What's the "AHA!" REPORT all about?

This series of newsletters contains AHA! information to help people and organizations hire the best employees, make the best promotion decisions, retain the most qualified people, maintain the widest applicant pool, follow best practices, and (if you are subject to US law) remain aware of EEOC hot-spots.

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September is just around the corner. In a time of scary economics, emotional politics, and downright weird weather, there’s a comforting autumn ritual popping up these days on nearly every TV: the start of a new football season. (If you’re not a fan, please bear with me for a moment.)

For many of us, the first sight of familiar uniforms and fake grass may provoke a giddy moment of optimism that this could be The Year. For an I-O psychologist, however, the last-minute personnel juggling and public prognostications of a favorite team’s management are almost as exciting. That’s because they offer some classic examples of the folly of organizations.

Staffing Fumbles On and Off the Field

Perhaps the most common “staffing” fallacy in football is that a given college star, now one year older and a lot richer, will immediately start performing well in the pros. Good luck, champ, because it’s a different game out there, and you’ll probably need some different skills. Moving a successful player into a new coaching system or position, or even from one side of the formation to the other, can likewise produce disappointing results. My favorite is when an athlete who’s been bashing heads effectively for a few seasons on the same team is expected to “step up to a leadership role.”

This kind of thinking is just as prevalent, though not always as obvious, in more mundane workplaces. For example: an articulate, good-looking applicant will make a high-performing employee; a high-performing employee will make a good manager; or, a highly skilled employee in Job A will also prove to be a highly skilled employee in Job B.

Sorry, people. We all know from experience that this is general nonsense. Stories are legend about a top salesperson or technical guru who failed as a manager; or, about a marketing whiz-kid who fast-tracked into the executive suite only to crash and burn on the job. Don’t get me started about overpriced wide receivers.

Let’s send this silliness back to the showers. The only time that past performance in Job A accurately predicts future performance in Job B is when both jobs are require virtually the same competencies. If Job B is different, requires more competencies or better quality ones, all bets are off. In fact, the only reliable way someone might even guess at future performance is to know that the employee screwed up his or her last job.

The Perennial Peter Principle
Consider the Peter Principle. If you don’t know the term, Google it or read about it here. In short, Dr. Laurence Peter gave multiple examples of how employees tend to rise in the organization until they reach their natural level of incompetence. His message: every time that job requirements change – or an employee changes jobs – there is a strong probability that the employee will not be competent in the new role.

Although Peter uses corporate ladder-climbing for his examples, his observations apply equally to all people holding jobs. (The corollary Dilbert Principle, which holds that the worst-performing employees are often promoted to middle management to limit the front-line damage they can do, is somewhat less well-established.) This 40-year-old book is still a classic must-read for every recruiter or hiring manager. In the next few paragraphs, I’ll explain why the Peter Principle is alive and well.

Little Observations = Big Assumptions
The world is a huge, complicated, and unpredictable place. If we had to investigate every situation thoroughly before making a decision, we would run out of hours in the day. So, evolution has blessed (or cursed) us with an unconscious tendency to make snap decisions based on clues linked to things we learned much earlier.

For example, we consider taller people to be more skilled than shorter people (perhaps because adults are always bigger than kids). We assume that best-dressed applicants will be better performers than the rest (because we equate attractiveness with success). Looking at past experience, we assume that bad job experiences were the applicant’s fault (because we blame the victim).

Even when we look at more “factual” information, we still tend to use a snippet of data to form an overall opinion: a spelling mistake must mean incompetence; a charismatic employee is also a competent one; or, an Ivy Leaguer will perform better than a public school graduate.

Little observations, however, often lead to big mistakes.

The Interview Hammer and the Applicant Nail
Ask any recruiter manager who relies on (unstructured) interviews and he or she is likely to swear by their accuracy. Look at any sales manager and he or she will say they are a good judge of character. However, when you look at the employees hired by these people, you will wonder, “What were they smoking when they hired such a bunch of troglodytes?”

There is a major disconnect between being asking get-to-know-you questions and evaluating job skills. Industry-wide research shows the gap to be about 50%. That’s even worse than it looks: it means that interviews may screen out blatantly unqualified applicants, but it’s a coin-toss whether survivors have sufficient job skills. Any recruiter or manager who is only familiar with interviews (or a silly training test) is doomed to believe one tool can measure every job skill. Holding the proverbial hammer, they’re bound to see a lot of nails.

Job Funnels
Organization charts are about more than titles. They are more like an upside-down funnel. As a general rule, higher-level jobs less-common combinations of competencies – better ones, and more of them. Take sales, for example. A true professional salesperson has exceptional rapport-building skills, is skilled in asking the right questions at the right time, only makes presentations that fit the prospect’s needs, and can help buyers overcome the fear of making a bad decision.

Now, move the salesperson into a management role. The job requirements change significantly. In addition to individual sales skills, the person must become a coach, a planner, and a sales diagnostician. Skills that came naturally as a salesperson must now be broken down into discrete, teachable elements. In addition to having the right skills, the new manager must be as excited about the satisfaction of being a mentor as he or she was about the thrill of the close.

The following examples point out some of the most common differences between roles:

1. Individual contributors must have skills to do the job without assistance.
2. In addition to their individual contributor skills, first line managers must also be skilled at coaching, planning, and diagnosing subordinate shortcomings.
3. Mid-managers usually require skills in group influence, tactics, analysis, planning, and mentoring.
4. Executive managers are usually required to be strategists, navigators, and motivators.

We can’t always rely on job titles to describe job functions. I have often seen fancy titles that disguise individual contributors, as well as complicated, demanding jobs with deceptively simple titles. The key to driving successful performance is to know exactly what skills are required; then, using a variety of structured interviews, pencil and paper tests, and simulations, to accurately evaluate them.