Talent Management Myths

They found that, although 97 percent of the original studies out of those 100 did demonstrate significance (meaning they were meaningful, they were published), only 36 percent of the replications worldwide were found to be again significant.

So it raises a really good question of the evolution of what we know and what we don't know, and it's one of the reasons I've been very interested in validating some of these popular misconceptions and looking at it from a perspective of, "Is there empirical evidence to really support it?"

Rachel Salaman: Now, I mentioned the 10,000 hour rule on deliberate practice in my introduction, so can we talk about that one to start with? What do we mean by deliberate practice and what's the widely held assumption about it?

Ken Nowak: The concept of deliberate practice is pretty much what the term might connote, which is that people put conscious effort into replicating a particular set of behaviors. Maybe they'll interlace it, maybe they'll change it up a little bit, but the idea is that, until we do something repetitively, we don't see some neuro change at a very basic biological and physiological perspective. And over time, when we do things over and over, it becomes really easy for both our old and new brain to accept that behavior until it becomes pretty comfortable, and people in the organizational development field refer to this as unconscious competence.

So what we mean by deliberate practice is very much taking some behavior, generalizing it back to the work environment. Think of a training program or coaching where we may challenge our client or an individual attending some type of alerting experience to go back to their work environment and try on that behavior, and actually do it over and over and over until it becomes a lot more comfortable.

A little exercise I like to do with my clients to illustrate this is I ask people to sign their name, write their signature if you will, with their non-dominant hand. And it may sound like a silly exercise but the concept behind the exercise is to challenge people to take a look at, how long did it take them to write their name with their non-dominant hand? How much cognitive effort did it take? And, also, what the quality or the output is. And the point is, until you would practice with your non-dominant hand over and over and over, it really won't be something we can do very easily.

It's one of those urban myths that any one of us can essentially just do anything in the world and if we do it long enough, with some effort and a conscious deliberate practice, [we] will in fact become experts at whatever it is that endeavor may be.

Rachel Salaman: So what's the truth then?

Ken Nowak: The truth is it's really an urban myth. Obviously we have to have a genetic set point in order to become great at anything that we do and deliberate practice over time will, in fact, make us better. It won't necessarily make us an expert, and we know this from a couple of different researchers, but one I'll mention that's very well known is Brooke McNamara, who is at Princeton University and last year published one of the best meta-analysis research studies.

Meta analysis, for those of you that don't know, is really taking a body of research and statistically trying to conclude whether or not that body of research leans in a particular direction. And meta analysis is not without some controversy, just in terms of what you load in, in terms of studies and the numbers, but what Brooke found in over 157 studies was that this 10,000-hour rule is just basically an urban myth and that deliberate practice accounted for very little predictability in actual performance. And she looked at this in terms of video games and music ability, education and even professional competence.

And she followed this up last year with a really interesting study, another meta analysis just looking at deliberate practice and sports performance. And what she found was that practice indeed was correlated positively with performance – that the more people practice, their performance was better. But what she found was that a very small percent of variance that was attributed to deliberate practice across all these sports and athletes was very, very, very small for elite athletes.

So what she really concluded in all of these studies, and I think what we have to take home, is that practice does in fact help us become better, but this 10,000-hour rule is, in fact, a huge urban myth and one that we shouldn't propagate any further.

Rachel Salaman: So bearing in mind this new research, how should managers approach learning and deliberate practice?

Ken Nowak: Let's build a context of why this is an important urban myth and what are the implications for coaching, for OD, for training and development, talent development. And if we think of worldwide globally that the cost expenditure in employee learning, and at least in the United States, we find that U.S. firms in particular last year spent over $160 billion on employee learning. And we certainly know that, without follow-up, about 90 percent of skills that are practiced in blended learning, classroom learning, e-learning, are typically just lost, and only about 10 percent of what's invested in a training program really does result in employees transferring what they've learned back to their jobs.

We need to be doing a better job of reinforcing the practice of new behavior, learning transfer if you will, being patient with that and making sure that it's not just a one-off of that. So, again, to really develop complicated skills in things like active listening and delegation and other types of very common leadership practice skills are pretty complex. So just to assume people will attend or watch a micro-learning, three-minute video and assume that's going to have the potency to change behavior certainly isn't very intuitive, but certainly vendors are running around the world selling that as a cost-effective way and a time-effective way for helping individuals learn more.

So more patience, and, certainly, picks to selection again that the right people in leadership roles have to have the aptitude and the ability to become more professional to begin with. So, we often make a lot of mistakes in selection that are intuitive and many organizations we work and consult with very commonly will find really great experts, independent contributors and specialists that have been teased into leadership roles without much of an assessment around aptitude, capability, nor interest and motivation, really, to want to lead other people.

Rachel Salaman: I also mentioned SMART goals in my introduction. For people who don't know, what are these and how are ideas around SMART goals usually applied?

Ken Nowak: The acronym SMART has been around for a long time and there's a variety of different variations of what SMART might mean, such as being specific and making it measurable.

But what we really find in the research literature and both the neuroscience and psychology of habit and behavior change is, whatever you want to call the acronym, they are all pretty much getting at goal intentions, what are you intending to do?, and trying to put a little bit of description around that. And what we know very strongly, again one of those urban myths, is that goal intentions may be necessary but they are not sufficient for actual implementation. And, in fact, goal intentions are very weak and poor predictors of actual behavior change.

So what's replacing the acronym of SMART and SMART goals, which really are nothing more than goal intentions, is a move to something that's referred to as implementation intentions – a fancy word for, "How do we really translate what people are intending to do into observed behavior over time?" And this is based on two researchers, one on the East Coast by the name of Robert Gaulitzer, in the United States, who coined the term and has done seminal research – over 60 published peer-reviewed journal articles on "The Power of Implementation Intentions," and a colleague on the West Coast, not far from Los Angeles, up at Stanford University named BJ Fogg, who is an expert in habit and behavior change and his concept called "Tiny Habits."

And implementation intentions are really replacing SMART goals in that they have two components. So when we sit down with an individual, whether it's coaching or training, at the end of the day we want to have something that will cue up a new behavior, and we refer to that as a trigger. You might be familiar with Marshall Goldsmith's latest book on triggers, which summarizes the research of Robert Gaulitzer and BJ Fogg and others. And a trigger could be a time of day (Monday, Wednesday, Friday at six o'clock), a trigger could be a situation, like every week I might meet with my direct reports in a staff meeting, or it could be an existing habit – when I wake up in the morning, I may have a routine or something that I do. And BJ Fogg actually argues that's one of the best triggers – it's just, here, something brand new that you want to do with an existing habit that's pretty firm.

And the second part of implementation intentions. It's great to have a trigger – that's the stimulus for doing something – but what really meets the rubber on the road is what will be the behavior. BJ Fogg refers to the behavior in a really nice typology or matrix, and he says, basically, we can do five things and five things only when it comes to behaviors, and again, think of training or coaching. We can encourage people to start doing something that they've never done before, and they could stop doing something (think of an unacceptable behavior like yelling or shouting at an employee or bullying an employee). We can have folks do things more, we can have folks do things less, or certainly a shift on that and another variation is to do things a little bit differently. So think of these as five ways of conceptualizing what will you be doing at a behavioral level.

And then BJ also has thought about a matrix that says some of these you may do all the time – it's something that you want to do habitual – some you may want to just do one time. A great example is individuals that might just wake up one morning and say, "Gosh, I just think it would be a great idea to run the London Marathon." So with that there's a whole set of micro behaviors that we would need to do to prepare ourselves for that one-off event. When you're done and have completed the London Marathon, you might say, "Great, I've accomplished that life goal that I've set out to do. It's one of my bucket list things. I'll never do that again."

So when we think of the difference between SMART goals and implementation intentions, it's really a way of shifting what we may articulate what we're intending to do to a kind of a formula to ensure we practice something over and over and over until it becomes more comfortable, as Phillippa Lally and other researchers have suggested.

Rachel Salaman: You've also written about the myth of leveraging strength. Can you talk us through some of the misunderstandings about that?

Ken Nowak: Quite popular. Obviously there's not much argument that what comes naturally will be easier for people to do, but one of the myths is that all of us have a pretty accurate understanding of what our skills and abilities are. And a lot of research we've done, particularly in the multi-radiant 360 feedback is a great example that many of us are, in fact, what we kiddingly refer to as "just clueless." In fact, we've written a book called "Clueless: Coaching People Who Just Don't Get It" that really provides a little bit of context, a model for coaching. But these are the kind of clients that we, in fact, scratch our head and say, "They really don't understand the impact of their behavior. They're not very accurate in understanding what they do well."

We also know people that are incredibly lacking in skills and abilities. These are individuals that, from a research perspective, overestimate what they do well, and, in fact, we call it the Dunning and Kruger effect. So people who are actually worse at behaving and performing sometimes just think they're the ones that walk on water. So, if most of us that are listening today were asked, "Are you an above-average coach or consultant or trainer?", the most common response would be, "Of course I am."

So this is one of the reasons there's just a myth about how accurate we are in identifying what we do well. The second myth in general is it that most attributes and skills and aspects, even of personality, have a curvilinear relationship with performance. So, strange as it sounds, I'm not always as good at better. And, in fact, there's quite a bit of research that suggests, let me use an example on the resilience area that I do research, is that, when you grow up, little or no life challenge and adversity actually has a negative impact on psychological wellbeing and, intuitively, having an overwhelmingly difficult childhood fraught with tremendous challenge can be psychologically damaging. So that sweet spot we find in the middle with resilience really does predict psychological and physical wellbeing. But we do find this curvilinear relationship with a large number of personality traits and qualities, whether it's emotional stability, or neuroticism in performance, or even conscientiousness.

So one of the myths in the strengths-based movement is that high or strong is always good and we're finding, at least at a research level, that not always is that true; that too little of a lot of qualities, traits, attributes, and personality factors can be equally non-predictive as too much.

A third area that we've studied, another myth, is that, even if you do adopt a positive psychology and strengths-based coaching perspective or training perspective, not everybody will in fact leverage their strengths.

So let me be really very specific about something that's come out of our research using 360 degree feedback. One of the patterns that we find that's very interesting are people that rate themselves relative to others quite low. They're quite humble – when we ask them a question about their proficiency or the extent to which they feel competent, they rate themselves much lower than their bosses, their direct reports, their peers, or internal or external customers. We refer to that gap and we label these individuals as under-estimators and we do find when we look at the personality of these individuals, they're very high on personality factors such as achievement orientation and perfectionistic tendencies; they're very goal oriented and they're very tough on themselves – they have very high standards for themselves and others. But what makes these individuals very interesting is they're also high in neuroticism or low in emotional stability, meaning they're a type of individual that's fairly anxious and fairly tuned in to themselves, and we find that, in general, they're very hypercritical.

So, at a practical level, when we sit down to give a performance review or we sit down and give feedback to these under-estimators, what they do is monopolize the conversation and are very, very tough on themselves, and all they want to talk about is the lowest score they find in a feedback report or a performance review or a comment that somebody has written. And we refer to this as being hypervigilant to the negative.

So, as much as, again, people in the positive psychology and strengths-based movement want to suggest we should always leverage strengths, we find in practice these are really interesting individuals because, no matter what I do, no matter what I say, all they want to do is focus on their weaknesses.

So there's a lot of good reasons to think about strengths as things we should consider focusing on, but, if we keep in mind what we know – that not all of us are very accurate in knowing what we do well, that there is, in fact, a curvilinear relationship with strengths, and there are, in fact, a group of people that, no matter what you do will not leverage their strengths – we need to consider that when we talk about the limits of strengths-based coaching.

Rachel Salaman: So if you were a manager who is coaching a team member who is very critical of themselves, what's the best way to get them to think more positively about using their strengths?

Ken Nowak: The nice part about these individuals is they're high achievers. So, although they're beating themselves up and rating themselves low or relatively low compared to others, we find that they're universally rated pretty high and their performance is very high. So most leaders tend to ignore these individuals, and again we just really want to encourage such individuals to look at feedback on balance, and certainly to celebrate life and achievements when they occur, and not move too rapidly to the very next thing on their brass ring.

So we need to slow these individuals down and take some time out to recognize what they've achieved and what they've done, and just be sensitive that these are individuals that, right away, want to talk about and are looking for what I'm not doing well. We want to make sure we counterbalance that with great feed-forward about what they could do to become more effective and, at the same time, compliment, recognize and reward their efforts and accomplishments in a very genuine manner.

Rachel Salaman: Now, you've done a lot of research on sleep, haven't you. So what are some myths to do with sleep and productivity?

Ken Nowak: I think the biggest one is that people that are tired or fatigued are referred to as slackers or lazy. So you do find that, certainly, there's medical conditions, there's interactions with medications, there's lifestyle practices that certainly are, in fact, interfering with the ability to get to sleep at night and get good rest and adequate sleep, but it will have strong ramifications on what people do the next day and what their working performance is all about.

I've also done some research and work in the auto-immune disorder and, for example, many of the auto-immune disorders, like multiple sclerosis, share one common symptom with a host of other common auto-immune disorders and that is a concept or a symptom called fatigue. And fatigue is something that is neural based and has very little to do with sleep. It has very little to do with depression or stress, but it's a neurological condition in multiple sclerosis or MS and many related auto-immune disorders. So when it presents for individuals that are still working, they're tired, they're pooped and, to others that are interacting with them, they just don't look they're pulling their weight.

So there's a lot of myths that people that are just sleep deprived aren't high performers, and, at the same time, without adequate rest and sleep it is difficult not just to be fatigued but to do high performance. Let me give you one example, a kind of crazy research from Ann Williamson. And what she's shown in her published research is that any of us that get just two hours less sleep than what you normally need, so, Rachel, if you need eight hours of sleep and, if not, you kind of know it the next day, and you only get six. And if I can get by with seven and a half, but somehow again I've not been able to get at least two hours that I really need, but I only got five and a half. What she's found is there's a significant impairment in cognition, meaning memory and mood. And further research suggests that getting four hours or less sleep in terms of performance would be what's equivalent, at least in the United States, to being arrested for being legally drunk – so blunt alcohol concentration.

So our research has taken a look at, with others, what's the impact of lack of sleep on interpersonal relations and performance as well.

Rachel Salaman: What's your advice for managers once they know all that? How can they get the best out of their people?

Ken Nowak: Great question, and I'll just share the results that are so intuitive of our recent study with over 100 senior leaders. We were able to measure their reported quality and quantity of sleep and, simultaneously, had a measure of their social and emotional competence, or what's commonly referred to as emotional intelligence. What we found was really intuitive and you might say, "Gosh, why do we need a research study to verify this?" But, to date, there's only about three published studies that look at leadership practices related to fatigue and sleep.

And what we found as very intuitive is that leaders that reported poor quality and quantity of sleep were rated significantly lower on social and emotional competence by their direct reports. So, again, we all know that stereotype of coming to work pooped out and tired and just not getting enough sleep, being kind of cranky and no fun to deal with. And, again, our research really does show a very conclusive link with lack of sleep and emotional intelligence.

And organizations just need to do more to recognize that, out of all lifestyle practices, and when I say lifestyle practices – eating, nutrition, physical activity, social support, all the factors that a lot of corporate wellness programs target – there should be much more attention to sleep, because it really does have bottom-line impacts on performance as well as interpersonal relationships and cognition.

So for example, I'll just throw out a few ideas that come to mind and what managers and organizations should encourage and think more about. One is to think about and revise travel policies, that certainly are intuitive around jet lag and schedules that will help maximize sleep and alertness, not sending people on red eye meetings here in the United States, where it's actually very challenging either way but, when we fly eastwards, it's harder for us to adjust and assume that they're going to wake up the next morning making really critical business decisions. We certainly could provide and support more employee wellness programs that focus on things that will impact high-quality sleep and we know that stress management, mindfulness-based training, even yoga, meditation have all found pretty significant impacts in addressing particularly insomnia. So it might be something that companies who are already thinking about and offering wellness could just extend.

A lot of companies worldwide offer the ability, as strange as it sounds, because we have a natural set point for wanting to sleep two times in a 24-hour period. One certainly is what we would recognize as going to bed at night but we also have another low point, from a biological rhythm perspective, in the early afternoon. So, again, a lot of cultures that have revered these siestas, really it makes sense for a lot of companies to support sleep rooms or quiet places where people could actually go and take a nap. And we do know from research that keeping naps probably to no more than about 20 minutes optimizes alertness and attention. If you go longer than that, we start to move into a regular sleep cycle.

I also think that companies could do a better job of including questions on health, even sleep and stress, on their employee engagement surveys – so look more to measuring fatigue and stress and psychological wellbeing. There's a few companies that are starting to do a little work in this area, but that would be another area I would include.

And, finally, just do a better job with all supervisors and leaders to provide training and awareness, not just on workplace safety but attitudes and practices that are referred to as fatigue countermeasures. There are certain industries, whether it's transportation or healthcare, that are 24/7 where, obviously, there's rotating shift work. And vigils being done around schedules is absolutely critical for high performance and health.

Rachel Salaman: Turning briefly to neuroscience, what myths have you identified in that area?

Ken Nowak: I will just say that we do work in the neuroscience area. One of our collaborative partners, who I know you've interviewed, is a very revered neuroscientist worldwide named Paul Zak, and we kid a lot about what we call neuro charlatans – people that have perhaps read about neuroscience or have tried to capture the essence of what others have done, but haven't really done research on their own. And there's been two recent fascinating publications that suggest that we could provide the public with even superfluous neuroscience information or sham information, and we certainly know that just putting "neuro" in front of anything seems to increase believability. We certainly want to be careful that all the folks that are coming out of the woodwork, adding neuro to their coaching and consulting and training. There may be some science behind it but Paul and I sat down and questioned what is the neuro behind coaching that they're offering, which is exactly the same thing that they've done for years and years. It's very easy to jump on the neuro bandwagon and add that to our marketing or advertising and get people's attention.

The last CIPD conference that I attended with one of my colleagues, there was no fewer than a half a dozen presentations that had neuro in the label or description, and both of us scratched our heads, and only one of them addressed some things that were neuroscience-based and it was very narrow to just learning and memory. Nothing wrong with that, but it didn't really do much to add to what leaders could do more or less or differently from a coach or consultant perspective I need to do.

So it's a buyer beware area. It's a real interesting fad, very much like the emotional intelligence explosion that started many years ago. Obviously, some good legs to what we know about EI and performance, but we could take the label "emotional intelligence" and just about any behavior and any theory and any practice could pretty easily be popped under that particular label.

Rachel Salaman: So, out of all of the myths that we've discussed today, what do you think are the most important ones for managers to revisit and reassess?

Ken Nowak: I think maybe a combination, if I can sneak out of that one! But this idea that practice for 10,000 hours and you will, in fact, be at the Rio Olympic Games and taking away gold isn't going to work. And also the strengths paradox, given that there's a curvilinear relationship and that some individuals just won't leverage their strengths.

If we take these two together, I think the statement I would like to make is that, obviously, deliberate practice and learning transfer makes better, but not perfect, and it helps us at least move up to our individual ability set points that are pretty highly genetically predetermined.

So I think organizations today have to do a better job of selecting talent with the right skills and personality in place, and then very much emphasize and reinforce learning transfer, if they want to see bottom-line results from talent development, high potential training programs, and the coaching engagements that they offer today.

Rachel Salaman: Ken Nowack, thanks very much for joining us today.

Ken Nowak: Thank you, Rachel.

Rachel Salaman: You can find out more about Ken and his work at envisialearning.com.

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