DDI’s Talent Management Intelligence

Curiosity. Karma. Whatever You Want to Call It.

By Jazmine Boatman, Ph.D. 

Do you fill out those diner satisfaction surveys they give you with your check at restaurants? I do. Those surveys about “What’s the State of Consumerism today”? Yep, those too. I’ve also filled out customer satisfaction surveys after a few internet purchases I have made.  As someone who, frankly, makes a living out of survey research, I feel compelled (and a little guilted) into doing others’ 5-point ratings to help someone else try to learn a little more about what I think.

Although rating the quality of the beef pot roast last night is a little different than rating the quality of leadership in business today, there’s the same underlying inquisitiveness of wanting to state your opinion and hearing what others have to say. You never know if something juicy (unlike the pot roast) will turn up.

DDI’s last Global Leadership Forecast asked more than 12,000 leaders from around the world what they thought and only 4 in 10 leaders were satisfied with what their organizations offered to develop their leadership capabilities. It was particularly interesting to find that HR professionals and leaders seemed to hold the other primarily responsible for the failure of these development programs. Trend surveys like this are not only practical from a continuous improvement perspective for organizations (What can we do better?) but innately fascinating from a voyeur perspective (What are others doing wrong?).

This year’s Global Leadership Forecast pushes inquiring minds further by asking not only about satisfaction with current leadership practices, but what is needed in the future to be successful, and we also partnered with Gary Hamel to ask about management innovation. Are organizations finally pushing past the status quo to open the doors for more flexibility and innovation that might just be the key to their future survival? Maybe you don’t need to build good survey “karma” like I do, but aren’t you a little curious?

Jazmine Boatman , Ph.D., is Manager of the Center for Applied Behavioral Research at Development Dimensions International (DDI).

Do Some Leaders “Look” More Competent Than Others? (A study says yes…)

By Mike Hoban

Do some leaders have faces which make them seem more competent? Apparently the answer is yes, at least according to the results of a recent study sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. But don’t recalibrate your senior leader recruitment processes quite yet.

The study, called “A Corporate Beauty Contest” (seriously) looked at several aspects of how a leader’s looks can influence others’ perceptions of their competence or likeability. The researchers found that the faces of CEOs were judged to appear more competent but less likeable then those of non-CEOs (subjects did not know who was who in the faces they observed). And CEOs with “baby faced” features (the researchers’ phrase) were seen as less competent but were seen as being more likeable than their colleagues who had more “mature” facial traits.

Interesting, but “So what?” you might ask. As it turns out, those CEOs judged to be more competent because of their facial features in fact had an average total compensation 7.5% higher than those who looked less competent. Yet, the study found no correlation between the looks-driven perceived competence of the CEOs and the performance of the firms they headed. They just looked more competent. A rather fascinating distribution of the mien…

So it appears there might be such a thing as having facial gravitas. And there is some historical evidence that one’s looks can indeed influence how leader-like they are regarded by others. In the first televised presidential debate for the 1960 election, John Kennedy, with his striking and tanned visage conveyed an energetic world leader look, while opponent Richard Nixon, with his heavy evening shadow and sometimes brooding appearance exuded an image that many viewers found to be far less presidential. Perhaps less “competent?”

The study of physical characteristics to explain or even to predict human behavior goes way back. Phrenology, which posited that personality can be understood as a result of the shape of the skull, was embraced by many in the scientific and medical communities in the 19th century and was used by some advocates for personnel selection decisions. So back then, getting a good job was apparently just a matter of using your head. (Pause here for effect)

And while phrenology was ultimately relegated to the pseudo-science dust bin, last year University of Cambridge researchers suggested a correlation between the success of financial traders and the proportion of length between their ring and index fingers. It looks like the exploration of physical characteristics to explain human behavior will continue to be of interest to researchers and to the general public alike.

What’s the HR lesson here? Perhaps that we need to be careful in making decisions about people based on some unspoken, amorphous and perhaps biased image of what success looks like. But, c’mon, everyone learned that in Personnel 101. Yet, the study found that a certain set of facial traits apparently have helped CEOs cultivate fatter wallets, so there is some sort of halo effect occurring even in high-level personnel decisions. Other research results in the 1990s also found a correlation between employees’ attractiveness and their pay.

And of course, Kennedy went on to win the presidency, aided in part no doubt by his countenance. But was he really more “competent” than Nixon even though he might have looked that way to voters? I’ll let the historians debate that, but the answer is probably no.

But there’s also some caution that needs to be exercised in reading too much into this limited study which used college students (of course) as subjects and which had all male pictures in the CEO/non-CEO image gallery. And with this next new generation of employees in the workforce, it is likely that a more important factor in career success will be Facebook rather than face look.

Mike Hoban is a senior consultant for Development Dimensions International (DDI).    

Free Lunch!

By Barry Stern

The Wikipedia-worthy notion of TANSTAAFL or “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch” is widely embedded in our current psyche. TANSTAAFL has a surprisingly long history, but the core notion is that if something feels too good to be true, then quite simply, it is. And generally, this isn’t a bad rule to live by in business, as capitalized upon in the catchy title of Andy Grove’s 1996 book “Only the Paranoid Survive.” In HR, the TANSTAAFL lifestyle seems a very prudent approach. Our employee base is litigious and connected. We need to “craft” our policies carefully to anticipate policy lunch payments, “design” our training programs, gain front end “buy-in” from steering committees and user communities. We are Grandmasters of the HR Chess Game and must anticipate and minimize negative consequences.

Or do we have it at least partially wrong? At two recent Talent Management Conferences in New York and San Diego, I was fortunate to meet Julie Clow, from Google’s Learning and Development area. Obviously enjoying pushing the envelope in extremely provocative ways, Julie ostensibly talked about social networking, however the implications were far broader. Social networking tools and learning designs could be “scrappy,” living organisms composed of disparate pieces and parts. Interventions might decidedly be not final, pretty, or “crafted”.  Unleash the wisdom of the crowd early and often and just perhaps a free lunch might result! And frankly, even if there are occasional negative reactions to less finely honed communications along the way, they are likely to be informative and of minimal cost. But perhaps people might simply get energized, teach each other, and develop their own passionate communities of expertise. Perhaps they might even exceed our wildest expectations if only we had the courage to get our big fat controlling egos (my words not Julie’s) out of the way.

Julie referred me to the first book of Wired magazine’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, The Long Tail, which challenged archaic assumptions about the marketplace in our digital age. The essence of the “Long Tail” notion is that historically we have focused on the “head” of a curve for marketing and distribution purposes (i.e., the highly engineered or researched hit or the best seller) – in our field that highly “crafted” rollout or “designed and finished” training program. But of at least equal importance today is the “tail” of the curve (i.e., that boundless reach into much lower quantities of sales or users with eclectic needs which, when taken in aggregate, represent a huge opportunity for product, messaging, or involvement). So how do we start tapping into our “long tail” employee base? What if we:

• Adopted an “open-source” software model of training and development? Much like anyone might write an application for an iPhone, what if we created better tools for associates to build programs and knowledge bases reflective of their interests?
• Viewed ourselves less as sources of information but, like Google, informative filters of information, going beyond mere key word searches to dynamic results based the eclectic interests of our diverse constituency?

If you’re at all like me, you have more than a little hesitancy to delve into these waters for all kinds of conventional and obvious reasons. Yet, as Anderson points out, in a world where inventory is digital and the ability to tap into passion is boundless, there is a very real possibility of enjoying many free lunches. What risks are we taking to enjoy them?

Barry Stern is vice president, Consulting Services and Delivery for Development Dimensions International (DDI). Follow him on Twitter.