Perspectives on Risk - 2/22/22 - The Management Issue
What Methods Work Best When Hiring? Give Advice, not Feedback; Start Meetings on Time; Show Gratitude (and They’ll Pay It Forward); Observations on Learning; Multitasking; Extroverts; Goals; ++
The Management Issue; no risk-specific stuff today.
For some reason, I continue to be interested in research on how to enhance individual and team performance. This PoR will share some research I have seen. Major hat tip to Ethan Mollick @emollick whose Twitter feed has highlighted many of these studies.
What Methods Work Best When Hiring?
Structured interviews (which we used effectively at the Federal Reserve, but did not use at AIG) are the most effective method. Other studies have found that unstructured interviews are horribly ineffective and lead to high levels of bias.
Job knowledge tests and/or work sample tests also are important.
Years of job experience and personality tests rank very low.
Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection: Addressing systematic overcorrection for restriction of range (preprint on pubmed.gov; $14.95)
If you want further evidence that you should stop using unstructured interviews, read Belief in the Unstructured Interview: The Persistence of an Illusion.
People form confident impressions even interviews are defined to be invalid, like our random interview, and these impressions can interfere with the use of valid information. Our simple recommendation for those making screening decisions is not to use them.
Give Advice, not Feedback
This seems like a stupidly simple observation, and something we are getting systematically wrong. I’d much rather get advice than feedback; I suspect most of us would.
Soliciting Advice Rather Than Feedback Yields More Developmental, Critical, and Actionable Input (It looks like they changed the title from Framing to Soliciting, which I think is a big mistake. If management mandates “feedback” the onus ought to be on them and not the staff receiver).
[F]eedback seeking is only weakly related to performance, and employees often report that the feedback that they receive is unhelpful. … a request for “feedback” limits the criticality and actionability of providers’ insight because it fails to increase their future orientation.
Critically, we observe a simple yet powerful alternative: feedback seekers can ask for “advice” instead. … [W]e find that input is more developmental (more critical and actionable) when providers are asked to give advice (versus feedback)—due to a greater future focus. … [F]raming an input request as advice seeking is a promising way to better align feedbackseekers’ information-seeking strategies with their communication goals.
Our research illuminates a suboptimal feedback-seeking-and-giving process; by requesting “feedback,” those who are seeking developmental insights receive comments that are less in line with their goals than if they had prompted a future orientation in their input provider by asking for “advice.” In doing so, we identify a costless, easy-to-implement intervention to solicit developmental, critical, and actionable information: managers, employees, and organizational leaders designing feedback forms intended to elicit developmental information could solicit “advice” instead.
I mean, duh. Why don’t we do this?
Focus on Starting Meetings on Time
Always a bugaboo.
Let's get this meeting started: Meeting lateness and actual meeting outcomes
In this paper, we build on recent findings on the prevalence of meeting lateness (Rogelberg et al., 2014) and consider the manifold adverse effects of meeting lateness in terms of attendees’ affective, cognitive, and behavioral reactions to meeting lateness.
[O]ur findings consistently show that people anticipate and actually experience lower meeting satisfaction and effectiveness when meetings start late. The experimental studies show that meeting lateness has a meaningful negative impact on participants’ attitudes about the meeting and its results, both in terms of post meeting experiences in the field (Study 1) and in terms of anticipated meeting effectiveness (when experimentally inducing meeting lateness
[M]eetings that started late suffered from a significantly higher rate of interruptions in particular. Meetings that started late were also characterized be emergent temporal patterns of negative socioemotional behavior, compared to meetings that started on time.
Our findings regarding the deteriorating interaction dynamics within the late-starting meeting itself are especially critical given previous research on negative communication dynamics in meetings, which has shown that dysfunctional meeting behaviors such as criticizing or complaining can pull groups into downward negative spirals and sap cognitive resources from more productive efforts such as problem solving
[M]eetings starting ten minutes late significantly impaired meeting processes and meeting effectiveness whereas “mild” meeting lateness (i.e., five minutes late) did not appear to affect meeting effectiveness suggests that the magnitude of lateness is an essential characteristic to consider.
Show Gratitude (and They’ll Pay It Forward)
Undervaluing Gratitude: Expressers Misunderstand the Consequences of Showing Appreciation
We believe that our experiments provide strong evidence that people underestimate the positive impact of expressing gratitude on recipients.
Participants in three experiments wrote gratitude letters and then predicted how surprised, happy, and awkward recipients would feel. Recipients then reported how receiving an expression of gratitude actually made them feel.
Expressers significantly underestimated how surprised recipients would be about why expressers were grateful, overestimated how awkward recipients would feel, and underestimated how positive recipients would feel.
[W]e found experimental evidence across multiple languages for the direct diffusion of gratitude expressions through cooperative networks. While thanks can be prompted by receiving something of value from another person, it can also be prompted by receiving thanks itself. Wikipedia contributors who receive expressions of gratitude also go on to thank others at a higher rate on average.
Receiving thanks could cause people to update their beliefs about normative practices in the communities. Receiving a message of thanks might also increase a person’s self-efficacy, leading them to be more confident about their ability to evaluate and appreciate other people’s contributions. Or the decision to thank others might be a form of generalized reciprocity, with senders wishing to “pay forward” the emotional benefits of receiving appreciation from others.
We also found that people who receive a single expression of appreciation continue to volunteer for a longer period.
So go change your culture - make sure you’re giving lot’s of thanks.
Multitasking
Research shows humans are really bad at multitasking, but we still like to do it. However, the perception that one is multitasking improves engagement! Just telling people they are multitasking makes them enjoy tasks more. And “individuals who perceive an activity as multitasking were more engaged and consequently outperformed those who perceived the same activity as single-tasking. The Illusion of Multitasking and Its Positive Effect on Performance
Observations on Learning
Be careful about over-emphasizing digital learning.
The myths of the digital native and the multitasker
This article presents scientific evidence showing that there is no such thing as a digital native who is information-skilled simply because (s)he has never known a world that was not digital. It then proceeds to present evidence that one of the alleged abilities of students in this generation, the ability to multitask, does not exist and that designing education that assumes the presence of this ability hinders rather than helps learning.
Information-savvy digital natives do not exist.
Learners cannot multitask; they task switch which negatively impacts learning.
Educational design assuming these myths hinders rather than helps learning.
However, there is some evidence that watching video content at 1.5x speed improves learning.
We presented participants with lecture videos at different speeds and tested immediate and delayed (1 week) comprehension. Results revealed minimal costs incurred by increasing video speed from 1x to 1.5x, or 2x speed, but performance declined beyond 2x speed. Learning in double time: The effect of lecture video speed on immediate and delayed comprehension
Extroverts - Be Careful About Burning Out Your People
Throughout the literatures on personality, social networks, and emergent leadership, there is little question as to the value of extraversion for understanding why some individuals emerge as informal leaders among others. But as the current research suggests, the dominant view of extraverted individuals among an unchanging cast of people seems incomplete.
Rather, our network churn perspective suggests a shift in the conversation from the stability of extraverted leaders to the variability of their networks.
Extraverted individuals are dynamic, informal leaders who indeed emerge and persist as such—but not necessarily among the same set of people. Revisiting Extraversion and Leadership Emergence: A Social Network Churn Perspective
Goals
Read This Again in 24 Hours
Now, if you want to remember anything I’ve written here, read this again in 24 hours.
Ebbinghaus' goal [1880] was to find the lawful relation between retention and time-since-learning. … [T]he experiment that yielded the famous forgetting curve describing forgetting over intervals ranging from 20 minutes to 31 days.
The Forgetting Curve shows that our retention of what we learn decays exponentially with time. But you can defeat this with spaced repetition, quizzing yourself at intervals.
Brian, I love this; takes me back to your corner office and the only thing missing is the soundtrack. You have a gift.