Spilling the Tea on Self-Assessment

An Idea for Consideration

This past week, there was an article in the Washington Post about a controversy in the UK over tea recipes created by Michelle Francl, a chemistry professor at Bryn Mawr College. She suggested adding salt!

Apparently, the Brits hated the salt-in-tea suggestion. The Daily Mail ran an article with this headline: “American scientist reveals her secret to the perfect cup of tea … but adding hot milk and SALT risks leaving Brits at boiling point.”

The Post article discusses the reluctance to accept new ideas about and approaches to tea and the British self-conception of their tea-drinking culture. “Drinking tea in Britain, of course, is almost mandatory — the first thing that most reasonable Brits do when they come home is to fire up the kettle. Making a good cuppa is something that many here believe they do very well, thank you very much.”

This is just one example of the many ways self-assessments are problematic. The other day, I ranted to a friend about why I absolutely disdain Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analyses. Stripping out the curse words, my rant argued two main points.

First, a SWOT analysis only makes logical sense relative to a specific strategy. To illustrate what I mean, this analogy is helpful: Is being tall a good trait for an athlete? It depends on the sport!

Whenever we assess strengths and weaknesses as an organization, it can result in generic statements like “we’re good at Attribute A and bad at Attribute B. ” Without any real grounding in whether the organization or team needs to be good at A, or why being bad at B is a strategic issue, the analysis is meaningless.?

Second—and this is where the Brits and their tea come in—it’s really hard to be truly objective when doing a self-assessment. If you asked me to assess my strengths and weaknesses as a husband, it would yield an A+ in all areas. But it’s not just that my grading is probably wrong; it’s that my wife’s grades and prioritization of attributes are what matters.

The self-assessment of strengths and weaknesses is likely to be even more biased when there’s pride involved—e.g., “Making a good cuppa is something that many here believe they do very well, thank you very much.” I’ve often seen pride become a strategic problem when the organization starts assuming strength on the attribute rather than continually benchmarking and seeking to improve.?

(British tea pride is ironic because, let’s be honest, there’s very little in the British culinary tradition that would suggest that they would have mastered any food or drink. Besides, their national superpower has always been, uh, taking the best of what they found elsewhere.)

It’s also a problem when strength on an attribute means we take for granted that other people value that trait. I once worked with a nonprofit that believed they had the best approach and highest-quality service in the field. That was a good attribute, of course, but it hindered them from seeing that many stakeholders made their buying decisions based on speed, proximity, and low cost rather than on quality.?

The implication is that whether we’re doing SWOT, experimenting with salt in tea, or figuring out whether our spouse likes us, we need to ground that assessment in outcomes and others’ perceptions.

A Taste Test

When first reading the suggestion to put salt in tea, I thought, “of course.” In culinary school, one of the main lessons is that salt enhances every other flavor.?

But I couldn’t leave the topic without testing the idea for myself—first with coffee and then with tea. I highly recommend it for both, though it took experimentation to get the salt ratio right.

Leadership Wisdom

This week, I read Black Titan, the biography of A.G. Gaston. After serving in WWI and working in the Alabama mines, Gaston built several successful businesses in life insurance, funeral homes, cemeteries (vertical integration!), banking, and real estate.?

As a coda to his career, in 1987, Gaston sold a collection of businesses, worth $35 million, to 350 longtime employees. He sold the businesses to them for just $3.5 million, so that the employees could share in the fortune they helped to create.

The book ends with Gaston’s Ten Rules for Success. I thought these two in particular were great:

#5: “Don't get bigheaded with the little fellows. That’s where the money is. If you stick with the little fellows, give them your devotion, they’ll make you big.”

#6: “Don’t have so much pride. Wear the same suit for a year or two. It doesn't make any difference what kind of suit the pocket is in if there is money in the pocket.”

Thanks for reading!

Charles

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