The "get leadership quick" schemes

A while back a good friend called me:

"-Anto! I will need stress therapy soon!

-Why? What's up?

-My manager read a book! We are doomed for the next six months!

-What do you mean?

-Last time this happened, we all received the book mandated to read, that was all we were talking about, using the same phrases, and the company was turned upside down and it sucked, but we did that for six months just to prove it doesn't work for us, not in the same way. Of course, we all told him it won't work with us, it didn't matter.

The "leaders at ____" did it and they were successful so we had to do it too.

It didn't matter we weren't in the same industry, it didn't matter we had a different production flow, we worked with a different type of customers, we had a different culture, it didn't matter that we didn't know that that was the actual cause of their success ... it was the NEW fad so we had to do it. It felt like I joined a cult. I almost quit that time, this time I will quit for sure. "

Sounds familiar?

I remember, a couple of years back, the fad was to ditch any form of performance assessment, and a lot of companies ate that up. It sounded awesome and it promised endless motivation, engagement, and productivity. We don't know what happened. I loved the allure of letting go of all the downsides of performance assessment, the lack of fairness, the lack of validity, no control for false positives or false negatives, the connection with pay. My question was "what do we put in place?".

In the last 10 years, this Ponzi philosophy skyrocketed. If you look at management books, articles, courses ... a lot of them look like this:

"How I made 1 mil dollars by doing these two simple things!"

They sound like get-rich-quick schemes. The slogan goes something like this:

"Industry leaders at [insert currently successful company here] do these [insert no from 3-12] things!"

What is implied is that because of those things the company is where it is.

Let's unpack that in leadership. When statements like that are made there are two unproven assumptions:

1) CAUSE ERROR: that the solution advertised is what created the success

2) PREDICTION ERROR: that the solution will work the same in any other context

"YOU TOO CAN DO IT!"

Identifying cause and effect:

Because the solutions but also the results promised by the solutions are usually ambiguous it seems like it might work because it is serially explained (just like conspiracy theories). The leaders did this and look at how successful the business is, so definitely it is because of this management solution.

The second thing about cause and effect is the hindsight bias, a psychological phenomenon that allows people to convince themselves after an event that they had accurately predicted it before it happened. This can lead people to conclude that they can accurately predict other events. "We did this and it worked (we knew it!) and will work also for you!"

Some other things that bring doubt into the people management "fix-it-all" cause and effect conclusions are:

"Correlation is not causation" refers to the inability to legitimately deduce a cause-and-effect relationship between two events or variables solely on the basis of an observed association or correlation between them. Just because a company does something and it is at the same time successful does not mean that the management strategy caused the success. It might be that the success caused the management strategy :).

Superstar bias - the tendency to assume that people who are successful at one thing (or companies) are successful at other barely related things (people who are good at their role will be just as good as managers, companies that are successful in business must be successful in people management strategies, managers in a notorious company must be good managers in any other company). It might be, but we cannot tell for sure, sometimes companies are successful in spite of their people management strategies not because of them.

Confirmation bias: The reaction to disconfirming evidence by strengthening one's previous beliefs. It is easy to believe something if you don't take into account the whole context. It might be a good people management strategy that is causing the success of the company, but do we have all the data?

Base rate fallacy: The tendency to ignore general information and focus on information only pertaining to the specific case, even when the general information is more important.

Desirability bias: An effect where someone's evaluation of the logical strength of an argument is biased by the desirability of the conclusion or the likeability of the author.

... and my favorite: Survivorship Bias which is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to some false conclusions. Survivorship bias can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because failures are ignored, such as when companies that no longer exist are excluded from analyses of financial performance.

I could go on for a long time listing most of the cognitive biases and logical errors.

How is this applicable for day-to-day leadership?

First of all, management practices are about the interaction of two different sets of data:

• the system of the organization
• human nature operating system

That means that we can find inspiration from other companies, we can entertain cognitively the idea and simulate in our minds if and how that would be helpful for our particular situation. But with any management practice, the rule is to really understand the system you operate in and know the human operating system (Human OS). With these two types of data you can ask yourself the following:

• do humans actually function like that?

Remember the days when we thought that "pay" was the highest motivator? Remember when we thought processes are what will create productivity and accuracy? Remember when we tried to ditch performance appraisals?

• does this solution work within the system I want to implement it in?

What is the culture in this system (implicit operation rules within the system), what are the established and engrained dynamics within this system, what would be the effect of implementing such a management activity, what would ripple from it, how much change the system requires, and so on. The main question is "How will it work for us, here, now, in this context?"

Don't get me wrong, I like those books and I will keep reading them. But I will remind myself (and I have to put a conscious effort there) that those books are at best case-studies, not solutions. Some of them describe really well the context and how they came up with a particular people management strategy and if you look at them like you would at a case study, they can be very rich in learning.

After reading them look at your context, your system, and see if you can create/figure out what that particular system needs at this moment. Always look at mechanics, how something works, when it works, when it doesn't, how doesn't it work, for how long will it work, what are the outliers, what changes will it need, what other ripple changes will it produce, and so on. Nuances, nuances, nuances! Be critical in every "solution" you take.

Whenever you hear repetitive catchphrases like "provide context, not control", "react situationally", "be an inspiring leader", "culture fit", "culture eats strategy for breakfast", "move fast and break things" ... and I could go on and on, ask yourself obsessively: "What does this mean?", "How does that look like", "What does someone do when they do that thing", "What is the opposite of that?". Get to the minute details of specific actions, behaviors, details about what a leader does specifically when they do what is proposed. It is very possible that those things can provide learning insights if you get to the actual learning, which means it is really clear for you as a leader what does that phrase looks like behaviorally.

Lift one eyebrow and keep it lifted. *even for this article ;)

______________________

simplifying leadership in plain language; reducing noise, keeping complexity

• If you use Medium for your reads you can follow simpLEADfy vs. compLEADcate
• If Facebook is more of your thing you can follow simpLEADfy
• If Linked-in is your go-to you can follow here