Minds at Work

360 degrees of credit and blame

Ben Dattner — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 22:21:07 +0000

As mentioned in earlier postings, credit and blame is at the heart of organizational psychology, for better or for worse. The "who, what, where, why, when, and how" of the assignment of positive regard or negative feedback in the workplace is a key driver of either productive or dysfunctional dynamics and performance at the individual, team, and organizational levels.

Here is a Credit and Blame 360 that assesses how fairly or unfairly a manager assigns credit and/or blame to his or her colleagues and subordinates:

Let's start with the first "item" on this 360:

"Assigns credit and blame based on facts and not personal biases"

It's a rare manager who is able to fully focus on facts without being unduly influenced by personal biases of all kinds, whether biases about people, situations, or the meaning of information about people or situations. In my experience, enlightened managers are aware of their personal biases, and work to correct them. For example, in assessing the performance of a subordinate, a mindful manager will consider how he or she would have assessed the quality, quantity or timeliness of the subordinate's work if it had been completed by someone else. This is analogous to the advice to "separate the person from the problem" provided by Fisher and Ury in their book "Getting to Yes".

Unfortunately, many of us have bosses who assign credit and blame based on personal biases rather than on facts. Some managers have "in-groups" who can do no wrong and "out-groups" who can do no right. Their personal biases about individuals who they get along with versus those they don't get along with provides a lens through which they interpret information and evaluate performance.

I look forward to hearing from you, readers, about experiences you've had with bosses who either did rise above their biases, or those who didn't.

Rationalizing your boss's rationalizations

Ben Dattner — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:52:48 +0000

Credit and blame are at the heart of organizational behavior. Over the years, issues of credit and blame have been among my clients' top concerns. When working well, credit and blame can enable individuals, teams, and entire organizations to confront reality and effectively move forward. When broken, however, credit and blame can derail efforts at any level of an organization.

Among the top complaints my clients have had about credit and blame are that their bosses simply "don't get it", and see the world through biased lenses.

The following are examples of descriptions that apply to an unfortunately large proportion of bosses:

"Rewrites history" in order to unfairly claim credit or deny blame

Blames due to personal biases rather than the facts at hand

Blames others for own errors or mistakes

Blames situational factors rather than own performance for poor results

Cares more about avoiding personal blame than in contributing to the organization

Cares more about getting personal credit than in contributing to the organization

Claims more credit than he/she is due

Generally holds others to the same standards as him/herself

Is more interested in confirming own beliefs than in understanding the current situation

Is willing to confront own weaknesses and work to remedy them

Is willing to share appropriate credit with other individuals

Rationalizes own actions instead of taking responsibility

Seems to have selective memory when it comes to credit and blame

Takes unfair credit for efforts instead of taking fair credit for outcomes

Views him or herself as above rules that apply to other people

I look forward to hearing from all of you- have you witnessed or experienced the kinds of biases mentioned above?

Introducing a new interactive blog series: Credit and Blame at Work

Ben Dattner — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:30:32 +0000

Dear Readers,

I am pleased to launch a new interactive "series" on this blog: "Credit and Blame at Work".

I'm currently working on a book about credit and blame, and will give due credit to anyone who can post an interesting response or a helpful link in response to the topics that we will be exploring together.

Why credit and blame? Because in my experience as an organizational psychologist, consultant and executive coach, the dynamics of credit and blame are at the heart of every workplace, for better or for worse.

Credit and blame is where "the energy is", and can either be a source of cohesion and commitment or anger and resentment.

We'll be looking at the various ways in which people piss each other off in the workplace by the manner in which they either hog credit or deny blame. We'll explore the individual psychology, relationship dynamics, team dynamics, and organizational culture factors that help determine how credit and blame play out. Although we will often talk about how bosses use and abuse credit and blame, we will also talk about how peers or even subordinates can have a role in playing the blame game.

Ultimately, I will be developing an assessment that individuals and teams will be able to use to get a "360 degree" perspective on how well they do in assigning credit and blame. This assessment will have items like:

- Takes a balanced and fair view of credit and blame

- Is totally self serving in assigning credit and blame.

If you have a great boss or colleague who represents the paradigm of fairness when it comes to credit and blame, please describe how he or she accomplishes that.

If you have a boss who is totally self serving in assigning credit and blame, here is your chance to vent.

In either case, please make sure not to post company names, real names of any individuals, or any other identifiying information. That way, we can share, discuss and debate different kinds of credit and blame without ourselves getting blamed for any negative real-world impact on anyone.

Thank you in advance for making this an interesting and engaging series.

Making the Most of Your Promotion

Ben Dattner — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:55:18 +0000

In these troubling economic times, we all know people who have lost their jobs. Losing your job can be a very painful and upsetting experience for a whole host of symbolic and substantive reasons. Friends and family members who are currently in career transition need our empathy, sympathy and support.

Interestingly, though, there are some indications that getting promoted can actually be as stressful as, if not more stressful than, losing your job. Andrew Solomon mentions research on this topic in his brilliant book Noonday Demon about depression.

There are many possible reasons why this could be the case. First of all, getting promoted can bring up insecurities about one's capabilities. Many people who are appointed to higher level positions become concerned that they will suffer from the "Peter Principle"- getting promoted to the level where one becomes incompetent and gets stuck there.

Secondly, people struggle with promotions because of the added level of effort, stress and responsibility that higher level positions often involve. Gone are the days where managers could delegate their anxiety to their subordinates. In the current economy, bosses often worry more than their teams.

Thirdly, there are often unexpected social costs of getting promoted. It's hard to maintain friendships with peers once they become subordinates. The colleagueship of being on a team can turn into the "loneliness at the top." It can be very difficult for some people to deal with the resentment and envy that promotions bring.

Finally, achieving any kind of goal can be bittersweet. As Dan Gilbert argues in Stumbling on Happiness, we are all bad at predicting what will make us happy or sad in the future. Having high expectations about the benefits that a promotion can bring may lead to serious disappointment. The energizing anticipation of striving to rise in an organizational structure can be better than the realities one confronts once promoted.

One other thing in terms of comparing losing your job to getting promoted. If you lose your job, you will hopefully garner sympathy and support from your family, friends and colleagues. If you get promoted, people may be much less sympathetic to the challenges you are facing. So the next time you get promoted, keep in mind that you are likely to face new, unexpected stressors. And the next time someone you know gets promoted, make sure you empathize with their new predicament.

I'd be interested in hearing from all of you-

- Do you believe that getting promoted can be as stressful as losing one's job?

The baggage we bring to work each day

Ben Dattner — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 14:50:00 +0000

Henry Ford reportedly once complained that all he wanted from a worker was a pair of hands, but that he had to deal with the whole person instead. Each of us brings our whole self to work each day, regardless of whether we have a chance to express and actualize ourselves in our jobs.

As much as we might like to believe we can adapt our personality or our style as needed at work, to an outside observer, we are likely to have many of the same strengths and weaknesses in the workplace that we have outside of it. Whether we suffer at home or at work from a lack of assertiveness or from too much confidence, whether we are accommodating peacemakers or contentious resisters, or whether we are supportive and empathic or businesslike and formal, who we are in our personal lives is inextricably linked to who we are in the workplace. And who we are in our personal lives and in our professional lives is always a function, at least in part, of our early life experience.

As an executive coach, one of my most important roles is to help my clients understand what they are bringing to work each day. I often find that people use language to describe bosses or co-workers that sounds as if they are describing parents or siblings. For example, bosses can be "supportive" or ""critical" and peers can be "competitive" or "favored." There are times when someone's early life experience is clearly affecting his or her interactions and causing relationship difficulties in the workplace.

For example, consider the story of a successful finance professional who was having difficulty managing his team. A brilliant technical expert, he did not enjoy supervising others and was widely resented by those who reported directly to him for his curt and brusque answers to their questions. In the course of our work together, he realized his direct reports were bringing back to him childhood memories of having been distracted and discouraged by his siblings, who lacked his academic talent and usually bothered him with requests for assistance with their homework.

By realizing that he was having a kind of flashback and was viewing his present direct reports through the prism of his past experience, this finance guy developed greater patience with his staff. Although he never fully embraced the role of manager, he was able to foster a sense of loyalty and cohesion on his team.

It's not only sibling relationships that provide an unconscious framework within which workplace relationships and interactions are evaluated. I've also worked with many clients for whom parental relationships provide a template for boss-subordinate relationships. Much of our identity and sense of self can be either helped or hindered by our bosses, in a manner strikingly similar to how our parents either encouraged or discouraged us as children.

Whether or not we like to admit it, our self-esteem can be profoundly affected by the positive or negative regard of our superiors in the workplace, and they can confirm our hopes or our fears about ourselves every day. One client described how much more important it was that his boss viewed him as competent and valued than it was to get a salary increase.

Despite having seen many examples of people who have the same issues at home and at work, I have also come across clients who have quite different issues at home and at work; sometimes it even seems that they are opposite issues. An attorney who may be energetically contentious in the courtroom can be calm and friendly with her friends. An overachieving research scientist can forget to balance his checkbook at the end of every month.

However, I find that even in situations where someone has opposite issues at home and in the workplace, the fundamental character issues are related. In fact, the expression of opposite attributes at home and in the workplace makes a kind of sense-things that are overused in one area of life may be underused in another, or in order to compensate for a lack of opportunities to express part of your character at home, you might express it in the workplace.

Whether you are the same person at work and at home, or whether you experience and express different aspects of yourself in your personal life than you do in your professional life, you should consider how your early life experiences provide a prism from the past through which you are evaluating situations in the present.

Note: The above post was originally published on Business Week online.

Holding managers accountable for their hiring decisions

Ben Dattner — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:39:28 +0000

Imagine you're the CEO of a hypothetical mutual fund company with 10 different mutual funds and 40 managers of those funds. Now, imagine you didn't know which manager had bought which stocks. Absurd, right? You would never be able to make adjustments as far as which managers were good stock pickers and which ones were not.

As absurd as this scenario is, there's an equivalent situation in most organizations in that managers are not held accountable for which employees they decide to "invest" in by hiring them. It's very rare that organizations hold hiring managers accountable for their hiring decisions, although the decision to hire an employee is really very similar to the decision to buy a stock- in either case, you are taking a calculated risk and making a prediction about future performance based on past performance.

A very simple way to remedy this is to come up with criteria, such as the ones listed below. For each one, you can create a five point scale, with 1 meaning the candidate would not likely be successful on that criterion, and a 5 meaning that the candidate, in your view, is highly likely to be successful in this area.

1. Technical ability
2. Leadership skills
3. Interpersonal skills
4. Presentation skills
5. Teamwork
6. Conflict management
7. Motivation
8. Catalyzing change
9. Cultural fit
10. Organizational citizenship

These quantitative benchmarks can serve as a basis for discussion between different hiring managers, and can also enable the organization to determine which managers are the best predictors of which dimensions. For example, the company can check in one year later and correlate the predictions made on the above dimensions with actual performance ratings on the job. Even if organizations don't crunch numbers to assess hiring managers, this kind of rating form can be helpful to evaluate your own skill in interviewing and hiring. You can see what kinds of candidates you are biased towards, and learn how to make better predictions over time.

For more information on this topic, here's an article from HR Magazine.

I'd be interested in hearing from you about your experiences with hiring manager accountability, or lack thereof.

Valid and invalid concerns about the validity of 360's

Ben Dattner — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 22:09:41 +0000

360 degree feedback is an increasingly popular tool for executive coaching and leadership development. An individual evaluates him or herself along some predetermined quantitative and qualitative dimensions, providing numerical ratings for the quantitative items and comments for the qualitative ones. This feedback can then provide valuable input into the individual's strengths and areas for professional development.

Human Resources professionals are often tasked with finding a technology provider for 360 degree feedback, which is most easily collected online and tabulated automatically by companies such as EchoSpan or SuccessFactors. HR sometimes gets asked by the executives or managers who are going to be participating in the 360 process whether the particular items being asked about the individuals who are participating have been "validated".

While having concerns about the relevance and utility of the items being asked on a 360 is understandable, there is no need to be concerned about the "validity" of the 360 items. This is because the traditional meanings of validation:

1. Extrapolating from a sample to an entire population (e.g. if a political poll is taken before an election, do the responses from the sample provide a valid reflection of how the entire population of voters would vote if the election were held on that particular day)

2. Making predictions about the future (e.g. does this personality or intelligence test predict who will be successful).

... are not applicable in a 360 context.

It does, however, make sense to inquire about the utility of the 360, considering questions such as:

- Have people who have received this kind of feedback been able to improve their leadership skills?

- Have teams who have taken a team 360 been able to build on strengths and overcome obstacles?

Whether or not statistical analysis has been conducted on items is much less important than whether those items can catalyze thought and action. The highly popular Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) for example, is not even reliable, much less valid, yet is still the most commonly used assessment in the workplace. As long as it is used to catalyze constructive discussions and not to select employees, the validity of the MBTI is beside the point.

In conclusion, a 360 should be a starting point for individuals and teams to reflect on their performance and consider ways to improve it. Whether or not a 360 has been used elsewhere in the past is much less important than whether the questions asked, and the way in which they are asked, are relevant to the user's needs. The only "valid" concern about a 360 is whether or not it can raise awareness and help people improve their performance.

Good feedback, bad feedback

Ben Dattner — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 22:38:52 +0000

In the current economic environment, it is crucial for individuals, teams and organizations to continuously improve their performance. Getting and giving useful performance feedback, whether through a formal performance appraisal system, or through less formal, more ad-hoc tools like Rypple, can help greatly. Regardless of whether you are providing feedback in a formal annual review, a brief Rypple survey, or at the water cooler, here are some tips to keep in mind when providing feedback:

Feedback is least useful when it is:

Inaccurate or untrue: if the feedback recipient doubts the accuracy of the feedback, it is unlikely he or she will be able to learn from it

Biased due to favoritism or politics: although nothing in human affairs in general or the workplace in particular is ever "objective", the more the feedback can stand on its own rather than being seen as part of some personal or political agenda, the better.

Insensitive and unduly critical: this kind of feedback is unlikely to be "heard"- the recipient will be too upset to process what you are saying

Not specific or actionable: anything vague or out of the person's control is not going to help him or her do anything differently

Constituted by orders or ultimatums: this kind of feedback is likely to raise hackles rather than willingness or ability to improve.

Feedback is most useful when it is:

Candid and honest: this kind of feedback is credible and although it can be painful, is your best bet for helping the person get his or her game up

Specific and actionable: the more behaviorally-based the feedback is, rather than character-based, the more able the recipient will be to implement what you suggest

Based on more than one incident or example: without trying to "build a case", it is still helpful to bring multiple examples into your feedback so that the person can see patterns as they appear to others

Based on more than one person's view: this can be tricky- on one hand, if multiple people share a perception, it is likely to be more valid and credible. At the same time, you don't want the person to whom you're giving feedback to feel ganged up on

Framed positively and constructively: this is the opposite of being unduly critical- people are more likely to hear and act on feedback if you use a "carrot" rather than a "stick" in describing to them the potential benefits of doing something better or differently

Summarized and integrated into key themes: it is helpful to provide some thematic linkages between feedback in order to give the person a big picture view and then also provide detailed feedback in that larger context

For more information about how to design a performance appraisal system, here's a presentation on that topic.

The unavoidable conspiracy in every workplace

Ben Dattner — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:32:38 +0000

Everyone has their own favorite indicators of the sorry state of our economy and the stress that it is causing. Some people point to empty restaurants in New York City, plunging condo prices in Miami, or lengthening unemployment lines. Others point to the growth in prescriptions for anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medications.

In my travels as a workplace consultant, I've noticed another indicator: breathing. Andrew Weil has a popular relaxation CD called "Breathing: The Master Key to Self Healing" in which he describes relaxed and relaxing breathing as quiet, regular, slow, and deep. Unfortunately, in many offices I've visited recently, people are breathing noisily, irregularly, quickly, and shallowly.

The interesting thing about breathing in the workplace, or anywhere else, is how contagious it can be, for better or for worse. The word "conspiracy" literally means "to breath together" and probably has deep evolutionary roots- primates and early humans lived in environments, enclosed spaces, or altitudes where sufficient oxygen wasn't always plentiful. There was likely a survival advantage provided by being acutely sensitive to social signals of potential oxygen deprivation. We all have observed how contagious yawns are, even over the phone. The same thing happens any time two or more individuals get together- their breathing comes into partial or complete synchronization.

Next time you are in a meeting with a boss or coworker, try to observe your breathing and their breathing. Are you adapting to them, or are they adapting to you? If you want to calm yourself and them down, try to make your breathing quiet, regular, slow and deep as Dr. Weil recommends.

I'd be interested in hearing from all of you about what you've observed in terms of breath and breathing in the workplace.

Better interviewing through psychology

Ben Dattner — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:00:43 +0000

In these difficult economic times, many people are in transition and looking for new jobs. Even though employment interviews are often unreliable and invalid predictors of job performance, they remain the most common and most heavily weighted selection methodology for most employers.

Much has been written about the subjectivity of interviews, and how interviewers often make up their minds in the first few seconds of an interview. Here's an excellent article on the topic by Malcom Gladwell that was published in the New Yorker. Knowing about the psychology of interviewers can help you if you're an interviewee.

Based on my experience coaching clients who are in the process of interviewing, here are several suggestions:

- Practice, practice, practice. Do as many interviews as your schedule will permit, including informational interviews and mock/practice interviews with colleagues and friends. Also, try to get videotaped doing a simulated interview and then review the tape to see how you come across. It can be disconcerting to watch oneself on camera, but doing so can help you identify and remedy problematic verbal or nonverbal habits.

- Don't answer the cliched question "what are your greatest weaknesses?" with strengths disguised as weaknesses, such as "I'm a perfectionist" or "I work too hard". Interviewers will see through this and your credibility will be hurt. Instead, describe capabilities you've developed over the course of your career and how the role for which you are being considered will help you further develop those skills.

- Have questions ready for your interviewer about the organization and its culture. This will show that you are trying to assess the potential fit between yourself and the role, rather than just looking to take the first offer you get. This also implicitly shows that you are considering whether the role is right for you, even as you describe why you are right for the role. The more your interviewer talks during the interview, the more likely he or she is to view you favorably.

- Don't be defensive about having left your last job, and don't rush through your description of the circumstances under which you left your last job. Take the time to be thoughtful as you describe what happened, and don't come across as trying to rush through that part of the interview, as rushing may create suspicion or concern on the part of your interviewer.

For a TV segment about how to enhance your interview skills, see this clip from NY1 News, February 16, 2009.

I look forward to hearing from you- what are some best practices you have come across in interviewing?