Nine Lies About Work

And when I say "work," I mean do the things that we're paid to do in companies, but also how we function, if you like, as organisms: how we grow, how we form bonds with other people. And so many of the things that we hold to be essential truths of the workplace push back very hard or get in the way of how we all do our best work, how we function together.

And we wanted to call those things out, and call those things out by saying, "What's the evidence? What is the evidence about where people live in the workplace, how people grow in the workplace, how we get stuff done together? What does the evidence tell us and then what might we do differently to design a world of work that actually sees the wonderful human beings in it in a real way?"

Rachel Salaman: And it's interesting that you call these nine things "lies" rather than "myths," which is what I called them in the introduction. Was there a reason why you chose "lies," because it's quite a strong word isn't it?

Ashley Goodall: Well, and part of the reason is it's quite a strong word. And the things that we're trying to push back against are also strongly held to be true: there are many people who believe for sure that the best plan wins, that the best companies cascade goals, that the best people are well-rounded.

These are the truths, the essential truths, of corporate life and we are calling them out to be wrong and we wanted a strong word to do that. And there is something about the automatic acceptance of these things – they are the fake news, if you like, of the world of work today, and we wanted to call that out as well.

Rachel Salaman: I'm sure people are dying to know what these nine lies are, and we won't talk about all of them in detail, but perhaps we could just run through the nine before we zero in on a couple of them.

Ashley Goodall: The first lie, and probably the foundational lie for the whole book, if you like, is that people care what company they work for.

So we start off the book by pushing hard on this idea of company and revealing that instead – if you actually look at how people behave, what drives behavior, what drives whether they stay with an organization or not, how well they perform, how innovative they are – what drives all of the things that we actually care about when we think about business results is not so much the company but the team.

So that's where we start, and we locate the local team experience as the most important, not the only, but the most important experience in the world of work, and once you've understood that, then a lot of other things sort of follow from that.

The second lie is that the best plan wins. And we argue that planning is a very slow process and usually a way of engaging with the recent past, and that if you look at what the best organizations do, they're much more interested in sharing real-time intelligence than they are in long, drawn-out planning processes.

The next lie is that the best companies cascade goals, and spend a lot of time essentially telling the smart people that they've hired what to do in great detail in order to produce alignment. And, again, if you look at the best companies, the way that they produce people moving in some sort of a coordinated direction is a very different thing – they talk much more about meaning than they do about goals.

The fourth lie is that the best people are well-rounded. We might come back to that one because I think that's one that's probably one of the most important for our listeners to understand. The evidence? Again, go look at the best people, rather than theorizing about the best people, go and look at them. And you don't see well-roundedness at all, you see something very different.

The fifth lie takes on the never-ending topic of feedback, which we certainly are hearing a lot about these days, and the lie is that people need feedback. And we argue that people need something very different.

The sixth lie talks about data. The lie is that people can reliably rate other people, and the reason that that's an important lie (and not merely a piece of "data science esoterica") is that much of our futures in organizations are determined by our being rated by other people.

So whether we get promoted, whether we get a plum assignment, how much we get paid, is all based on ratings data that is other people looking at us and saying, "I think Ashley is a four on a scale of one through five." And the data isn't good because we can't reliably rate other people.

The seventh lie is that people have potential. Again, [this is] something that we almost take as a given – that we can somehow sort people into buckets of those that have potential and those that don't. And again, when you look at the evidence, that's something that isn't supported by any sort of analysis of how humans function and how human brains grow, but it is something that's therefore a very pernicious thing that we do in our organizations.

And then the last two lies broaden a little bit. The eighth lie looks at the idea of work-life balance and challenges the fact that that's the thing we should all be striving for.

And we finish the book with a lie about leadership. And, in fact, the lie is that leadership is a thing at all, and we argue that there's actually something else going on that's more interesting – more true, obviously – but more interesting and more rewarding as a path of study, if we try and understand how people get stuff done together.

So that's a somewhat brief summary of the nine lies.

Rachel Salaman: So, if we're able to recognize these things as lies we can stop pursuing them as if they're things we should pursue, and thereby we'd do better at work, we'd enjoy it more, we'd be more productive.

Ashley Goodall: Well we'd ask some better questions. Which would lead to better answers, which might well lead to better workplaces. I think what we're saying is that if you believe all these things are true (erroneously, in our opinion) then you don't get curious about the useful stuff.

So let's go with the first lie. If you believe that people care which company they work for, if you think the company is the most important thing, then you spend all of your time talking about company culture, and you spend none of your time asking the question, "How do we build great teams?"

Because if the truth is (and by the way the truth is) that teams are the most important experience at work, the team you're on is the most important experience you have every day at work.

It's not the only experience – company isn't invisible, but it's in second place, or third place, or fourth place: team is the one. But if you don't get that then you never ask, "How do we make great teams?" You don't prioritize your answers to that.

Now then, as soon as you start asking, "How do we make great teams?" you do a number of interesting things. Firstly, you go study the best ones so that you have a target to aim at and you find some characteristics of the best teams, which are useful because team leaders can do something with them, team members can do something with them.

Then you start asking, "Well, what are a team's needs for information, for intelligence? What is a team's need for development? Is there a way of developing people on a team together so that they can grow together? How do teams get their work done?" You don't ask any of those questions if your belief is company is the thing.

Once you understand the lies, they take you in directions that yield real and powerful insights and further questions about the world of work.

Rachel Salaman: But that one, if we stick with that first one – people care about which company they work for – some people might hear that and just think, "Well, yes I do. I chose this company because I wanted to work for them!" You must meet people who say that. What's your response to that?

Ashley Goodall: Firstly, it's to say that's true. We've all had the experience of looking from the outside, or many of us have had the experience, looking from the outside of a company and thinking of joining it, and all you can see from the outside is company.

Now what does that look like? Well it's a little bit vague is the first thing to say. It consists of a lot of PR material, things that the company wants to put out in the world to attract people to join it. As soon as you join, all your information changes; you're now on the inside.

So, what do you see from the inside? You don't see the PR materials in quite the same way, or at least you might say, "Well, it's all very well talking about daycare center in that office, but there isn't one in this office, so that was a little bit of a head fake wasn't it?"

You might be thinking about culture of innovation or culture of feedback, but those things don't seem to happen exactly where I am today.

What happens when you join is that you stop seeing company as the main thing and you start seeing team, because it's right there in your face every day. And you have no way of knowing whether your team experience is the same as somebody else's in a different office on the other side of the world, or in fact somebody on a different team down the hall.

All you've got is your team experience. That's really the sun, the moon and the stars of your experience at work every day, and if you look at how people react to that experience – if you look at, for example, whether they decide to stay or not – you find that's driven by the team they're on, not the company they're a part of.

The data point on this that we discovered at Cisco is that if you moved somebody from one of our 50 percent most engaged teams to our 50 percent least engaged teams… they still work at Cisco, right? Still at the same company, I've just changed your team experience. But if you do that, their odds of leaving the company voluntarily, of walking out the door, increased by 45 percent. So, the place that they're choosing not to work, in that case, is not a company, it's a team.

Rachel Salaman: As you mentioned, another lie you explore is that the best companies cascade goals. Why doesn't this work?

Ashley Goodall: It's one of these things that we do to create alignment. We're terribly worried in our companies that people will be off doing the wrong sorts of things, and that therefore we will be inefficient because people aren't, to use the somewhat tired cliché, "pulling on the oars in unison." And so somehow we've got to make sure they're all working on the same stuff, so that everybody's effort adds to everybody else's effort, so that we're maximally efficient.

And one of the ways that many companies do this is they will say, "Here are the senior leaders' goals, and so the level below the senior leaders has to set goals for themselves." So they're a subset of the boss's goals, if you like, and you keep going down, all the way down the chain so that each layer of leaders looks up and sets a mini version of the goal of the person above them, and all the way down.

A couple of things about this: number one, it takes a while to do it, because each layer has to set their goals before the next layer can set their goals, and we like to review all of these to make sure that they're properly in alignment and hard enough but not too hard, and we like to massage the goals a little bit.

And so it takes a while to do it, during which time, of course, the world has changed. So we're no longer setting goals for a world that exists today, but we're setting goals for a world that used to exist at some time in the past.

The really strange thing is that of course nobody comes into the office on a Monday morning and, in search of ideas about how to spend their time, looks at their goal form. We are all very well aware of what work is and it keeps on coming, it's like a river that keeps on flowing, and in fact the deficit that we have at work is not deficit of figuring out what to do, it's the deficit of figuring out why. What does this all add up to? Which direction are we going together, which hill are we trying to take, if you like?

And you find out that if you can give people on the ground two things: a sense of, what is the world that we are encountering together? So real-time intelligence about the world. And then a sense of, here's where we all need to go, then they're perfectly capable of figuring out what to do to advance the ball.

So it's less a question of a big cascade of direction as it is a cascade, if you like, of meaning (what are we here to do?), and trying to figure out how to share as much real-time intelligence about the world as we can.

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Rachel Salaman: Let's talk about feedback now, which is lie number five, that people need feedback. You mentioned the basics of why this is a lie a little while ago. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?

Ashley Goodall: The idea is that, I think, people need feedback in order to grow. Because there's a quality of many of the things that we talk about in the book that just beneath the surface is this idea that those other people are misguided, aren't they, and we need to help them.

And they're deluded as to where growth will be for them and they're not quite sure what to do every day. You sort of begin to wonder why did you hire them in the first place if they're so completely clueless and they need telling what to do and telling them how to get better at it?

But the lie is that people need feedback, and it rests on the idea that if I don't tell you how to get better, you're never going to figure it out. And the best way for you to improve is to be more like me.

So I will say, "Gosh Rachel, here's how I would do that and here's how you need to do that. To do it better do it this way." And what I'm essentially telling you is, "You would be better if only you were a little bit more like me."

And so, strangely, feedback is a very self-centered thing. It involves our telling people our view of the world and doesn't encourage us to engage with their experience of the world. And it's strangely self-centered and it is, again, based on this idea that those other people just need help and that I can see the way for them.

However, if you look at how we learn, we actually learn by building on patterns of behavior in our own brains that are completely idiosyncratic; we all have repeated patterns of behavior and thought, they're different from the next person over.

So, firstly, you have to start with the person, and then the process of growth – the sort of moment of an "aha!" – emerges from inside somebody, it's never compelled from the outside. I can't force you to see something differently, I can share with you my reaction to what you did and you may or may not have an "aha," if you like, and figure out how to do it in a different way to get a different reaction from somebody. But I can't actually compel you to grow by sharing with you a bunch of ideas that essentially boil down to "here's how I would do it," because you're not me and you never will be.

Rachel Salaman: I suppose it depends on the situation, doesn't it? Because if there's a specific performance issue, in fact you say in the book that in those circumstances a team leader would need to remediate and they would presumably do that through giving some form of feedback.

Ashley Goodall: There are two things going on here in the world of performance, if you like. One is, how do we ensure adequate performance across the organization? And the second is, how do we create excellent performance? And if you look at the tools for doing those two things, there's a completely different tool set.

Now, we spend a lot of time thinking about adequate performance, because we're very worried about [the] risk of bad performance. And if you say to any team leader "what worries you the most," a lot of the answer will boil down to, "I worry that my people are going to do it wrong," or, "I worry that we're going to miss the outcomes," or, "I worry that we'll have some sort of a failure." And so risk mitigation is a big thing on my list.

What risk mitigation looks like is: that didn't work, do it differently. Now, in some cases that's great – particularly if you're saying to somebody, "Listen, there was a fact you didn't know or a step that you missed in a particular process, or an outcome you didn't deliver on."

But in telling people those things, you're not creating growth, you're merely creating adequacy, because you're bringing performance from negative up to zero. You're bringing it up to adequate performance.

And then the mistake that we make is to say, "Well, all those things are great." But if all we ever get is adequate, we're not going to thrive as an organization. So what are the sets of tools for building excellence?

Well, we know that excellence is different [from] one person to the next, so there's no "one size fits all" approach to excellence. We know that people grow idiosyncratically and in different ways, and that I can't tell you how to grow, I can just give you the ingredients and invite you to knit them together, in a way that isn't transparent to me from the outside.

And so when you put all of this together it turns out that the way that you build excellence in somebody (or the way that you help them build excellence for themselves, more importantly) is you share with them your reaction to what worked, your instantaneous reaction to what worked.

So, you see somebody do something on your team, or a peer, and you go, "Gosh, that really landed on me, that made a huge difference to me, that moved me, that impressed me. What were you thinking? Have you ever done that before, could you do it again, could you use that same trick in different circumstances, could you do it more powerfully?"

The excellence-building tools, if you like, are tools of inquiry in response to moments of excellence. And when we talk about feedback and candor and critical feedback and constructive feedback, we're not talking about that at all; nowhere in all of the writing and talking that's been done about "people need feedback" is this idea that if you want to be in the excellence business, not just in the adequacy business, you need to be giving your instantaneous reaction to what works in the people around you and then uncovering and interrogating that.

Rachel Salaman: And what do you do about the things that don't work?

Ashley Goodall: You call them out and you say, "We missed here." And you help people understand what works.

And, as you do that, you need to understand that you're getting from negative performance to zero performance – you're not getting zero to infinity. Which is to say risk mitigation is not unimportant, but it's risk mitigation and it's different from excellence building.

Rachel Salaman: Closely linked to this is lie number six, which is "people can reliably rate other people." What goes wrong when managers try to rate their team members?

Ashley Goodall: Essentially you get bad data. And it is linked to this idea of feedback, because actually when I say, "Rachel, you lack strategic thinking." And we look at that as an example of data, we find it contains no truth of anything whatsoever, because my assessment of what strategic thinking is, is different from the next person over.

Because if I'm giving you a score on it, my use of a scale to give a score is much more rooted in me as a user of a scale than you as a person with a specific quantity, if you like, of strategic thinking, and that I don't see enough of you to be able to evaluate you consistently and reliably on some sort of weird, abstract concept.

So, when we do this (whether it's in a 360 or a one through five rating or a nine box that we use in talent reviews) all the data is bad data. And by bad data I mean it's not reliable: it contains none of the characteristics of data that one should act on or pay attention to.

Rachel Salaman: So what's a better way to measure someone's performance?

Ashley Goodall: The better way is to go, "Where are humans reliable raters?" And we are reliable raters of not very much, as it turns out, which is part of the problem here.

We're not, for example, reliable raters of our abilities: if you ask people if they are above average drivers, 75 to 80 percent of them will say they are above average – which is mathematically impossible.

But we are reliable when you ask us what's going on in our brains in a particular way. If you say, "What are you feeling now?" Or, "What do you intend to do?" We can tell you those things. And those are reliable data in the statistical sense that if those emotions or intents don't change, our reporting of them won't change.

So, when we talk about data reliability we're always talking about, do the measures wander around by themselves when the underlying thing we're measuring hasn't changed, or not? And if the measures are consistent when the thing they're measuring is consistent, then we have reliability.

So, I would say, instead of saying, "Is Rachel a high performer?" I can't rate you on that in any sort of reliable way. However, if you say, "Do you always go to Rachel for excellent work?" Now I'm not talking about Rachel, I'm talking about me.

"Do I always go to you for excellent work?" Am I a judge of whether I go to you a lot? Yes. Am I a judge of why? Yes. Am I a reliable judge of those two things? As it turns out, I am. So I get good data from that.

If I want to measure your teamwork, then "Do I choose to work with Rachel as much as I can?" gives me a window into that. If I want to measure whether you have a performance problem, you don't say, "Is Rachel underperforming?" Or, "Is Rachel missing expectations?" Because those things are, again, abstract and you get bad data.

But if you ask the question, "Does Rachel have a performance problem I need to address now?" I am saying, "Is there something I need to do now with regard to underperformance?" And you get good data.

So we have to invert our questions, we have to get into the habit of saying, "If you're trying to measure X, how would somebody respond if they saw X? What would they do, what would their intent be, what would their reaction be?" And if you can structure your questions like that, you get good data.

It's reliable but it also doesn't attempt to solve the truth of you in some enduring way. And so, as a recipient of that, we can have a conversation about it. I can say, "Rachel, here's where I always go to you, here's where I hesitate." And that's not a feedback conversation, I'm not telling you to fix yourself. I'm just telling you about some characteristics of our working relationship that we can decide to ignore, or we can decide to explore and it's up to us.

Rachel Salaman: So lie number nine is "leadership is a thing." Meaning it's something that can be defined and aspired to. In your experience is there really no characteristic or ability that connects successful leaders?

Ashley Goodall: Well, there's one. Which is that they have followers, and that's the only one I've ever seen.

The thought experiment, or the study, is to say, "Alright, let's look at the things that all leaders are meant to have." And everybody has their different version of a list (and by the way there's a whole cottage industry devoted to improving the perfect list of "leader-y" things) so let's pick a thing on the list.

Many, many companies going through the exercise, which companies do from time to time, of defining what a great leader is in that company will start off with ethics. Because somebody in the meeting to decide the list of things will make the excellent point that if somebody is unethical they shouldn't be a leader. So, we rank ethics on our list of leadership things and it sounds completely unobjectionable, doesn't it?

Of course leaders should be ethical, but there's a difference between should and are. For anything on the list you can find a human being who we would all say this person is a leader, who doesn't have the thing on the list or many of the things on the list. The only thing that they have is followers.

And when we make the mistake of saying, "What are the characteristics that all leaders have?" What we're really doing is saying what are the characteristics we would like them to have if only the world were a prettier and tidier place than actually the one we live in is.

We are missing the most important question. And the most important question is, "Why on earth would you follow somebody else?" That's a weird thing to do. You are taking some part of your destiny and entrusting it to another human being, why on earth would you do that? If you start grinding on that question, you get to some really powerful insights about what bonds humans to other humans, and where it happens and where it doesn't.

Rachel Salaman: How can that help you?

Ashley Goodall: What you find when you start answering the question, is that what we follow… is there anything that lessens our uncertainty about the future? One of the things that humans have in common is uncertainty about the future, and the future is a kind of a scary place, the unknown is a scary place, and the future is a continent of the unknown.

We hook onto people who give us a little bit more confidence in the future. And what we hook onto about those people is they're really good at something we care about. They're really good at something. It's not that they don't have deficits, we see the deficits, we know that there aren't perfect people. But you're following them because they're really good at something that you care about.

And because they're really good at it, that removes a little bit of your doubt about the future, a little bit of your uncertainty because you know which way they're going to jump. You know which dent they're trying to make.

It makes them predictable, and predictability is an important thing in a world that is unpredictable, and that's a trade that we make. We say, "Alright, I'll overlook your shortcomings and I will follow you because you remove a little bit of the uncertainty I perceive in the world every day."

Rachel Salaman: So looking at all of the nine lies, which do you think is the most significant for today's business leaders and why?

Ashley Goodall: When we were talking at the beginning I mentioned that the fourth lie is something that we should spend more time talking about – the fourth lie is that the best people are well-rounded.

And I think it's the most significant of all of the lies (not just for today's business leaders but for a lot of the world that we live in today) because it leads us – the belief that the best people are well-rounded leads us to a lot of things that we do to try and round people out, if you like.

In the service of helping people improve, we should tell you your shortcomings and we should enjoin you to work hard to remedy your shortcomings. Thereby you will be more well-rounded, thereby you will be more successful.

And this isn't just a work thing, this starts in school. If you tell parents that their kid comes home with two As, a C and an F and ask them which of those grades merit their most intense attention, 75 percent of parents will say it's the F.

Which is not to say that the F doesn't need any attention at all, but the future of that kid isn't going to be built on turning the F into an E, the future of the kid is going to be built on turning the A into an A+, into a vocation, into a career, into a passion.

So we get our attention pointed at the wrong thing, we have the wrong sets of priorities. We keep doing this when we get to work: we like to rate people against a standard model of skills or abilities (or, as we call them, "competencies") and then we say to you, "Your lowest scores are the ones that demand your most attention. We need to remediate those so we're going to send you to a class on our old friend strategic thinking! You had a low score in strategic thinking so we're going to have to teach you what strategic means, once we've figured it out and also had a think – and in that way we will round you out and you will be more like…" And there's the question, more like what? More like the abstract model of well-roundedness.

But look at the real world, look at the best people: the most successful performers in any field of endeavor (business, sports, the arts) they're not well-rounded, they don't have all of the things.

Instead, you discover that they've learnt to make incredible use of what they had in the first place. Great performance isn't a question of adding ability where we have none, it's a question of adding impact where we already have ability, and that's what's missed when we say over and over again, the best students are well-rounded, the best people are well-rounded. We're missing the forest for the trees.

Rachel Salaman: Ashley Goodall, thanks very much for joining us today.

Ashley Goodall: Thanks for having me, Rachel.

The name of Ashley's book again is, "Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader's Guide to the Real World," and it's co-written with Marcus Buckingham.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.