Problem 5: Your PD overestimates your skills.

As part of the launch of The Impactful Executive, Dr Ali Monadjem and I have launched a newsletter focused on the topics of organizational health and performance. Over eight weeks on this site, I will post the previous eight articles from that newsletter, an 8-part series on the problems and solutions with corporate training and professional development in 2024.

The introduction to the series can be found here

If you'd like to read the whole thing now, please go to https://newsletter.impactfulexec.com/

Corporate training is a $300 billion global industry, but much of the training offered is ineffective. Over six weeks, I am detailing six reasons I’ve seen for that ineffectiveness, and how they can be addressed.

Today’s focus…

Problem 5: It overestimates your skills.

?There is a great scene in the Brad Pitt movie Moneyball about the Oakland A’s baseball team, in which the A’s scouts are talking about the potential of a prospect they’re considering.

“He’s got a classic swing,” says one scout.

“I don’t know, he can’t hit a curveball,” counters another.

“He’s noticeable,” replies the first, presumably as a positive.

“He’s got an ugly girlfriend,” adds another. “Ugly girlfriend means no confidence.”

They continue by adding that this guy “passes the eye candy test,” but “his girlfriend is a 6 at best,” so they have serious doubts about his ability to succeed in the pros.

Now, this is a silly scene meant to demonstrate the absurdity of the rationales baseball teams were using at the time to analyze players. I happen to believe that corporations make similarly silly calculations all the time today, even if baseball teams have moved on—but that is a discussion for another article.

In today’s article I’d like to focus on another element of this scene: every one of the scouts in this room believes to his core that he knows everything there is to know about evaluating baseball prospects. He doesn’t need to learn anything new, since he already knows it all. After all, they have all been baseball scouts for decades.

This overconfidence is at least as prevalent among novices as among purported experts. The Dunning Kruger effect is a well-known cognitive bias in which people with low ability overestimate their ability to perform a task effectively. The TV show Idols owes at least as much of its global success to this phenomenon as it does to the great singers who make it onto the final stage.

In an earlier post, I quoted a 2015 study on professional development among American schoolteachers from the non-profit TNTP. It found that through several years of professional development, most teachers saw no performance improvement, and 20% actually saw their performance decline.

The self-assessments of these teachers are instructive. Of the teachers evaluated as a 1 or a 2 out of 5, 62% believed their own instruction to be a 4 or a 5. Of those whose scores declined substantially over the course of the study, 80% reported that their practice improved “some” or “tremendously.”

Novice or expert, young or old, improving or declining, most of us believe that we are really good at what we do, and that we’re getting better over time. It’s just usually not true.

A few years ago, at the behest of an education donor, I visited a high school chemistry class in a low-performing East African country. The students all had their textbooks open, and the teacher was doing his best to give a lecture on the Krebs cycle. The students were paying close attention, looking through their books and taking notes. It was not the best lesson I had ever seen, but not the worst one, either.

Then I asked a few students about it afterwards. They responded with blank stares. I asked again, in a different way—more blank stares. After some investigation, the problem became clear: not a single student in the class could speak more than three words of English. Now, this is not an indictment on them, or even a problem in and of itself—lots of people can’t speak English, and I could not speak a single word of their native language—but it was a problem because their chemistry textbook, their chemistry lesson, and their chemistry exams were all in English!

These students’ inability to pass chemistry exams had nothing to do with their chemistry abilities. Instead, they had substantial knowledge gaps (in this case, the ability to speak and read in the language of instruction) that made it impossible for them to learn what they hoped to learn. Attempting to tackle the task at hand without addressing those knowledge and skill gaps was a complete waste of time.

Less dramatic versions of this challenge occur during professional development all the time. Millions of people lack basic skills that they need to do their jobs effectively—reading comprehension and written communication, number sense and mental calculation facility, logical reasoning and the ability to evaluate evidence. We do not focus our training on these areas—we expect graduates to have already learned these skills in school!—but the gaps in these areas often undermine everything we do. We do not test for these skills or identify these gaps, in large part because doing so would be considered too insulting or stressful for our employees—our cultures have not developed the psychological safety necessary to do so without damage.

Our efforts are not only undermined by gaps in “academic” skills, but also by gaps in self-mastery and interpersonal skills. Perhaps the thing holding someone back from being a good sales person is not the knowledge of how to overcome objections, but a lack of understanding of how to self-motivate to avoid procrastination. Or to prioritize effectively. Or to avoid overcommitting.

These are areas of personal performance that we normally take for granted. We do not train these skills because we assume people already have them, or that exposing gaps would be too psychologically damaging.

But this is a fool’s errand. The only way for true improvement and growth is through a clear-eyed assessment of where we are today. Companies must address the fundamental gaps preventing improved performance, before tackling the surface challenges that seem to hold us back. If that seems too difficult or too psychologically dangerous, then we need to invest heavily in building the type of culture where this sort of self-analysis is both accepted and celebrated, and can be completed without fear.

I wish I could tell you that the solution to this issue is an easy one. “Test people first, find their gaps, and address those gaps. That is how you will make your training and people development successful.” Sure. But these efforts only work in the right sort of environment. In the wrong environment, they can lead to chaos.

Creating that type of culture is extremely challenging. It is also perhaps the most potent force for sustainable overperformance.