Inform Yourself

One reason why our legacy of dependence on management persists today is due to a basic human need to fit in. At our core, all humans have a basic fundamental need to belong. Evolution has taught us that survival and prosperity is more likely if we live and work together. However, to live together, we need to agree on common beliefs, values, attitudes and behaviors. We thus learn to conform to the rules or expectations of other people. And the more we see others behaving in a certain way or making particular decisions, the more we feel obliged to follow suit. Most people will be unwilling to publicly express their opinion if they believe they are in the minority. They will also be more vocal if they believe they are a part of the majority. This works because we fear social rejection.

While we would like to believe that real people would never do such a thing, unfortunately conformity is not restricted to only imaginary characters. According to Dr. Heather Williamson, a professor of social psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, all humans have a basic need to want to fit in. One reason is called the Similarity Principle, which states that, “we trust people who are like us or who are similar to people we like” says Dr. Williamson. She says that, “when we are trying to decide whether to trust someone, we often do not have time to find out how trustworthy they actually are, so we take a short-cut by assuming that someone who is either similar to us or who is similar to someone we would trust can be trusted themselves.”

We seek similarity in beliefs, values, attitudes, ways of thinking, understanding and deciding. We also look for short cuts in physical appearance, words and actions. Since we long to be trusted it is in our best interest to be similar to others, and therefore we strive to conform, to fit in, to be like the rest.

Another reason we conform is due to a psychological phenomenon called Majority Influence. The degree of influence that this effect can have on us is surprisingly strong. The Asch conformity experiments, performed by Dr. Solomon Asch in the 1950's, were a series of studies that starkly demonstrated the power of conformity in social groups, and how we aren’t as far from Smith’s description of his countrymen as we might like to think. Asch asked groups of students to participate in a "vision test", but in reality, all but one of the participants were working with Asch, and the study was really about how the remaining student would conform to the other student’s behavior. All of the subjects were seated in a classroom and were presented with two cards. One had on it a 'standard' line; on the other were three comparison lines. They were asked to judge which of the comparison lines was equal in length to the standard line.

The group was told to announce their answers out loud and the only true study participant would always be the last to answer. While this sole study participant didn’t know it, the other students were secretly instructed to give the wrong answer. The idea was to see if the single study participant would conform to the group and give the same answer as the others, even when it was obviously the wrong answer. In other words, when asked, all of the student’s working with Professor Asch would state that standard line was the same as line A or C on the second card. Even though this was obviously wrong, the one student who wasn’t a part of the Asch’s group would give the same answer.

The results showed that 75% of the time the single participant gave a knowingly wrong answer to at least one question, whenever the control group gave the wrong answer. Of the 125 participants, only 25% gave the correct answer every time, compared to the 95% result from a control group. Clearly participants did not want to stand out like a sore thumb or rock the boat, risking group disapproval. The power of majority influence was shown as participants nervously sweated and squirmed in their seats. The lie they were telling was blatant, but they did it anyway so as not to stand out and risk not being accepted or trusted.

Due to majority influence, people are more likely to depend on others for the answer. Also, the more knowledgeable a person is, or the more authority they have, the more valuable they are as a resource, thus people are even more likely to turn to experts or leaders for guidance.

Studies like these go to show us that one of our most basic human instincts is to follow the crowd, but that doesn’t mean doing so is always the right thing to do. Conformity can have either good or bad effects on people. Driving safely is an example of where conformity serves us well. Trying drugs because of peer pressure is an example of where a need to fit in doesn’t serve us well at all. The Asch experiments proved that people frequently followed the majority judgment, even when the majority was wrong. And even though more and more people feel inauthentic in their roles today, and even though somewhere deep down inside they know it is wrong, they continue do it anyway.

The desire to be like others and to follow the crowd reinforces the legacy of dependence we have on others telling us how to be successful. What works for another works because of their unique talents. This doesn’t mean, however, that the same will work for you unless of course you happen to have an identical set of talents, which is next to impossible.

Perhaps Peter Drucker sums this legacy problem up best when he says, “in a few hundred years, when the history of our time is written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event those historians will see is not technology, not the internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time – literally – substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.” Becoming authentic and achieving the 5th level of performance requires that you stop following and start leading – yourself.

The Genius Project: A Legacy of Dependence

One of the most pervasive management principles that remain from the industrial era is the belief that companies have to manage and control people. The conventional wisdom of the industrial economy was that all workers should do things the prescribed way, the way the company says. To achieve this, if the job required a worker to be able to do something, and the worker wasn’t good at it, it was the worker who was expected to change to better fit the role, not the other way around. This has created a legacy of dependence where people look to the company or management to tell them how to proceed, how to work and how to be. This creates a sense that the job is more important than I am, and therefore what I think isn’t as important as what the job or company needs. People become dependent on those with management authority to decide what must be done. They consent to being controlled, but unfortunately all this remnant of the old industrial age does is preventing people from tapping into their own talents and Genius.

In the Industrial economy people were considered in many ways a distraction, an obstacle to performance or an unavoidable expense. While many organizations argue that this isn’t so, that no real legacy exists and that they have updated their entire approach to people to be aligned with the realities of today’s economies, in practice they continue to operate from a basis closer to Taylor’s industrial view. They just don’t realize it.

We see it all the time in the organizations I work with and to help make my point to these companies I have developed three litmus tests. Whenever I work with an organization that tells me that people are their absolute most vital asset, but their actions don’t support their words, I ask them the following questions to help make my case:

1. “If you have a Chief Executive Officer, and a Chief Financial Officer, and even a Chief Operations Officer, can I meet your Chief People Officer?” While there are a growing number of companies that do have some similar title or position, the great majority of companies that tell me they value their people above all else, don’t show me this in their actions because they have no such role. Finances, operations and governance are still more important and require Chief positions to head these segments of business. People are usually the primary responsibility of a Vice President of Human Resources who reports to one of the other Chief officers.

2. “Where do you record capital equipment purchases and payroll on your books?” The answer is almost always that capital equipment is listed as an investment, which is itemized out over a certain number of years, and payroll almost always goes in the expense column. While the company may want to believe that people are their most important asset, they continue to practice an old belief as to how they manage that asset. At least from a financial perspective, they don’t view the money they spend on people as an investment, just an expense. Not much has changed from industrial era view that people are an expense and something to be reduced as much as possible.

3. If the company manufactures anything I ask them, “What is the defect rate for the products you make compared to your human turnover rate?” All too often the company tells me that their defect rate is much lower than their turnover rate. This just means that they do a far better job of production management than they do people management (i.e., they fail less with things then they do with people).

This is not to say that these companies are lying. For the most part they truly do appreciate that they are in an intellectual economy and they really do believe that people are the most vital asset, but the very field of management itself is so founded in the industrial mentality in which it was born that they just can’t appreciate these basic flaws. It’s easy to miss this kind of “big-picture” insight because we all exist within the very thing in question, the thing that is flawed. It’s so big that you completely forget you are inside of it.

Why are so many people around the world being inauthentic and suffering from The Problem? This lack of authenticity stems from a flawed belief system concerning the value and management of people that is outdated and simply wrong, at least in today’s business environment. The flaw Jay Niblick’s referring to is the lack of appreciation for the uniqueness and individuality of people. It is a flawed belief that finds the job as sacrosanct and the individual as sacrificial. It is a belief that the job’s duties and responsibilities should remain fixed and the individual is the one who should change to better fit the job. Such beliefs are the primary cause of an individual becoming inauthentic and they lie at the very heart of the struggles we’ve been discussing. To understand this flawed belief system we need to consider their origin.

~It is a flawed belief that finds the job as sacrosanct and the individual as sacrificial~

With advances in modern technology, production capabilities, the globalization of competition and ever-tightening labor pools, the world has shifted to from an industrial economy to an economy that relies much more heavily on a person’s mental ability than their physical ability (intellectual economy). In the intellectual economy people are the new raw material (their creativity, their knowledge, their talents). The real value of an employee in today’s organizations is based on their ability to mentally think, not physically do. They are more valued for their mind, heart and spirit than simply for their bodies.

Here are some statistics that demonstrate that this shift has indeed taken place:

1. Most staff now devote more time to solving complex problems through the
application of knowledge than in the manufacturing of products

2. Eight out of ten employees produce services rather than products

3. Most tangible products are purchases on the basis of intangible assets like brand,
reputation, employee satisfaction and service

4. 80% of the US GDP is generated by service, not manufacturing

5. Companies that do a better job of managing intellectual assets like brand, employee engagement, customer satisfaction and service:
a. Enjoy market values up to $40,000 higher per employee
b. Outperform the S&P 500 by 50% the last ten years running
c. Have significantly higher survivability rates

While the world has shifted from an industrial economy to an intellectual economy, most of the management practices applied in today’s organizations have not shifted. The majority of today’s management beliefs about how to manage people are very much the remnants of past industrial organizations, and as such they are flawed when it comes to managing people today. In many ways, we’re still practicing old management practices, which used to be appropriate and effective, but are not anymore. As Stephen Covey says in The Eighth Habit, “we live in a Knowledge Worker Age but operate our organizations in a controlling Industrial Age model that absolutely suppresses the release of human potential.”

The effect of this failure to shift management principles accordingly has resulted in people still being viewed primarily as commodities, expenses or as labor. The fault for this problem doesn’t lie just with the organizations, but with the individuals in those organizations as well. Individuals themselves continue to adhere to an old paradigm of how to be managed. They continue to believe that it is management who knows best how they should do the job. People continue to look to management to tell them the best way to work and how to be successful.

The error lies on both sides of the divide. Both management and those being managed continue to perpetuate the old beliefs of a bygone era, and both fail to fully comprehend that the playing field has changed.