High-performance Workforce

Human beings are odd creatures.  We like to pride ourselves on our logic.  However, our brains contain two systems for processing.  The first is fast, automatic, and not at the conscious level of use.  Kahneman and Tversky, the Nobel prize winners who documented these systems, called this system our intuition system.  The second system, being slow, flexible, rule-based, and conscious, is our reasoning system.

Our intuition system determines our impressions – including the first impression in an interview.  That system quickly determines, based on a lifetime of experiences, what you think about the person sitting across the table from you in an interview.  Our reasoning system often uses the short cuts, known as heuristics, created by the intuition system to speed up our slow reasoning system.

When you are trying to select employees who best fit a position, that intuition often doesn’t work so well:

…a young psychologist in the Israeli army, Kahneman’s primary job was to try to figure out which of his fellow soldiers might make good officers. To do this, Kahneman ran the men through an unusual exercise: He organized them into groups of eight, took away all their insignia so know one knew who had a higher rank, and told them to lift an enormous telephone pole over a 6-foot wall.

Kahneman felt the exercise was incredibly revealing. “We could see who was a leader, who was taking charge,” Kahneman says. “We could see who was a quitter, who gave up. And we thought that what we saw before us is how they would behave in combat.”

Certain of their wisdom, Kahneman and his fellow psychologists would make recommendations after the exercise. The chosen men would go to officer school, and Kahneman would move on to the next batch of soldiers. There was only one problem: Kahneman and his colleagues were terrible at it.

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Despite the negative feedback, Kahneman’s faith in his own ability was unshaken.

“The next day after getting those statistics, we put them there in front of the wall, gave them a telephone pole, and we were just as convinced as ever that we knew what kind of officer they were going to be.”

The certainty that Kahneman expressed was his intuition taking control of the promotion situation.  In his terminology, he had anchored his rational thinking process (evaluating the performance of his promotion procedure) with his intuitive processes (his assumption that individuals who led a team to lift a telephone over a wall were good candidates for leadership).

And if Kahneman, a Nobel prize winner, fell victim to this effect, what can we expect from others who don’t even know about such an effect?  Is it possible that knowledge of one’s own fallibility could help avoid the mistakes caused by intuition in complex situations?  Apparently not:

From stockbrokers to baseball scouts, people have a huge amount of confidence in their own judgment, even in the face of evidence that their judgment is wrong.

So, what influence do cognitive biases have on the typical hiring process, one where interviews are conducted and influences such as the affect heuristic or interpersonal attraction effects are running rampant?  You guessed it: the hiring process is typically not as effective as it could be.  In fact, interviews, the typical method that employers use to hire employees, are less effective than a variety of other methods to select employees.

So why do organizations keep using processes that are so poor at selecting high-performance employees?  Because managers are confident in their skills to pick good employees.  They believe that they do a good job hiring, confident in the face of evidence that their judgment is wrong.  Kahneman showed humans are vulnerable to such errors when he won the Nobel prize.

And managers are only human, after all.  If they didn’t listen to their intuition and make decisions effectively, they wouldn’t have been promoted to their spot in the organization.

So, how does a company that aspires to create a high-performance workforce improve their selection process?  There are many, many ways, but here are a few that would help avoid the cognitive biases that we just discussed:

1. Use tests that are specifically designed to assess the applicant for knowledge, skills, and abilities relevant for the job.  There are a variety of tests that can help screen out applicants without the proper capabilities.  At a minimum, use tests and assessment centers prior to interviews in order to screen out individuals who can’t do the job.
2. Use structured interviews in order to minimize the chances of interpersonal effects inappropriately influencing the hiring process.  Structured interviews help interviewers avoid inappropriate and illegal hiring questions as well.
3. Train your interviewers to avoid making any decisions or evaluations about the applicant until the applicant’s interview is complete in order to avoid a premature, intuitive judgment instead of a slow, rational judgment.
4. Instead of basing the analysis of a position on intuition (as Kahneman did with the military officer selection program discussed above), use a scientific approach such as job analysis or competency modeling.  There are many benefits to such an approach, including reducing turnover, selecting poor job candidates, and legal protection.

Ironically, maximizing the performance in high-performance workforces means managing the human element of the hiring process closely, minimizing the human element until the late stages of the hiring process.