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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

“Oh, you hate your job? There’s a support group for that. It’s called Everybody, and they meet at the bar.”

It’s a Drew Carey line. Think he was exaggerating? He was. By 35 percent. That, according to the “Bad Boss Study” led by Michelle McQuaid, is the fraction of U.S. employees who are happy at their job. The remainder would, if given the choice, prefer a better boss to a raise.

How reliable are the numbers? Beats me. While the results of this study have been widely reported, the study itself is well hidden. I know nothing about the methodology, whether survey questions were without bias, the sample and error bar sizes, whether the study was subjected to peer review, or, for that matter, anything else that would affirm its validity.

It is, that is, pretty much par for the course for this sort of thing. Caveat emptor.

But even if we imagine the study was poorly done, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the leadership provided by U.S. managers is pretty bad.

Why is that? And what, as a leader yourself, can you do about it in your organization?

Here’s one place to start: Stop reading the Harvard Business Review. This will save you time and money, and will have the same effect with respect to bad ideas that frequent hand-washing has on infectious diseases: It will help you avoid exposure.

There is, for example, “One Out of Every Two Managers Is Terrible at Accountability,” (Darren Overfield and Rob Kaiser, 11/8/2012, and thanks to Mike Bowler for bringing it to my attention). According to the authors, “… far and away the single-most shirked responsibility of executives is holding people accountable. No matter how tough a game they may talk about performance, when it comes to holding people’s feet to the fire, leaders step back from the heat.”

How do we know? Their “database of 5,400 upper-level managers from the US, Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific gathered since 2010” tells us so. But speaking of missing methodologies, theirs is conspicuously absent.

Want evidence of the authors’ contempt for evidence? They ascribe much of the problem to “The youngest members of the workforce, especially in the U.S.,” who have a poor work ethic, an entitlement mentality, and “have grown up in a sheltered environment; they expect praise and recognition and can be indignant when it is not forthcoming.”

The evidence? “… blogs at US News, Daily Finance, Forbes.” That’s right. Several other bloggers say so too.

The authors don’t even bother to explain why they think holding people accountable is a good idea. They simply assert it as a management axiom.

But it’s a practice whose drawbacks exceed its virtues. Holding people accountable – “holding their feet to the fire” in the authors’ terms – assumes the root cause rather than discovering it. It simply presumes that if something goes wrong, someone must be at fault, and that the manager knows who that person is.

But if there’s fault, it’s almost always the manager’s, because when something goes wrong the most likely causes are such barriers to success as bad processes, frequent interruptions, inept delegation, politics, a failure to provide proper training, or otherwise leaving systemic problems in place that exemplify Peter Drucker’s principle that “Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.”

And if the root cause really is a bad employee, who made the hiring decision?

Now, imagine the manager dodges all of these pitfalls. Something goes wrong and it is one person’s fault – not malfeasance or sabotage, but an employee simply botching a responsibility. Does anyone seriously think that, given a choice between negative reinforcement and positive coaching, the negative reinforcement leads to a superior result?

The answer: Yes, some people do think so. They’re called “bad managers” because negative reinforcement turns teams into a giant game of Whack A Mole, where employees keep their heads down so they aren’t the ones to get whacked when something goes wrong. Let the manager know there’s a problem? That’s an invitation to be the scapemole.

So as holding people accountable leads to employees doing everything they can to keep their manager in the dark, it also leads to managerial ignorance. Perfection!

My recommendation: If you want to fight the scourge of bad management, start by helping the managers who report to you choose their sources of information wisely.

Like, for example, avoiding The Harvard Business Review.

The superior alternative is right in front of you.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

MY SIDE WON!!!

No, not President Obama. Not the Democratic party either and not any ballot initiatives, state constitutional amendments, or other specific candidates either.

Nate Silver won this election, and it matters to all of us.

Silver, in case you somehow managed to ignore all political polling this election season, is the polling class’s version of Moneyball’s Paul DePodesta (Peter Brand in the movie) — a hard data and analytics guy whose results proved superior to gut feelings and personal preferences.

Longtime readers will recall that KJR is affiliated with the Competence Party — a mythical organization built on eleven principles, three of which are:

  • Our decisions will always begin by examining the evidence. And we will recognize that when our cherished principles collide with the evidence, the evidence wins. Every time.
  • With new evidence we will reconsider old decisions. Without it, we won’t.
  • We will never mistake our personal experience for hard evidence. Personal experience is the evidence we know best. It’s also a biased sample.

Nate Silver is our kind of guy, and this last election just might turn out to be a turning point (given Malcolm Gladwell’s advocacy of “the power of thinking without thinking” in Blink I refuse to say “tipping point”) … where was I? Oh, yes, Silver’s dead-on predictions provide a reason for cautious optimism that in the contest for business decision-making’s soul, evidence and analysis might regain (or maybe just gain) primacy.

If they do, there’s a lesson to be learned from comparing how Nate Silver did so well to how Wall Street’s equally nerdy “quants” fared so poorly.

It’s a simple lesson, too. Here’s what it isn’t — that Nate Silver was of better character and integrity than the quants. I’m not saying he is and I’m not saying he isn’t. I’m saying that if we place our bets based on character, we’re likely to place them quite poorly.

No, it’s a matter of incentive. Silver won by having the most accurate predictions. He’s a celebrity because he called 49 states correctly. Or maybe 50, depending on whether Florida ever does declare a winner, and, if it does, who it is. In spite of all the gas he took during the run-up to the election about being biased (and really, does anyone think anyone decides who to vote for based on opinion poll results?), his only bias was in needing to be the most accurate analyst out there.

Compare that to the quants. Their financial rewards were front-end loaded — they made their money when their financial instruments sold out. They had every reason to understate risk and overstate payoff.

This doesn’t mean they did so deliberately. It’s much more likely they “knew” the picture was great (and knew the answer management wanted to hear). They sold themselves, and so didn’t dig deeply enough into the underlying assumptions of the models.

They rationalized, that is, and did so with surpassing sophistication.

Nate Silver, in contrast, didn’t just aggregate poll results. He dug into the methodologies followed by each poll to determine their relative trustworthiness, and weighted them accordingly.

Business leaders who want Nate Silver results will need to be very careful to avoid rewarding analysts who follow the quant model. They’ll be making decisions based on what the analysts tell them, so if there’s even a whiff of a preferred answer in the wind, some analysts will smell it and unconsciously fiddle things to get it.

And most managers, faced with conflicting analyses, will unfailingly choose the analysis that tells them what they want to hear.

Which is why KJR has made such a fuss, so often, about the critical role the business culture plays in all this, and in particular establishing a culture of honest inquiry.

If your “quants,” analysts, “data scientists,” or … call them by their proper name and background, statisticians … operate within a culture of honest inquiry, they will give you unbiased answers, because what you care about is whether they turn out to be right or not. Otherwise, I, Silverishly, predict their predictions won’t be reliable.

There’s a danger in the Nate Silver model, by the way, not that I’m particularly worried about it. It’s the impact of relying on aggregators rather than front-line researchers. If the lesson learned here is that aggregating the work of multiple polls is what led to Silver’s best-in-class results, that will give us fewer source polls and more aggregation of those polls. That would be bad, because without reliable polls to draw on, aggregation is nothing more than garbage in, garbage out.

On the other hand, “garbage” might be just the right metaphor for most pre-election coverage.

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