Another choking-on-my-drink moment on Monday this week with the publication of the Business Week survey on workplace attitudes. Anyone care to guess what percentage of the 2,000 middle management and above respondents to the [admittedly unscientific] survey thought they were top-flight performers?
90.
Yup - 90% of these geniuses thought they were in the top 10% for performance and effectiveness in the workplace. And when it came to executives - you know, the clear-sighted, steely-eyed visionaries who are leading us into a glorious future? Guess what the figure was amongst them?
97%
Laugh? I nearly herniated myself.
The American Management Association survey is probably a bit more scientific - a much bigger pool of respondents, with answers compared against employee feedback. But the results there weren't much more impressive in terms of self awareness.
On the all-important area of communication skills, 90% of senior managers rated themselves as "Effective" or "Highly effective" communicators. But only 30% of their subordinates were similarly generous in their scoring about those managers.
Deep sigh.
Having looked at all the big quote-generating thinkers over the years, none of them - for me at least - have quite captured the essence of these yahoos. For me, the definition of an egomaniacal bore is, "Someone who is more interested in himself than he is in me."
Think the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert. Think C.J. from Reginald Perrin. Think David Brent from The Office. Why are these characters funny? Because we have all met them. And 97% of them think they are in the top 10% of performers.
And what do I think about this?
Related posts:
Admitting ignorance or asking for help
Mastery - in conversation with Seth Godin
Something no-one thinks they're average at - listening
The law of averages as it pertains to Confidence
Performance appraisals
90.
Yup - 90% of these geniuses thought they were in the top 10% for performance and effectiveness in the workplace. And when it came to executives - you know, the clear-sighted, steely-eyed visionaries who are leading us into a glorious future? Guess what the figure was amongst them?
97%
Laugh? I nearly herniated myself.
The American Management Association survey is probably a bit more scientific - a much bigger pool of respondents, with answers compared against employee feedback. But the results there weren't much more impressive in terms of self awareness.
On the all-important area of communication skills, 90% of senior managers rated themselves as "Effective" or "Highly effective" communicators. But only 30% of their subordinates were similarly generous in their scoring about those managers.
Deep sigh.
Having looked at all the big quote-generating thinkers over the years, none of them - for me at least - have quite captured the essence of these yahoos. For me, the definition of an egomaniacal bore is, "Someone who is more interested in himself than he is in me."
Think the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert. Think C.J. from Reginald Perrin. Think David Brent from The Office. Why are these characters funny? Because we have all met them. And 97% of them think they are in the top 10% of performers.
And what do I think about this?
First, I reckon that Steve Salerno might just be on the money when he writes about the negative effect of all the self-help, gee-aren't-we-just-great thinking that has been pervading our collective consciousness for the last 30 years.
- Second, if the numbers are telling us what I think they are telling us - and we've all seen so many results like these over the years, they can't all be wrong. In which case, I wonder about the sense of having apparently delusional people running large companies.
- But third, and most importantly, because I am a human being, which means I am fundamentally self-interested, I think, "Thank God for the yahoos. Without them, I'd be out of a job." Does that make me a bad person?
Related posts:
Admitting ignorance or asking for help
Mastery - in conversation with Seth Godin
Something no-one thinks they're average at - listening
The law of averages as it pertains to Confidence
Performance appraisals
11 comments:
I used to work for a very large IT outsourcing company. A colleague in that company was working on a project that had some of its team members in another city. The team leader was supposed to communicate some bad news to the team members in the other city. He rang them all and had a conversation with them.
A couple of weeks later, there was a telephone conference with the whole team and this piece of bad news was brought up. There were gasps of surprise from the remote team. This bad news was news to them!
The project manager asked the team leader why he hadn't communicated the news to them. He insisted he had and cited all those phone calls. So the project manager asked each team member in turn whether they had received the information. One by one, the said they hadn't, frequently being interrupted by the team leader, who insisted he had delivered the information.
While the team members in the other city were speaking in turn over the speaker, the team leader in question scribbled "I DID communicate it!" on a sheet of A4 paper and held it up for his peers and his manager to see.
You say you did communicate it. Our survey says... "Eh, ehhhhhhhhh!" (Family Fortunes reference, in case no one gets it).
Ah - that old chestnut. The single most common mistake in human communication that I have encountered over the years is the assumption that communication has taken place.
Great post Rowan, it is raises of couple of questions - which means you'll get a link from Brain based Business in the next day or two. Great discussion about a key topic:-) Thanks!
This is a leadership lesson that I shared in March last year with my company's management team.
With my own eyes-
I recall being at a gathering of about 120 mid-level and up leaders who were asked to declare how they rated their performance when compared to their peers. We declared this with our eyes closed, of course, so no one would be able to see how each other viewed themselves. The results: 100% of those attending believed themselves to be in the top 30% of performers when compared to their peers. 65% that day believed themselves to be in the top 10 percent!
So much for a normal distribution (or the bell curve). Was I really there that day with such an extraordinary group of people or was something else, perhaps leadership arrogance and self-deception, at play?
This was a very vivid demonstration of how wonderful managers perceive themselves to be compared to everyone else. But the truth is, leader performance is all over the map or normally distributed. A small percentage perform very very well, a small percentage perform very very poorly. Most fall somewhere in the middle.
That's my leadership lesson for today. Maybe even an awakening pinch for us all. Hopefully we can take ourselves down a few notches, if only for today.
Rowan-
On the flip side would you be worried if people's attitudes were extremely negative about themselves or no one thought they were effective or efficient at what they did?
It seems to me that part of this issue deals with measurement. Measuring oneself against peers is only one way to determine how you're doing. Sometimes it's appropriate, sometimes it's not.
But sometimes the correct measure is absolute, not relative. Sometimes it's a comparison with one's own prior performance or with one's potential.
This can do lots of damage. I know of a young man who was offered a new car if he graduated at the top of his class. In response, he chose to go to the school that was the least demanding academically. He got the car, but probably not the education he would have gotten if he made other choices.
One of the lessons I learned from playground basketball is that there's always someone better. There's always someone with greater skills, greater physical prowess and greater desire to practice. But that doesn't mean you can't be a "winner" playing basketball. In my case it meant learning that if I did some of the scut work on the court and helped better players look good, they would choose me again and again to be on their teams and I would get to play all day.
Ellen - thank you and I very much look forward to contributing to the discussion.
Eclectic - a show of hands replicated all over the world on all kinds of topics. I just can't see a pride of lions doing that at a meeting - vanity/delusion seems to be a uniquely human trait.
Carl - good point. When I'm conducting 360 sessions, I am equally bothered by participants who lack perception and insight into themselves from either end of the confidence spectrum. "To thine own self be true" seems to me to be a pretty good way to lead your life, but it assumes that you know who and what you are ...
Rowan I wok with a colleague who runs electronic (both email and web form) 360 degree feedbacks for largish companies.
He comments that vertical feedback is usually similar to self perception, but that peers are more likely to be harsh (fairer?) markers.
What do you make of this?
Wally - succinctly put. Whether we are measuring ourselves against the bell-curve of our peers or against a gold standard, it's rare to find someone who even tries to bring a measure of objectivity to that process.
Maybe as a species, we simply don't want to know ...
It reminds me of the great line, so powerfully delivered by Jodie Foster in Silence of The Lambs: "You see a lot, Doctor. But are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself? What about it? Why don't you look at yourself and write down what you see? Or maybe you're afraid to."
What a great discussion on a hot topic. It's easier to see what to go away with - when you can clearly see and engage the opposite sides! Thanks Rowan all!
Rarely can this one go anywhere - because it takes terrific tone to allow different voices to share and support other unique views. Bravo!
Seems to me also that this topic should add new colors to support brain based research now -- that shows how people grow new dendrite brain cells -- based on what you do each day.
No longer is average intelligence fixed as once thought. I used to write a column for Mensa and the community got quite excited at that news.... and I guess with good reason:-) Great insights!
You don't mention whether any of these managers who put themselves in the top 30% received
objective standards to compare themselves to - they probably all had their own ideas of what constituted top-flight performers but without objective standards we can't know how good these people really are.
Having said that, there's a proverb (forgot the author) saying that the problem with the world is that stupid people have too few doubts about themselves while the intelligent have too many.
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