What If What You Think You Know Just Ain’t So?
Challenging your own assumptions is one of the smartest things you can do
By Rodger Dean Duncan
If you’ve ever studied semantics, organizational behavior, or even history and politics, you’ve likely heard some variation of this:
There are known knowns. These are things we know we know. There are known unknowns. These are things we know we don’t know. There are unknown unknowns. These are things we don’t know we don’t know. And there are unknown knowns. These are things we know, but don’t realize we know them.
There’s a lot of wisdom in that tongue-twister. In every aspect of our lives we must constantly juggle what we know with confidence, what we’d like to know but don’t yet know, what we don’t even know we don’t know, and what we unknowingly already know.
The humorist Mark Twain is often credited with a variation of this: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Ironically, despite the frequent attribution to Twain, we can’t be sure who actually coined that pithy thought.
Misplaced certainly can be dangerous.
That’s the point behind Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall.
Marcus, a global thought leader focused on unlocking people’s strengths, is the author of several bestselling books including First, Break All the Rules and StandOut 2.0. Ashley is former senior vice present of Leadership and Team Intelligence at technology giant Cisco and previously served as Chief Learning Officer at Deloitte.
Their research-based views on a wide range of business beliefs and practices are, to say the least, provocative. If you enjoy having your own thinking challenged, this conversation is for you.
Rodger Dean Duncan: Throughout your book you refer to the “free-thinking leader.” What exactly are the mindset and observable behaviors of such a leader?
Marcus Buckingham: Freethinking Leaders stand for the truth that the power of human nature lies in each human’s unique nature, and that work is a magnificent place to unleash that power. They stand against organizations, leaders, practices and tools that systematically or carelessly crush that power.
They know this:
The crazy, wonderful, weird uniqueness of each individual is a mess worth engaging with—all good things come only from this.
Left to their own devices, organizations can operate as if their identity and their sanctity is more precious than the lives of the people within it. Freethinking Leaders reject this.
Emergent patterns are always more revealing than received wisdom.
We must put our faith in evidence over dogma. There is no dogma in science.
The only way to make the world better tomorrow is to have the courage and the wit to face up to how it really is today. The brave build only on truth.
“That’s not how we do it here” is the trigger to keep doing it, only more, and faster, and better, and with as many people as possible. Only challengers make change.
Freethinking Leaders are most easily spotted by their frequent requests for reliable data, by their impatience with the corporate Kabuki of yearly goal setting, ratings, and calibration sessions, and by their willingness to treat each person on their team differently, according to the uniqueness of each person’s performance, personality, and tenure.
Duncan: Is it possible for a “traditional” leader to become a freethinking leader? If so, how?
Ashley Goodall: Yes. Be skeptical about the received wisdom of organizational life, and be curious about real people in the real world and what makes them tick.
If your organization, for example, says that all successful people have a particular set of abilities or competencies, ask yourself if you see that in your corner of the world (spoiler alert—you’ll find you don’t). And then get really curious about the people you know—what energizes them, what they volunteer for, what they run towards.
Think about the world one human at a time. Resist simplistic categorizations. Find the sparks.
Duncan: You assert, unequivocally, that people are horribly unreliable raters of other people. Why, then, do so many organizations persist in asking people to appraise others’ performance? What’s a better approach to helping people develop?
Buckingham: It’s less an assertion than a finding. Ever since the British Army, just after WW II, introduced the world to the idea of competencies—that one could define a job or role by a list of skills-plus-attributes and that the best way to develop people was to identify the competencies they lacked and then remediate these gaps—we have been on an unending quest to measure these competencies accurately. After all, if we can’t measure these competencies how will we ever know which ones a person possesses, and whether this person acquires more over time?
Well, despite 80 years of effort, the unequivocal finding is that these competencies, despite their allure of bringing order to the messiness of real people, are unmeasurable. In part this is so because a competency—such as Strategic Thinking, or Business Acumen, or Executive Presence—is not an objective thing existing in the real world. Instead, it’s an abstraction existing in the theoretical world. Abstractions, by definition, can’t be observed and measured.
Duncan: So, you’re saying competencies are unmeasurable because different people have different views on what exactly constitutes a particular competency?
Buckingham: Precisely. Competencies are unmeasurable because we’ve discovered that other people are incapable of holding each competency definition stably in their minds, reaching into another person’s psyche, rating him against the definition, and then turning their attention to a different person, reaching into her psyche and doing it again.
If people were capable of doing this, then when they rated different people on different competencies their scores would change—because they are looking at different people, with, presumably, different levels of each competency. But, in oft-repeated studies, we find that the scores do not change. Instead, the pattern of scores of one rater remains surprisingly consistent no matter who is being rated.
It turns out that each of us has an idiosyncratic pattern of rating, which travels with us no matter whom we are rating, and which seems to be entirely independent of the person being rated. It’s almost as if we can’t see the other person at all. This effect is called the Idiosyncratic Rater Effect. It is large, and it is stable. And it means we can’t rate other people on anything. Thus any tool, system, or research finding that’s based on raters rating other people is without any foundation and should be viewed with extreme caution. All 360 degrees surveys and studies are an obvious example of this.
Duncan: What, in your view, is the solution?
Buckingham: A more effective and reliable approach to development is to throw out the models, with their goal of homogeneity and their flawed measurement systems, and instead base everything on the truth that each of us is a reliable rater only of our own reactions.
Just as the patient—not the doctor—is the best rater of the patient’s pain, so each of us is the unequivocal source of truth only of our own experiences and feelings. If we want to help someone else grow and get better, we should avoid rating them against a model, and instead share with them our own reactions. People on the receiving end of what we share can then use our reactions—which are humble but unimpeachable—as input to help them decide how they might create more of those reactions—if they were positive—and less of those reactions—if they were negative.
Our input can help people gain insight about themselves. But the insight, and the growth, will always be of their own making.
Duncan: You say “people need feedback” is a lie, yet you report that “positive attention” is 30 times more powerful than negative attention in creating high performance on a team. How do you draw a distinction between feedback and attention?
Goodall: The distinction is this. Feedback, at least as most of us understand and practice the concept, is about my telling you about your performance and what I think you need to do to improve. The effect this has is to appoint me the arbiter of good or bad (which is strangely arrogant, if you think about it) and to imply that my way of doing something should necessarily be your way of doing it—or at least, that you can learn from my way. But all the evidence suggests that (a) I can’t ever see inside your brain to understand exactly what you did, that (b) you learn by building on patterns of thought and behavior that are uniquely yours, and that (c) as a result, great performance is uniquely different for each great performer.
The idea of attention, on the other hand, invites us to stay on our side of the conversation—not to reach across and judge you, but instead to share our honest reactions to what has worked or not, and our curiosity about how you did those things.
Much feedback today boils down to our telling people they would be better if only they were a bit more like us. Attention, however, and a focus on sharing our reactions rather than our judging your actions, is humble, curious, and respectful of how each of us grows in our own way.
Duncan: Work-life balance seems to be a goal for many people. But you say love-in-work matters most. What does love-in-work mean, and how does it differ from work-life balance in terms of personal satisfaction?
Buckingham: Balance, when you think about it, is an odd metaphor for living a fulfilled life. Not only is it virtually impossible to find that one precise point where everything in your life is perfectly balanced, but, more confoundingly, if you ever were to, if one Thursday afternoon at 3:00 PM you were to all of a sudden realize that, finally, all aspects of life were in balance—the kids were happy, the spouse content, the finances ticking along, the job challenging but not too challenging—what you would want to hiss-whisper is “Nobody move! I’ve got it. Finally. Shhh.” Balancing is precarious. Balance is stasis.
This isn’t as tricky, or as theoretical as it sounds. You are wired to get a kick out of certain activities, situations, contexts, people, and those you get a kick out of will be utterly unique to you. For no good reason, other than the clash of your chromosomes, you may love that moment when you empathize with someone else’s emotional state, or when you persuade someone to do something they didn’t intend to do, or when you are on all fours playing a woolly mammoth with your four-year-old, or when you sit quietly searching for patterns in data, or when you buy just the right gift for your second cousin, or when you polish the gas cap on your restored ‘57 Chevy. Or you may loathe all or most of these. What is certain is that you are set up to love—“love” meaning, lean into before you do it, time speeding by while doing it, a feeling of wanting it to happen again after you’ve done it. Life, as you move through it, will keep offering actions and situations up to you. The responsibility lies with you to catch them, cradle the feeling they create in you, and then honor this feeling by deliberately orienting your life so that you experience more of them.
We call these actions and situations your “red threads.” Our lives are a fabric woven with many threads—black, white, gray—but some of them appear to be made of a different substance: things-we-love, for no good reason. Our challenge is to take these red threads seriously and then weave them into the fabric of our lives. Research by the Mayo Clinic suggests that we do not need to weave for ourselves an entirely red quilt; that, instead, if 20% of our life is spent on activities we love then we are far less likely to burn out. A little love, it appears, goes a long way.
Duncan: So, you’re suggesting that a change in language can be helpful with this issue.
Buckingham: Burnout is not the absence of balance, but the absence of love. When it comes to balance, imbalance and living a fulfilled life, we have gotten our categories wrong. We say that the key categories are “work” which is generally depleting, and “life” which is generally uplifting, and that the challenge is to balance the heaviness of the former with the lightness of the latter. But “work” is not the opposite of “life.” It is merely a part of life, as are family, and friends, and com- munity. No, the proper categories here are not “work” and “life,” but “love”’ and “loathe.”
Each of us has certain activities—in all parts of our life—that we love and others we loathe. Our goal should be to intentionally imbalance our life toward more of the former and less of the latter. Nearly 75% of us say we have the freedom to modify our job to fit our strengths better. Yet only 17% of us say we play to our strengths every day. We know we can take our red threads seriously, weave them into the fabric of our lives, and so imbalance our lives toward love. But, in practice, it seems we don’t.
Duncan: How do you explain the difference in feeling between aspiring to balance and aspiring to love?
Buckingham: Balance feels antagonistic, many things, outside of you, pulling you one way, then another, coming at you, a torrential assault from which you must protect yourself, deflect, shield, barricade. To strive for balance is to strive for a brittle, short-lived, short-tempered state. This leaves you, in the end, standing all by yourself, hardened to life, doomed to fall.
Love-in-work asks you to pull down the shields, and instead to open yourself to life. Your life contains moments, activities, situations that, if you let them in, can warm you, can bring strength in, can, from the Latin, “invigorate” you. Your life is sending you signals, is communicating with you in a language only you understand. Love-in-work asks you to pay attention to these signals, and to let them in. Once in, they confer on you feelings of flourishing, of authenticity, of wholeness, of being lit from within. They don’t keep you at bay; instead, they bring you closer to you, and thence, to others.
Duncan: Multiple studies show that 80% or more of employees are not fully engaged in their work. If more focus were given to challenging the assumptions behind the nine lies you write about, what effect do you think such focus would have on engagement in the workplace?
Goodall: We now know—and can measure—quite precisely the particular set of experiences at work that lead to increased performance and fulfillment. This is the most useful way to think of engagement—experiences that predict results, for employees and for companies.
We also know that the experiences fall into two groups. The first addresses our need to be seen and valued for who we are, whether through being empowered, through being asked, repeatedly, to do what we do best, through recognition, or through being challenged to grow. We can think of these as the “Best of Me.” The second group addresses our need to be part of something bigger than ourselves—through a visceral sense of mission and the possibilities of the future—and to feel supported by those around us in a shared endeavor. We can think of this as the “Best of We.”
We also know from the data that these experiences are created, first and foremost, on a team—that our interactions with the people we spend the most time with always outweigh our sense of the broader company.
Put simply, the Nine Lies stifle our paths to experiencing the Best of Me and the Best of We at work. Our neglect of teams and our over-rotation towards “company” and “culture” steer us away from the most important experience-creator we have. This leads us to remove accountability for the experience of work from our team leaders, who in fact should be where we focus the vast majority of our attention.
Duncan: So, what are the common practices that get in the way?
Goodall: Our over-reliance on planning neglects the intelligence of our teams, and suggests to them that what they see on the ground is of secondary importance. Our cascading goal systems elevate the “what” over the “why,” and deceive us into thinking we can pay only lip ser- vice to the purpose of our work.
Our addiction to normative models of performance—and in particular to competencies—sends a strong signal to our people that we neither see nor care about their unique and wonderful abilities.
Our insistence on persistent corrective feedback squashes our curiosity about how another human being might, in fact, do what they do, and how they might do it more.
Our measurement tools privilege our demonstrably wonky judgments of others over our humbler and more useful reactions.
Our casting aside of those who we (erroneously) feel lack “potential” suggests that we don’t care to see them at all.
Our tired yearning for balance leads us away from asking what each of us, uniquely, loves.
And our mistaken focus on leaders, rather than on followers, pulls us toward generic abstractions and away from understanding how we might help all our people perceive the future a little more clearly.
If, on the other hand, we can embrace our teams as our homes at work ...
if we can empower them with real-time intelligence about the world they face every day ...
if we can deliberately and persistently show them what we’re here to do together ...
if we can point our curiosity at each person’s spiky abilities and at how they do what they do ...
if we can base our measures on nothing more than our reactions to one another …
if we can explore each person’s journey through life ...
if we can help our people do more, each day, of what they love ...
and if we can use our unique gifts to help those around us feel more confident about the future we face together.
Then, surely, we will help each person share the Best of Me, and each team can harness the Best of We.
Which of your closely held beliefs about workplace practices were challenged in this conversation?
What changes, if any, will you make in your own workplace practices as a result of the views shared by Buckingham and Goodall?
What value do you see in being a Freethinking Leader? What could that mindset do for you and the contribution you make to your workplace?
