured more than twenty times by his captors, and never had much reason to believe he would survive the prison camp and someday get to see his wife again. And yet, as Stockdale told later, he never lost faith during his ordeal: “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

Then comes the paradox: While Stockdale had remarkable faith in the unknowable, he noted that it was always the most optimistic of his prison mates who failed to make it out of there alive. 

Stockdale recalled:  “They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ 
And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. 
Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ 
And Easter would come, and Easter would go. 
And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. 
And they died of a broken heart.”

What the optimists failed to do was confront the reality of their situation. They preferred the ostrich approach, sticking their heads in the sand and hoping for the difficulties to go away. That self-delusion might have made it easier on them in the short-term, but when they were eventually forced to face reality, it had become too much and they couldn’t handle it.

Stockdale approached adversity with a very different mindset. He accepted the reality of his situation. He knew he was in hell, but, rather than bury his head in the sand, he stepped up You must confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

For me, the Stockdale Paradox carries an important lesson in personal development, a lesson in faith and honesty: Never doubt that you can achieve your goals, no matter how lofty they may be and no matter how many critics and naysayers you may have. But at the same time, always take honest stock of your current situation. 

Don’t lie to yourself for fear of short-term embarrassment or discomfort, because such deception will only come back to defeat you in the end.

Living the first half of this paradox is relatively easy, since optimism really isn’t that hard. You just choose to believe that it will all turn out for the best, and everything that happens to you is a means to that end. Simple as.

But optimism on its own can be a dangerous thing:

There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, “Oh, it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything,” and an optimist who says, “Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyway.” Either way, nothing happens. – Yvon Chouinard

So you need to embrace the second half of the Stockdale Paradox to really make strides. You must combine that optimism with brutal honesty and a willingness to take action.

Now of course, nobody likes admitting that they’re fat, that they’re broke, that they’ve chosen the wrong career or that their marriage is falling apart. But admitting such truths is an absolute necessity if you want to grow and improve. It might feel like you’re taking a few steps backward by doing so, but you can view that retreat as the pull-back on a sling shot: you’re just setting yourself up to make significant progress down the road.

Read more about Dries Lombaard

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Most HR Data is Bad Data - {Guest Article}

By Marcus Buckingham; Founder of TMBC

How good a rater do you think you are? If you were my manager and you watched my performance for an entire year, how accurate do you think your ratings of me would be on attributes such as my “promotability” or “potential?”

How about more specific attributes such as my customer focus or my learning agility? Do you think that you’re one of those people who, with enough time spent observing me, could reliably rate these aspects of my performance on a 1-to-5 scale? And how about the people around you – your peers, direct reports, or your boss? Do you think that with enough training they could become reliable raters of you?

These are critically important questions, because in the grand majority of organizations we operate as though the answer to all of them is yes, with enough training and time, people can become reliable raters of other people. And on this answer we have constructed our entire edifice of HR systems and processes. When we ask your boss to rate you on “potential” and to put this rating into a nine-box performance-potential grid, we do it because we assume that your boss’s rating is a valid measure of your “potential”— something we can then compare to his (and other managers’) ratings of your peers’ “potential” and decide which of you should be promoted.

Likewise, when, as part of your performance appraisal, we ask your boss to rate you on the organization’s required competencies, we do it because of our belief that these ratings reliably reveal how well you are actually doing on these competencies. The competency gaps your boss identifies then become the basis for your Individual Development Plan for next year. The same applies to the widespread use of 360 degree surveys. We use these surveys because we believe that other people’s ratings of you will reveal something real about you, something that can be reliably identified, and then improved.

Unfortunately, we are mistaken. The research record reveals that neither you nor any of your peers are reliable raters of anyone. And as a result, virtually all of our people data is fatally flawed.

Over the last fifteen years a significant body of research has demonstrated that each of us is a disturbingly unreliable rater of other people’s performance. The effect that ruins our ability to rate others has a name: the Idiosyncratic Rater Effect, which tells us that my rating of you on a quality such as “potential” is driven not by who you are, but instead by my own idiosyncrasies—how I define “potential,” how much of it I think Ihave, how tough a rater I usually am. This effect is resilient — no amount of training seems able to lessen it. And it is large — on average, 61% of my rating of you is a reflection of me.

In other words, when I rate you, on anything, my rating reveals to the world far more about me than it does about you.  In the world of psychometrics this effect has been well documented. The first large study was published in 1998 in Personnel Psychology;there was a second study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2000; and a third confirmatory analysis appeared in 2010, again in Personnel Psychology. In each of the separate studies, the approach was the same: first ask peers, direct reports, and bosses to rate managers on a number of different performance competencies; and then examine the ratings (more than half a million of them across the three studies) to see what explained why the managers received the ratings they did. They found that more than half of the variation in a manager’s ratings could be explained by the unique rating patterns of the individual doing the rating— in the first study it was 71%, the second 58%, the third 55%.

No other factor in these studies — not the manager’s overall performance, not the source of the rating — explained more than 20% of the variance. Bottom line: when we look at a rating we think it reveals something about the ratee, but it doesn’t, not really. Instead it reveals a lot about the rater.

Despite the repeated documentation of the Idiosyncratic Rater Effect in academic journals, in the world of business we appear unaware of it. Certainly we have yet to grapple with what this effect does to our people practices. Look closely and you realize that it will cause us to dismantle and rebuild virtually all of them.

Fueled by our belief in people as reliable raters, we take their ratings — of performance, of potential, of competencies — and we use them to decide who gets trained on which skill, who gets promoted to which role, who gets paid which level of bonus, and even how our people strategy aligns to our business strategy. All of these decisions are based on the belief these ratings actually reflect the people being rated. After all, if we didn’t believe that, if we thought for one minute that these ratings might be invalid, then we would have to question everything we do to and for our people. How we train, deploy, promote, pay, and reward our people, all of it would be suspect.

And yet, is this really a surprise? You’re sitting in a year‐end meeting discussing a person and you look at their overall performance rating, and their ratings on various competencies, and you think to yourself “Really? Is this person really a ‘5’ on strategic thinking? Says who – and what did they mean by ‘strategic thinking’ anyway?” You look at the behavioral definitions of strategic thinking and you see that a “5” means that the person displayed strategic thinking “constantly” whereas a “4” is only “frequently” but still, you ask yourself, “How much weight should I really put on one manager’s ability to parse the difference between ‘constantly’ and ‘frequently’? Maybe this ‘5’ isn’t really a ‘5’. Maybe this rating isn’t real.”

And so perhaps you begin to suspect that your people data can’t be trusted. If so, these last fifteen years have proven you right. Your suspicions are well founded. And this finding must give us all pause. It means that all of the data we use to decide who should get promoted is bad data; that all of the performance appraisal data we use to determine people’s bonus pay is imprecise; and that the links we try to show between our people strategy and our business strategy — expressed in various competency models — are spurious. It means that, when it comes to our people within our organizations, we are all functionally blind. And it’s the most dangerous sort of blindness, because we are unaware of it. We think we can see.

There are solutions, I’m sure. But I think, before we can even consider those, we must first stop, take stock, and admit to ourselves that the systems we currently use to reveal our people only obscure them. This admission will challenge us. We will have to redesign almost our entire suite of talent management practices. Many of our comfortable rituals — the year-end performance review, the nine-box grid, the consensus meeting, our use of 360’s — will be forever changed. For those of us who want HR to be known as a purveyor of good data — data on which you can actually run a business — these changes cannot come soon enough.

- This article was published in the Harvard Business Review on 9 February 2015. 

Marcus Buckingham is the founder of TMBC, a company that builds strengths-based tools and training for managers. He is the author of several WSJ and NYT bestsellers, including his latest book and accompanying strengths assessment, StandOut: Find your Edge, Win at Work.