Adam Grant & Marcus Buckingham: Nine Lies About Work | 2019 Wharton People Analytics Conference

Marcus, welcome to Philadelphia, tomorrow, tomorrow, so I have to tell you that yes, I don't think you know this, but two decades ago I was an early participant in one of your surveys, are you serious? Yes, when I was a student, did we have? to pay you for that, oh, he still has the check in the mail, kind of like no, I had to do it for course credit, but I feel like it's fair to turn the tables now, so I'm going to ask you to participate in Today I did some research , so I prepared a little survey.

First question is Marcus, do you have a best friend at

work

? I do a scale of one to five five, okay, yes, the second one, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day? It varies, but I have to say that most days I do, certainly today I mean, this has been a, there's already been a strong day for me, well, we'll see, yeah, it could go downhill, these things go up and down. , these are states. rate, you know Adam, so this is right and I'm sure you're already tired of these questions, but tell us what your main strengths are in terms of the strengths finder originally.

I have a futuristic past context, we mentioned it, so I missed the present, but it's okay ideation in the selection, so I really want to be able to. I don't want to be completely alone right now, but it's okay and in individualization, so I like the fact that

people

are different and in terms of the standard evaluation. which is more of a situational judgment test than a self-assessment, creating a simulator, so I like to think, push, which I guess is not a corollary of ideation, push to the core and then I like to share. In fact, I like to have parts of my life that Is this it?

Yes, so those are the right strengths. If you keep

work

ing and taking the assessments, you will find that you may have the right one. I'm joking, so today I'll try to do some simulations. Yeah, I just want to get started. asking a little bit about why you spearheaded this Strang space movement because it's a level for me, these were the early days of

people

analytics

, right, I didn't see a lot of companies trying to measure engagement and you came and said, look, we can. We can actually run the numbers on these that seemed like really fluffy concepts and we can figure out how to predict that and how to scale it up, yeah, what led you to that and then how did you go from there to saying we should be more? focused strengths that we, well, my grandfather was in Human Resources, he was at the London School of Economics right after the Second World War and his focus was demobilization.

My father was also in HR and focused on collective bargaining in the 60s and 70s and 80s, particularly in the UK and in Europe, there was a lot of management work and conflict, but as part of that it became at the Allied Breweries CH ro and their job there was they had 7,000 pubs so their job there was to try to figure out how, given that beer, beer, beer, beer, beer, any pub Wherever you are, one of the differentiators is the quality of the pub manager, so a search began to try to find which are the most reliable and ultimately have some form of criterion validity to measure. the talents of a power manager and, of course, he inevitably found a company in Lincoln, Nebraska, that knew nothing about pubs, but he did so with a very clear mindset and began conducting concurrent validity studies to try to identify the talents of pub managers compared to contrast groups and Don Clifton's Professor Zahn Dr.

Dolin Clifton, who became the president of Gallup, spearheaded that work and when I was 16, when everyone else was on vacation going to the south of France or wherever we were going, I went to Lincoln Nebraska, which to me was super glamorous , strange and flat. and huge and then I went back every year while I was in college too and of course Don's focus at the time was how to reliably measure things that can't be counted but can be measured initially in pre-employment screening . evaluations moving forward so how do you measure engagement?, but how do you measure engagement?, heck, it's engagement anyway.

How would you do it in a way that is reliable? Where could you begin to understand the relationships between that metric right now and then something other than We're interested in lost work days or accidents at work or whatever, so we did all that and then we want to see that some of the The people we focused on were good managers and when you interview good managers and ask open-ended questions, you actually do that. I found that although they are different, they have some similar types of answers and two of them have always stuck with me as we try to build instruments to measure managerial talent.

The first question was how closely people should be supervised and their answer was although each manager was different if you took the participants from the study group to the contrast group, everyone in the study group had the same type of answer and everyone they said some said it briefly some said it in every paragraph but they all said the same thing what you might be thinking about now or what is the right answer to how closely you should supervise people and of course all the best managers they said it depends and then the next question was what's the best way to motivate someone and they all instinctively said it depends, they didn't say beer, they didn't say well, some of them said beer, but what that starts to help you understand is that the best Managers individualize and therefore what they are really doing is looking for a particular person to have a source of strength and then they are taking advantage and intelligently not fighting against who you are and trying to remedy you and fix you because you are not broken, they are quite pragmatic in a sense, they go who is your uniqueness versus you versus you and how to get the most out of you an inevitable way of saying what the best managers have in common emerged: they focus on people's strengths and manage around to their weaknesses, which is kind of a derp when you say it, but at the time there was a lot of recovery deficit thinking with good intentions, but it was very different from what you actually heard from real people talking about how they get the best of themselves with their people and then, obviously, that came out of well, we better come out with This with this work that started as a research paper and ended up being the first to choose all the rules and do you think we find it difficult even know what our strengths are?

Yes, some of the complicated things about strengths are right first. After all, we think that a strength is what you're good at and a weakness is what you're bad at, which isn't the case, there's no right definition, obviously, because you're pretty good at some things that you hate, we or us. all pretty good at some things that if we never had to do it again it would be a day too soon so we have our definition wrong if you define a strength as an activity that makes you stronger if you define a weakness as an activity that exhausts or depresses you Even if you're good at it, then suddenly you're actually the best you, you're the best source of truth about your own strengths because you know that if I focus on particular activities that makes me stronger and one of them turns out to be finding patterns. in the data, then you, as my teammate or my boss, might go well, you have to find a better way to show the pattern or you have to find a better way to explain it to people. so buddy you better find patterns that are useful like you can say all those things but what you can't say is no no you don't love that at all because I'm the one telling the truth.

What makes me stronger, you can tell the truth about how to navigate towards something useful, but I am actually the source of truth about my own strengths if we define them that way, sometimes, of course, we are very close to our own things. like the New Yorker who can't hear the sirens or horns anymore because he's just so close to it that he can't hear it, so yeah, sometimes it's helpful with reviews, for example, I'm a big fan, as you can imagine, of talent assessments that are done incredibly reliably and that can be incredibly helpful in helping you take a step back a little bit and giving you new nomenclature to describe the best of yourself, so one of the things that worries me, as I've worked with many organizations that have adopted the strengths-based movement.

We have seen McKinsey and Facebook and many others say that we already have a lot of critical feedback and that we really need to encourage our Managers make sure that people are told what they are good at and encouraged to do the things they actually do. . They feel the strength in them. Yes, I feel like sometimes a side effect of that is that people abuse their strengths in situations where they are difficult. It's not appropriate, so I think there's some research out there by Rob Kaiser and his colleagues that shows that actually one of the ways you can have a weakness is to exaggerate your strengths, so I have a colleague who is extremely charismatic. and that strength becomes a crutch and you never prepare to give talks on stage and then the talks are very confusing and you know they drag on over time and that feels like abused strength, right, you feel strengthened by trusting in the charisma of that team, but it harms their performance.

What do you think about that? I would, so I wouldn't agree, I would, I would totally disagree, I thought you were only going to give me positive feedback here, oh come on Marcus, come on I'm just giving you my reaction, who knows what the feedback would be . but a strength is just an activity that makes you stronger, it's not good or bad, it's morally neutral, you can use it for evil and you can use it for good if someone is strengthened by the fact that there are 50 people who are watching them and they like them. you get energy from this and then you ramble on because you haven't prepared yourself, then the appropriate reaction is for all of you in the room to leave, we're all like that, in which case we can go back to this person, this friend of yours and go, look , they fell asleep, yes, there is a super bad mood with you rambling, that doesn't mean you have too much charisma, you can never have too much strength, you can only use it wrong, what we are talking about here is intelligence, you can use your strengths intelligently , there are many leaders on the world stage today, perhaps even some leaders here in the US who have many certain strengths and use them wisely in the sense that they don't get the result they want. we want them to have that's not too much, it's interesting if you think you can never have too much strength, your coaches sound like that, be less yourself, Adam, reject yourself and to you you are like that, how do I metabolize that.

Well, if I tell you, listen, you have a great strength in maybe being super assertive, stop pissing people off and start using that to persuade them to do something they had no intention of doing and then you go away and continue how. Do I do that now all of a sudden? Oh, well, I don't know this is what I would do, but I tell you what you could try now, all of a sudden you're leaning into yourself, not to quote Cheryl, but like you. You're leaning into yourself and that's what feels better than me. I'm going to turn it down, turn it down, you're at 11:00, put it at 6:00 and you say I can't like it, oh, you're too empathetic, no. you can never be too much if you have empathy you are empathetic our challenge to you here is how you can intelligently leverage that to create the results you want you can't be crying on people all the time but that doesn't mean you have too much it means we will help you channel that productively, it's different, it leads to different conversations, great, so I think I'm unborn, help me apply this in my own life, so apparently when I.

I took the strengths finder I took an older version and one of my strengths was that it was logical and data-driven and I think you have a term for that now logical and data-driven annoying thank you, it's literally all about strength I expected it to be so good analytical was one, yeah, and I think there was a little bit of maybe it was courting the others, yeah, so I took this as feedback and said, "Okay, this will probably be a useful skill as a teacher." A few years ago I had a student call me for career advice and I gave her a ton of advice and at the end of the conversation she said, you're a logical bully, you were a logical bully, yeah, and I was like, what does it mean? that means and she said well you just overwhelmed me with rational arguments and I don't agree with them but I can't defend myself and I said well that's my job right and she said well no because I actually want to own My decision. and I realized that she had at least failed in my vision of my role as a mentor or advisor, that is, I wanted to help her see how I would think in a situation, but not tell her what I thought.there is a contribution, here is the remediation, so I am not saying this is, yes, no.

Don't do that, it's just that that doesn't get you here, it really does, so this is really fascinating because then you complicate this idea and say, but I don't think people have potential. Wow, I'd say this is a measure. The problem listens, so line number seven is: people have potential, that's a lie, people don't have potential, this is how potential is developed in the world of work, Adam, you have a bucket in the bucket, it's a great thing, it's called potential and if you have a lot of potential in your bucket we give you a name, we give it a name, right?

We give it a name, we call it high potential, it's a hiccup and then here you also have a bucket, but maybe it has a hole. or I don't know something, but there isn't much potential. You are a high and low position of low power. About 15 to 20 percent of our company is a senior position. The rest are low positions. I'm so sorry, you have a golden ticket. a thing called potential that you carry with you wherever you go and somehow turbocharges you, that's all. Well I will tell you that we have not been able to measure that, try to measure it, turn to any people analysis tool anywhere that can show that you can measure something in Adam but regardless of the context or situational role it is called potential and it has a lot of it and you don't have any of that, it's made up, we just made it up, we've taken a truth that is true in a small set of circumstances, that is, if Adam himself has the potential to grow and improve, which is true, and then we've expanded on it. to all. and we turn it into a lie that all of us may be someone who is still in college and stumbled upon this yet, but in any big company, there are hippos that get all the benefits and there are everyone else that doesn't.

We have created an apartheid. in our companies and it is morally sorry or what, but it is morally reprehensible, every human being can grow, learn and improve, everyone can and when we cut a period of laziness from those of you in measurement, you know that it is lazy to show me that potential. exists, measure it, it's like measuring leadership, yes, best of luck British on that, imagine a leader, share, measure it once and I'll show you a bunch of leaders where all qualities seem to be optional, it's like no , can. By the way, we can measure the number of followers, so we comply with these measurements.

It's very interesting because it pushes you to be really humble first. I think and am precise about what you are saying. Leadership is something that there are no followers to send because we can actually measure people's willingness to give. their encouragement to you, okay, that's interesting, we started measuring the traits of leaders, the first thing that strikes you is how many leaders don't have them anyway, sorry, yes, no, that was the place to who wanted to go next, so you assume leadership as his ultimate lie, which is especially funny because he is often described as an expert on leadership, so at least in the world of psychology and organizational behavior one of the Ways we measure leadership effectiveness is we simply measure the success of the group or team that you're leading and ideally we get the Delta right so that we measure your performance before you came in and then after and we look at well, you know, trying of controlling what he had before knowing how much the leader moved the needle. and that's basically measuring a version of followership, do you cut but would you accept that that's leadership or do you think we should move away from that completely?

So we have two challenges with follow-up mission number one. Can we actually measure something in followers reliably and then do any kind of improvement comparison from time to time and can we maybe show some kind of criterion-related validity of moving from that to moving? It's something else that matters to us, that's interesting. To do that work, a lot of people are trying to understand that everything is fine because we are measuring things that people can report on their own experience as a member of this person's team. The other aspect is a little more complicated. Adam is that at the moment we don't have a reliable way to measure the performance of knowledge workers.

How is it that today, by the way, today at this moment, when someone says that this thing that we did boosts performance at the individual level, everything is made up? Because we don't have a reliable way to measure the performance of knowledge workers. Another way to measure worker performance is not ratings which we know are more reflective of the rater than their eighties, we know that the idiosyncratic effect undermines the fact that your rating is a reflection of you, so anyone who says anything about this drives the performance it's doing and then all the alarm bells should go off after we've said we can see the performance.

I mean, you know that your level of participation from time one to time two could change and it makes sense to infer that if we bring in a new leader the leader comes in and moves, it's difficult, that must be a function of that leader, so there is follow-through, the challenge is that when we look at the leaders themselves, I mean, let me do it, let's say we do a concurrent validity study, we have a ton of studies. group we have a contrast group and we try to identify and by the way I spent the first eight years of my career doing exactly this how do you measure non-staged traits the traits that exist in this group?

This IRS group is the only thing we could ever find a Gallup, the only thing and we must have done those matching malignancy studies. I must have done 100 myself let alone the rest of my colleagues did the only thing that predicted group membership was the total score, it was not the configuration of particular traits. was that you had some traits really well, that's really interesting, that imp

lies

that leaders are good, they're idiosyncratic and that average, by the way, this is probably true across the board, the average is homogeneous or homogeneous, the average is the same excellence, almost everything is unique, so heterogeneous and and the data shows us that in my language, when you do pre-employment selection evaluations and try to say that the best people have all this, you actually look at the data, they don't have a big total score but I have spikes or spikes and okay that's annoying because you want Richard Branson to look and act exactly the same as Warren Buffett but he doesn't and you know in the real world if you told Warren grow up.

As a leader, we have defined leadership competencies. You are missing many. Richard has to grow up. You should be more like Richard when I say he sounds stupid because he's stupid, but we still created fifteen billion dollars in three. In many cases, Adam knows that he does exactly that, that there is something about leadership that if you could learn it little by little you would become a leader and that is, there is no data on that, in fact, most of the data pushes exactly in the opposite direction, yeah Marcus, I agree and I think you know it's interesting because I guess on some level you could do a fuzzy set analysis and try to find archetypes of different models or prototypes and what a good leader looks like, but there are a lot of Of them would be right and you wouldn't encourage people to try to become one of them.

I think you pointed out something more interesting, which is that there are three technology companies represented in the audience right now, where I started and Then we stopped at research projects because we wanted to measure performance and they said, well, we can't, we don't have data. performance goals and I say, but you have software engineers writing code, you can tell if the code works or if it breaks, you can tell if the code is elegant or complex and they say no, they're not really our engineers. I don't agree with this, we can't measure it precisely, but we still have to find out who is doing a good job and who is not.

To promote or pay people, yes, what would you advise them to do? I really don't know how to navigate that well. This is a longer topic than we could talk about today, but it is if any of you are interested. Like if you and I were to do a research project together, one of the things that we absolutely should address and then reveal is how the performance of knowledge workers is reliably measured in a way that doesn't mean that we've analyzed, you know, hundreds and millions of ratings data over four or five years to see if it relates to anything and of course it doesn't relate to anything useful because it wobbles on its own, it's unreliable, so it's flapping around in such an unreliable way. it's any wonder that flapping around here doesn't relate to anything here because it's just everywhere, the only thing they predict and we've found that they predict by the way you rate this year seems at least half of their need. to protect your grade from last year, okay, so once you're a three, that three is on your back four and you walk with it, it's hard to shake the three and by the way, if you're a five, it's like you could I'm wrong a lot more times because, hey, look, I have five, you know, so the solution is probably and I don't have it here because otherwise, oh, I don't know, I'd be a happy bunny, but probably the answer.

lies

somewhere in the same way that it does with health today, no one says if you are healthy, they say what your weight is, what your body mass index is, what your cholesterol is, so health is It has become a kind of silly simplification of something we have broken. in some things that we can measure reliably and correctly, that lead to actions, performance will be that way, there will be some Poorman aspects of performance that we will ask your team leader, by the way, that raises the question of who is the team leader because There are a lot of dynamic teams, but anyway, to ask some questions not about you but about their reaction to you, why would we do that?

Because we're trying to make decisions about what to do with you, so why wouldn't we ask? the person close to you what they would do with you is that performance no, it's what I would do, it's just what it says it is, which is a summary of what a particular team leader may feel and which then becomes a data point that could then let's take the code and its Darwinian strength in terms of how long it survives, as we know, is a good way to measure the usefulness of the code, whether the world agrees to scrap it or build on it, so I think that in every role we play.

You will have some aspect of performance that will be a reliable measure of the person closest to you, if they are peers. I know there are a lot of apps out there, let's pair them up and rate each other. I think you have There's an under-data problem, well I just don't run into you enough for any of my data points to be different than what I like Adam basically, but I think let's break down the performance into a few few measured reliably. things so when we design the

nine

boxes of the future it won't be performance and potential a potential stupid B performance is stupid instead we're going to have reliable measurements of some things and then we're going to humbly say look Adams strong here he has a little else here and in the book we talk about it as drive what people don't have potential they have a drive which means they have some things about themselves that they probably carry with them in every situation traits like things and they have some things that probably change depending on the particular part of the world they are in, their skills, their experience, performance status, things like that, yes, that is if I confess that you have low potential. that's a conversation starter, but if I say what's your impulse all of a sudden, that's a conversation starter and we can start to ask ourselves well, what is your, what's the level of your impulse, what's the direction of your impulse, You know, the change now, that's interesting, you know. language is important, momentum is a better word than potential, yes it is some of that.

I think that's what every manager should create. Yes, how can I help establish momentum for the people who work with me? Yeah, so should we take some questions from the audience? Sure, let's see. what are they, what are your comments, Marcus, you mentioned that you're a fan of talent evaluations that are done reliably and that are valid. Yes, what are the obstacles that you see that delay many talent evaluations? And I'm sorry if I'm preaching to the choir, some of you know this much better than I do, but the first thing you need to establish when you build a psychometric tool of any kind is reliability, you know reliability, you know anything else, so we have to Start with reliability.

The only thing I would say that holds back a lot of these assessments is that we haven't started by saying who you are is a reliable assessor, whether you are the examinee answering questions about yourself or whether you are a 360 participant completing a survey about someone else. I am only a reliable evaluator of my own experience. We better build tools that are based on whatWhat do we know. Humans are reliable evaluators. I am NOT a reliable evaluator of you on anything and that is a systematic error and not random. error the more data points you add, as some of you know, systemic error, the more error in the more data points you add to the systematic error, the bigger the error, don't eliminate it by adding noise plus post noise, noise plus noise It's not a equal signal, it just makes more noise, so a lot of these talent assessments I don't think start with humility and say what can a person reliably report on whether I'm reporting my reaction to you or whether I'm just reporting.

In my opinion, you make a mistake, everything else goes wrong and you do it right. You are at the beginning of understanding what can be known. Another question that I think is incredibly interesting is one of the places where people have reliable information about us. What we don't have is that our blind spots are correct for other people to see strengths that we don't recognize and sometimes also see weaknesses that we probably need to remedy. I know that if I had worked with Steve Jobs, the first conversation I would have had was about his weaknesses, what do you recommend telling people when you detect a blind spot again?

Language is important. The blind spot is strangely arrogant. A implies that you are seeing someone else that someone else doesn't and B, you are implying. what's relevant you can only report on one thing I'm obviously not people need to be around other people like I said but you can only report on one thing what's my reaction it's like I can't tell you that you're a logic bully I can tell you that I felt that I couldn't make a decision the moment I turned it over, I know it seems like a small thing, but the moment I turned it over to you, you won't be able to argue with me because you never will.

I felt intimidated, see, I know I felt intimidated and that's a beautiful twist because it's like I'm not telling you that you have a blind spot for bullying, how the hell do I know that the only thing I know for sure is that I felt like I couldn't make any decision and you would corner me with logic. By the way, I'm very sorry, no, it's okay, but I will take it with me, but if those little things I think are very important to do well, I agreed to one more question, what do you do? Think about the question of whether potential is measurable in some environments, so when that comes up here is athleticism, could we say that in LeBron James is a better prospect because we know he's taller, he's faster, you know he has more skill?

There's a Draft Combine where you try to measure all of these qualities and then translate them into some indication of potential which I realized is noisy and limited, but as we move towards more objective qualities, do you think there's any indication of a current measurement? of those qualities of future potential to perform well, of course not, I don't know, but it's knowing a bull, some of these things are knowing a bull, you know, if you recover, you know that all basketball players They must almost have Marfan syndrome. where they need to have that weird streak where you're 6 or 7 but you play like 72, okay that's not not interesting, it's interesting to know about a person but then you don't get Muggsy Bogues, so you miss out and then you don't get Isiah Thomas because he didn't have that, so you lose all kinds of really great people, now you get LeBron because he does have that and you get Kobe, but you miss Kobe's steel like there's something about Kobe, it's different.

The right thing, so all these things that can be known and I think that is why this

conference

is so important because we know that HR we do not dominate the data in HR and a discipline has respect based on the quality of their data and most of the data that we have put into our HCM systems, our human capital management systems are fake, they don't measure what they say and therefore everything falls apart beyond that. I'm not saying when you started or your salary or when you were last promoted. The things we put into these systems are good, but a lot of non-accountable stuff leaks into the feedback.

Potential competition lists all those kinds of things and it's all garbage, from a data point of view, it should make all of you cringe and So this type of meeting like this is very important because we want our children to reach the workplaces and feel that the whole focus on people is trustworthy, knowable, humble and then valid in some way at the moment we are inventing it and it means that there is no basis, so in terms of potential, we should start going well, what can we know about a human? That's a great question. My sister was Rob's ballet dancer for raw ballet at age 11, she had her wrists measured. measured the gap between her bones because they didn't want to hire people at 11 who were going to be taller than 5 foot 5 well they measured her bones they said the potential good ones and they brought because they had a measurement and they brought her because it turns out she was five seven and a half years old and outgrown to be a ballet dancer for the robotics company.

What I mean is that they had a measure, yes, now that they could go, as you know, retrospectively. and see whether or not there was any predictive validity of what they selected for subsequent performance and now we can start adding a little bit of knowledge that builds on another little bit of knowledge and their lies progress, there's the wisdom, that's why this is Scosh, it's very important what they will do. Well, in closing, what I want to do is a very low-tech survey. Can I have all of you in the audience? Can they lift as many fingers as they have?

Have you been challenged or stimulated by something Marcus said this afternoon, okay Marcus, I have to say that we are arbiters of that truth, this is not an idiosyncratic evaluative effect, you lived up to those strengths, thank you, thank you very much.