I guess a few of you are a bit shocked when you read this. Please, allow me to explain.
If you rob leaders of their inclinations and their human subjectivity, it’s like asking them to play darts with a blindfold. It’s probably not going to be very productive.
Some biases are safe and constructive
A part of the reason that a leader is appointed is (hopefully…) because the person has great values, engaging behaviours, a growth mindset and know how to go about people.
That person may come with a set of biases that are inherently positive: For example, bias towards action, bias towards analysis or bias towards team play. There are so many biases that are extremely powerful, and these are rooted in the leader’s personality, processed into attitudes and visible in their behaviours. When these biases turn into great leadership, innovation and collaboration, it is exactly what we want. That’s why leaders, or any person for that matter, have biases we should not try to remove.
Objectivity is an illusion
100s of millions of employees have performance reviews with their leader every year, and the leader is asked to review their performance objectively. This includes a data-driven review of the results, as-well as questionable “rating” of “behavioural” components. Sometimes even “Attitudinal” components are rated, that can only happen if the rater can mind-read.
The problem is, nobody can give an objective judgement on behaviours and attitudes, no matter how well the criteria has been defined, no matter how much prior training the rater has received. The reason is the so-called “idiosyncratic rater effect”, which makes the rater rate themselves against the scale, and then position the rated person in relation to themselves. In fact, research shows that 54% of a rating is caused by the rater’s personality (Scullen, 2000), so how a leader rates say more about the leader than the employee being rated.
“Talent Reviews” are never objective
One of my previous bosses had to rate me against a set of company-wide expected behaviours, and we disagreed on the rating. During the year, he would see me maybe 30 times and we probably spent 40 hours together. As much as a short working week. He was rarely part of the meetings I had with my staff, and could not possibly know how I was behaving. In my view, he had no idea about how I was leading, little idea about my context and yet, he had to rate me. The only things he really had, was his own subjective opinion and biases.
Of-course I was rated, and my score went into the famous “talent review meeting”, where a group of senior leaders locked themselves into a room for 2 days, to review around 100 people. Not even once, was a “talent” invited in to the session to answer some questions, and to give some context. These meetings are therefore driven biases and opinions, and suffering from flawed data pretend to be “objective”.
When I later became part of the exclusive club of “talent reviewers” I too got caught up in the same traps. I sincerely wanted to be fair and objective, and HR did a great job in trying to remove my biases. To no avail, and I know that I am not the only one who failed at this.
I am not suggesting to suspend talent reviews, but I do recommend that companies are more aware and open about that behavioural and attitudinal reviews are to large degree subjective.
Employees rating their leaders is one solution
Today many companies use the employee’s feedback on their leaders’ behaviours in the leader review process. But this only produces usable data if the review questions are formulated in such a way, that the employee is describing their own, subjective and personal experience of the leader. Yes, you read right: We need the employee’s subjective answer.
While also this process is not flawless, it has great merits for several reasons:
Who is better situated to review a leader than an employee?
It democratizes the review process, and employee’s opinion count more.
There is a broader spectrum of perspectives to work with.
It gives concrete input that can be utilized during the leader-manager review process, and transformed into concrete changes of behaviours.
Making subjective feedback valuable
The only thing any person has available to rate another person’s behaviours and attitudes, is the experience they have when interacting. When we are clear about this, it becomes easier to accept that “objectivity” is not possible, and to find other ways to assess people.
One of the things I work with leaders on, is to help them avoid blurting out their judgement. They learn to listen, to reflect and to respond, instead of only reacting. The interesting thing about this work is, that many leaders actually believe that their reaction is objective, and they will even tell their people that they are objective. That’s how deeply rooted the “leaders are objective” fallacy is.
Instead of operating with “fake objectiveness”, it is so much more valuable to be human, and say “this is how I perceive it, and if you like, I can share my view with you”. That’s a good start for a constructive conversation.
Some biases must go!
Any biases that disadvantage people due to gender, race, religion, social background, education, preferences etc, must obviously be abandoned. This can be hard, and it is great to see all the work that is being done to increase awareness about the downsides of biases. However, I am pessimistic about the likelihood of effectively removing these biases, but we have no other choice than keep working on it.
What is your opinion on this?
Yours,
Henrik