Posts tagged Development

Scientists did an experiment with a bunch of children where they gave them several tests that got increasingly more difficult.  After the first two tests, they told the children that they had done very well. Group A was praised them for being smart and talented. Group B was praised for their hard work.

Next they gave them a very difficult test–so difficult that many children didn’t get a single question right. They then told both groups that they hadn’t done as well on this test and asked them if they knew why. The students from group A said that it must be because they weren’t smart enough. Group B said that it must be because they didn’t try hard enough.

That in  itself is pretty amazing. Giving people praise for being smart basically backfires because it teaches them that success comes from being intelligent. Once they are faced with a situation where they fail, the logical conclusion is that they must not be very intelligent.  On the other hand, praising people for working hard helps them stay focused on something they can control–their effort.

My 4 year old is pretty advanced when it comes to reading. According to a test we recently had her take, she reads on the level of a 10 or 11 year old. I’m not sure how accurate the test is, but I do know that it isn’t normal for a kid who isn’t even kindergarten age to read chapter books. (As a side note, one of my proudest moments as a parent was when I saw her 2 year old brother bring her a book and she sat down on the floor and read it to him.)

So is my daughter a genius? No. She has simply put in a lot of hard work. Of course not nearly as much hard work as my incredible wife who taught her how to read.

So back to the experiment. The scientists went ahead and gave the kids another test. This time one that was much easier. Up to this point the kids in both groups had performed about the same on the tests. There was no significant difference between them. On this final test, there was a wide variance in the scores. Members of group A (who had been told they were smart) did about 25% worse than group B (who had been told they had worked hard).

Why did this happen? Lets try to imagine the thought process of these two groups:

Group A – told they were smart:

• Test 1 – Oh I’m pretty smart. Good for me.
• Test 2 – Hm. They say I must be really smart. Maybe I’m smarter than I realized.
• Test 3 (the hard one) – I did horrible. I guess I’m not very smart. Maybe I’m not even as smart as I originally thought.
• Test 4 – I didn’t really try that hard because this test taking isn’t really for me.

Group B – told they had worked hard:

• Test 1 – Hey they are proud of how hard I worked.
• Test 2 – I did it again. I must be working pretty hard.
• Test 3 (the hard one) – Not so good. I must not have worked as hard on this one.
• Test 4 – I tried extra hard on this one and I think I did pretty well.

That is a pretty big difference just based a small change in wording isn’t it?

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A reader named Susan left an interesting comment on Never Hire an MBA. She doesn’t like the article, but what I found interesting was this part of her comment:

Are you familiar with discrimination laws, well although there is not currently a discrimination law that would protect individuals from potential employers from discriminating against individuals who are unemployed, I am proud to say that I am one of thousands who have signed a petition against little minded people who discriminate against the unemployed.

I hadn’t heard of this before, but after a little research I found that some employers are including requirements in their job postings that basically say, “we only consider job candidates who are currently employed.”  Some people are upset about this because they feel it discriminates against people who don’t have a job. Which it obviously does.

Why would you do this?

So why would a company do this? Well if you were wanting to hire someone and knew that you’d get hundreds of applications, wouldn’t you want to restrict those applications to the pool of people who would statistically be best for the job? Lets say you have 1,000 workers who all have identical skill sets.  Half of them have a job and half were fired 9 months ago.  If you randomly choose someone from the first group and randomly choose someone from the second group who do you think has a better chance of being a good hire?  Lets say you repeat the experiment 100 times. Do you think you’d get a higher percentage of good hires from the employed group or the unemployed group?

Now regardless of what you think will happen, some HR departments think their chances would be a bit better with the employed group.   If you have 1,000 employees, an excellent employee appraisal system and suddenly needed to let half of them go, would the people you lay off be random?  Probably not. You’d try to let people go who are least tied to your ability to make profit.  That doesn’t mean that they are all bad workers. If Sue’s expertise is in project X and you are about to cancel X, you’d probably let her go before you let Bob go who works on Z where Z is your main money maker.  But you’d also let go people who aren’t as productive, who show up late, who are harder to work with, etc. Another reason employers might do this is because they realize that job skills can get out of date very quickly. Since a lot of people have been out of work for a long time, they may feel more comfortable concentrating on people who are currently employed.

So HR departments figure they would rather hire the workers that other employers can’t do with out–not because they think everyone in the unemployed pool is a bad worker, but just because they think that their chances of randomly getting a good worker from the employed pool are better. Is it fair to a particular individual? No. Is it completely irrational? Not as irrational as other decisions HR makes. Besides HR may be admitting that they have very little ability to do their jobs and find good job candidates. If they are going to select a job candidate at random, they better try to do it in a way that increases their odds.

What can you do about this?

If you are unemployed, what can you do about this?  Well you can do try to find some petition to sign, but there are more productive options.  Here is what I would do:

1. Take any job – Find a job where you will learn something and take it as a learning experience. I’ve always wanted to work for McDonalds for a few weeks just to see how their systems are organized. It wouldn’t make any financial sense from a salary perspective, but from a learning perspective I think it would be fascinating. You could get a job selling cars or doing some form of direct customer service. The idea is to build your skills by doing something.  Now the problem with this approach is that unemployment seems to help people more if they wait for a high paying job.  It basically introduces an artificial element into the employment process that keep people from going out and getting any job just to stay working, but that is an issue best addressed in a different post.
2. Volunteer – The next option would be to volunteer somewhere. Keep yourself on a schedule where you have to get up in the morning and go somewhere to do some type of work. If you are on unemployment, society is basically paying you a salary so do your best to contribute back while keeping yourself busy doing something. At the very least, volunteering will help make sure you are out meeting people and the best way to get a job is always going to be through someone you know.
3. Contribute Online – This is similar to volunteering, but getting involved in online community projects can be another great option.  If you code, you can program for an open source project. You can help open source projects with their documentation, test for bugs, write up meeting notes, etc.
4. Learn – Read the top 10 books in your field that you haven’t had a chance to read. Take an online class or work toward a certificate or citation program or get started on some type of masters degree in your field. Look for things that are quantifiable that you can put on your resume.
5. Blog – Write about stuff in your field. You can review the top books about the area where you want to get a job. You can do interviews with people in your field and post them on your blog.

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Normally I’ve taken the position that an MBA can be well worth the money. Even my arguments that many employers overvalue MBA candidates suggests that the degree may be a very profitable career decision. My article Never Hire an MBA got a lot of attention.  I was surprised at the number of people who missed the point of the article, thought I was saying that no one should get an MBA and tried to defend the degree.  While there were some well thought out arguments, there were quite a few that were—well lets just say, less well reasoned.  Take a look at them for yourself and you’ll see what I mean.  Also keep in mind that I moderated quite a few of the really bad ones.

This kind of surprised me.  Not that I didn’t expect anyone to disagree, I just figured a disagreement with a bunch of MBA grads would occur on a different level than what I was seeing in the comments. One particular MBA grad called me an idiot, I responded by clarifying my position and asking about his experience, his response was to find a picture of me and called me several other names. While it isn’t uncommon for me to have disagreements with people, this style of argument was something foreign.

Still I had to delete quite a few comments–not because they disagreed with me, not because they called me an idiot, but because they contained language that I didn’t want on my website and didn’t have any discernible point of view once the language was removed.  I realize it isn’t fair or accurate to lump every business student into the same group based on the responses of a few individuals, but it did make me start looking into some research regarding the value of business degrees. My results were startling.  For example, during the first two years of college, undergraduates who study business show the least improvement in their writing and reasoning skills of any major. If the same thing holds true for graduate business students, it might explain some of the comments I was seeing.

While we are on the subject of undergraduate degrees, I ran into another surprising statistic. The GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) is typically the test you have to take to get into an MBA program. Lets say you are trying to choose an undergraduate degree based on what will best prepare you for taking the GMAT. Wouldn’t you be interested in avoiding the degree that produces the lowest average scores on the GMAT.  For example, if English or History majors got the lowest scores on the GMAT, you might want to study something else. You’d think that studying business would be a safe bet.  It’s not.  In fact, of all the different degrees, business majors get the lowest scores on the GMAT.

Let that sink in for a moment. What if pre-med students did the worse on medical school admission exams? What if pre-law students were the least qualified to get into law school?

So if the GMAT is a good indication of how well you’ll do in an MBA program and going through an MBA program is a good way to do well in business, then studying business as an undergraduate is the worst possible choice you can make.

Those seem like reasonable assumptions don’t they.  Doing well in an MBA program should somewhat correlate with doing well in business right? One would think, but the book Personal MBA pointed me to some research that shows the opposite.

Jeffrey Pfeffer from Stanford and Christina Fong from University of Washington looked at 40 years worth of data to see:

• If possessing an MBA correlated with career success, increased salary, etc.
• If doing well in an MBA was useful in predicting how well one would do in business.

Their idea was that if an MBA degree was valuable, then people with an MBA should have more successful careers than people without one.  And, if the skills taught in an MBA program were important to business, then people who had high grades should do better in business than their classmates who had lower grades.

Yesterday we talked about influence. One of the primary keys to influence is good communication. It doesn’t matter how good your ideas are if you can’t communicate them in a way that will connect with your audience and bring about change.  In this post, we are going to look at three ways to communicate  more effectively.

1. Be visual

I once ran an IT department for a non-profit with about 200 employees.  In the work room we had a large color and a large b&w printer.  The cost on the color printer was about $0.15 per page.  The cost of the b&w was $0.015 per page.  I kept trying to ask people to use the b&w unless they had a compelling reason to print color.  When you are printing 50,000 toe 100,000 pages per month the $0.015 vs $0.15 made a big difference on the budget.  A few casual visits to the work room made it clear that no one was listening. A good percentage of the paper being printed on the color printer was b&w or had unnecessary color.

I had my assistant get me 165 pennies to prepare for a meeting where I was going to try once again.  I took 10 sheets of paper, put them on the table and said, “Here is how much this costs to print on the b&w printer.”  Then I dropped 15 pennies on the table.  ”Here is how much it costs to print these same 10 sheets on the color printer.”  I then dropped 150 pennies on the table, making as much noise as possible and letting them roll all over the place and onto the floor.

After that, people started being more careful.  Behavior didn’t change overnight, but there was a noticeable drop in the usage on the color printer.  Dropping the pennies on the table made an impression–something I hadn’t been able to do before using just my words. Showing is nearly always more effective than saying.

2. Tell stories

Stories engage us. They turn words into images and thoughts into emotions. Story telling is a powerful part of effective communication. As we start getting into the swing of things for the next election, watch how stories are used.  Coming out and saying that 75% of the population was helped by program X is almost meaningless compared to trotting out a husband, wife and two kids and telling their story as an example.

We are not wired to respond on a deep emotional level to raw facts and figures, but we do respond deeply to the emotion, failures and success of other people.

3. What people hear vs. what you say

After Obama won the election, the news crews were talking to people who were very excited about his success.  One person interviewed was a woman who made the statement that now she wouldn’t have to worry about putting gas in her car. Now she wouldn’t have to worry about her mortgage. I didn’t watch everything Obama said, but I don’t think he made any promises to pay mortgages or give away free gas. I do know he did a pretty good job of conveying a message of hope, but what that lady heard and what Obama said were not at all the same thing. Here is the video:

While this may be a bit of an extreme example, it is vitally important to remember that what you say isn’t the important thing.  What matters is what people hear.  In many cases those to things can be miles apart. All of us hear things through our own set of biases, assumptions and personalities. When you are communicating it is easy to be so focused on what you say, that you overlook what people will hear.

(This isn’t meant to be any type of political statement. It is just the best illustration of my point.)

So, in summary, if you want to be a better communicator, be visual, tell stories, and concentrate on what people hear.

Some of my friends are involved in putting on a series of communication workshops starting in Vail this October. That is what got me thinking about  this post in the first place.  If you are interested in their event,  checkout the Dynamic Communicator’s Workshops.

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