Monthly Archives: June 2010

Predicting behaviour

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When recruit­ing new staff an often used golden rule often is that past beha­viour is an indic­a­tion of future beha­viour. Busi­nesses rely on ref­er­ence checks or even Google searches to find out as much as they can about their poten­tial new staff. But, is past beha­viour really a good proxy for pre­dict­ing future behaviour?

Know­ledge of the past is the found­a­tion of all sci­ence and human know­ledge. We try to pre­dict the future by draw­ing from our exper­i­ence of the past. Philosophers call this pro­cess induct­ive reas­on­ing — draw­ing a gen­eral con­clu­sion from a range of obser­va­tions. But when you think deeply about this, we can actu­ally never know for cer­tain that our past obser­va­tions can be used to pre­dict the future. Scot­tish philo­sopher David Hume did pre­cisely this more then 200 years ago when he found that it is actu­ally not logical to think that past beha­viour is an indic­a­tion of future behaviour.

it is not logical to think that past beha­viour is an indic­a­tion of future behaviour

For mil­len­nia people in Europe thought that all swans are white. This little ker­nel of abso­lute know­ledge was rudely des­troyed when in 1697 Dutch explorer Willem de Vlam­ingh was the first European to see a black swan in what is now West­ern Australia. The silent part of the Amer­ican magician’s duo Penn & Teller broke his usual silence and vow of secrecy when he explained a clas­sical magic trick to a gath­er­ing of con­scious­ness schol­ars. Teller showed that magi­cians can use the propensity of the human mind to seek pat­terns by skil­fully chan­ging the method dur­ing the routine. Teller beau­ti­fully illus­trates what Hume philo­soph­ic­ally argued: in human beha­viour, the past is in no way a reli­able approach to pre­dict­ing the future.

We have to be care­ful when judging a per­son through second hand inform­a­tion gained from ref­er­ees, Face­book searches and other forms of overt espi­on­age. People are not bil­liard balls that oper­ate in accord­ance with laws of phys­ics. People have free will and can change their beha­viour depend­ing on the cir­cum­stances they find them­selves in. Most import­antly, we can learn from our mis­takes and grow as people by learn­ing from them. Not hir­ing some­body who has made a mis­take in the past could mean that you miss out on hir­ing a per­son with a high level of matur­ity and an abil­ity to adapt. Therefore, when judging a per­son, keep in mind the words of Roman poet Hor­ace: Non sum quals eram — I am not who I once was

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Learning to Drive a Bus

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One day last sum­mer, on my way to work and dressed in my busi­ness suit, I boarded the bus to find only two other people on board: a trainee driver and his instructor sit­ting two rows back from him. As I boarded, I said, “Good morn­ing” to the driver.  When I walked past the instructor he said, “It’s going to be easy for you, work­ing in your air con­di­tioned office all day while we’re stuck in this thing for ten-and-a-half hours in this heat.”

Admit­tedly the weather fore­cast was for 42°C through­out the day: I did feel some sym­pathy for their situ­ation and respon­ded, “I hope it won’t be too bad for you today”.

I sat down and thought about how, des­pite it being the Monday after a really excel­lent week­end, I was going to work feel­ing that the fol­low­ing week held many pos­sible oppor­tun­it­ies and felt quite pos­it­ive. The instructor’s remarks were, how­ever, like the arrival of dark clouds.

I sat quietly and decided not to allow someone else to choose my mood for me so I set aside his remarks and men­tally pre­pared for the day ahead. He decided, how­ever, that he wasn’t fin­ished with me yet…

Apro­pos to noth­ing, he told me that his philo­sophy on life was to “Trust no bas­tard and hate every­one”. I had come across people that had a bleak view of human­ity in the past, but few who rivalled the instructor’s point of view. I decided to politely listen but not chal­lenge him – I could tell from his atti­tude that he was look­ing for an argu­ment so that I could con­firm his beliefs.

“I’m going to be stuck in this glass cham­ber all day, in this heat and so will he,” he said as he poin­ted to his stu­dent, “but I feel sorry for him: he has to drive all bloody day.”

I wondered if this man’s philo­sophy on life placed him dir­ectly in the middle of his cur­rent misery. Feel­ing very little sym­pathy for him by this point, I was look­ing for­ward to arriv­ing at my bus stop. I thought about what neg­at­ive thoughts and atti­tudes I held that made me miser­able. I would need to be more aware of this in the future but, my stop was approaching.

The Trainer then decided to share another of his views with me – that any­one with “dark skin, slanty eyes or a straw hat had bene­fits handed out to them by the gov­ern­ment and if you’re white ya get nothin’.”

It was then that any sym­pathy I had for him evap­or­ated and all my sym­pathy was with the driver. I wished the driver “Good luck” as I stepped off the bus.

As I walked to work, I moved my mind to the com­ing week and all that I might achieve in my “fancy air-conditioned office”. I felt good and am acutely aware that I have a lot to be thank­ful for: a won­der­ful fam­ily, a beau­ti­ful house, a steady job, and so much more. Today, how­ever, I had one more thing to be thank­ful for – that I’m not learn­ing how to drive a bus.

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The Mysteries of Motivation

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When the enter­prise agree­ment in an organ­isa­tion comes to an end and both man­age­ment and staff are pre­pare to enter the trenches for the next round of nego­ti­ations. Hav­ing par­ti­cip­ated in two such nego­ti­ations, on both sides of the table, I have learnt a lot about the irra­tion­al­ity of people’s motiv­a­tions. One such irra­tion­al­ity is the argu­ment is that more pay will motiv­ate people to per­form bet­ter. But does the old car­rot and stick approach always work? Will the prom­ise of a bonus make work­ers slob­ber like dogs on a treadmill?

Unfor­tu­nately, man­age­ment schol­ars and psy­cho­lo­gists can not agree on what actu­ally motiv­ates us. There are almost as many motiv­a­tion the­or­ies as there are reli­gions. One thing is cer­tain, how­ever, the tra­di­tional beha­vi­our­ally view that you should offer mon­et­ary rewards to achieve the required beha­viour is not so clear.

Inter­est­ing exper­i­ments show that the tra­di­tional motiv­a­tional the­or­ies only work for simple phys­ical activ­it­ies. As soon as the job requires intel­lec­tual activ­ity this does not work. The research even shows that pro­ductiv­ity decreases!

Watch this great present­a­tion from theRSA.org. They dis­cuss these fas­cin­at­ing exper­i­ments about what makes us tick.

When man­aging a busi­ness this insight raises inter­est­ing ques­tions. How do you hire people that are intrins­ic­ally motiv­ated? How do yo make sure every­body is motiv­ated towards achiev­ing the same object­ives? If phys­ical motiv­at­ors are no longer effect­ive is brain­wash­ing the only option available?

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The Lies We Tell

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Job interviewMatt was nervous. Most people are under the cir­cum­stances. Matt sat in front of the HR spe­cial­ist, hop­ing that he’d end up with the job that was on offer. It was a step up from what he had done in the past – in pay, respons­ib­il­ity and influence.

Daniel, the HR Man­ager, pushed a fol­ded piece of paper and a pen­cil across the table to Matt and then did some­thing appalling. He lied.

“Please answer the ques­tions for this per­son­al­ity test – there are no right or wrong answers”, Daniel reas­sured Matt.

There are no right or wrongs answers.

Mind you, Daniel had no inten­tion of lying nor did he even real­ise that he had, at the time. “There are no right or wrongs answers”, is a lie that many man­agers and human resources pro­fes­sion­als use from time to time. The per­son­al­ity tests that are con­duc­ted in work­places through­out the world in job inter­views have no answer that is intrins­ic­ally cor­rect — as you might find in a high school math­em­at­ics exam. How­ever, the pres­ence of a series of ques­tions that is included as part of the selec­tion pro­cess for an employ­ment role makes a lie of Daniel’s reassurance.

If a test of any kind is used as part of an employee selec­tion pro­cess, there is an inten­tion to use it to jus­tify the selec­tion of a par­tic­u­lar can­did­ate and to exclude oth­ers. It has already been decided by the inter­viewer, selec­tion panel or organ­isa­tion that a par­tic­u­lar per­son­al­ity is required for the role (or, con­versely, that par­tic­u­lar per­son­al­ity pro­files are to be avoided). This means that, for the organ­isa­tion, par­tic­u­lar responses on the per­son­al­ity test are, in fact, right or wrong.

Look­ing at per­son­al­ity tests from the point of view of the can­did­ate exper­i­en­cing the job inter­view pro­cess, there are also right and wrong answers. In our example, Matt des­per­ately wants the job but does not neces­sar­ily know what per­son­al­ity pro­file Daniel is look­ing for, nor does Matt know what responses he needs to give to present the ‘right’ per­son­al­ity pro­file for the job. Addi­tion­ally, he knows that he should be hon­est dur­ing a job inter­view. When nervous, the ten­sion cre­ated by the need to be hon­est and also the desire to meet the ‘needs’ of the inter­viewer is unlikely to help Matt through the selec­tion pro­cess nor help Daniel find the right candidate.

Set aside for now whether there is any valid­ity in using Myers-Briggs, Keir­sey, DISC or any other per­son­al­ity test or tem­pera­ment sorter in a job inter­view, the simple mes­sage is that there are lies in the work­place that we use to smooth the path or pla­cate people; but they are still lies. A lucid man­ager will make every effort to assist Matt through the inter­view pro­cess and would also be aware that, truth be told, there is a right or wrong answer to every ques­tion in a job inter­view — the answer that demon­strates suit­ab­il­ity for the job.

For more inform­a­tion and cri­tique of per­son­al­ity pro­files, con­firm­a­tion bias and the Forer effect check out Peter’s essay, Know Thy­self. Also check out Peter’s recruit­ment, arguing that every busi­ness gets the employ­ees they deserve.

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