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The (uncomfortable) truth of HR and leadership development | Patrick Vermeren | TEDxKMA - YouTube
Channel: TEDx Talks
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Translator: Rik Delaet
Reviewer: Ivana Krivokuća
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I both love and hate
the business of human resources
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and you will soon understand why.
[19]
This vivacious young girl was diagnosed
with schizophrenia at the age of 21.
[26]
Like so many patients
diagnosed with schizophrenia,
[29]
she did not want to accept her disease
[32]
and she often refused
to take her medication.
[35]
She became so desperate
[37]
that she decided to put her fate
into the hands of a charlatan.
[42]
Very soon he had convinced her
[45]
that it was the medication
that made her feel ill.
[48]
So he urged her
to abandon that medication,
[52]
and he convinced her to take
his Bach flower remedies instead.
[57]
Now, her condition soon deteriorated.
[62]
And one late afternoon in 1996,
[64]
I received a phone call from her boyfriend
[66]
because she was standing
on the escape ladder
[68]
of the apartment building
where they lived.
[71]
And she was threatening
to throw herself off.
[74]
So I rushed over,
[76]
and we somehow managed to save her
by recklessly storming down the ladder
[81]
and grabbing her tightly.
[84]
And with the help
of her family and a lawyer,
[86]
she was rid of the charlatan.
[89]
But the damage had already been done.
[92]
She tried to commit suicide
on several occasions.
[98]
And this was, of course,
a turning point in my life and my career
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because I realized,
[103]
because I personally witnessed
[105]
how dangerous pseudoscience
and quackery could be,
[108]
so I realized how dangerous it could be.
[112]
And what has this got to do
with human resources?
[115]
Well, at the start of my career,
[118]
I had to attend training
in Transactional Analysis,
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and this theory states that during
the first three years of our lives
[128]
we make our life script,
[129]
including the diseases
we will have and try to conquer.
[133]
And this sounded so very strange to me
that I decided to challenge the trainer
[139]
and I asked her,
[140]
"Is schizophrenia a choice too?"
[144]
And she confirmed that it was!
[149]
Now, in fact, the woman
I've been talking about
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was my sister-in-law.
[157]
And we had been well informed
[159]
by the doctors and specialized
patients organizations
[163]
that this was total nonsense.
[167]
She finally killed herself
at the age of only 36.
[174]
And yes, I realized
how dangerous it could be,
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but I also - with a shock - realized
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that HR could be dangerous too.
[183]
And I have experienced many examples.
[186]
Take for example the case of Pete
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who had been a successful
manager for many years
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until the point
where he had to take a test
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based on an entirely crazy theory
called "Spiral Dynamics".
[200]
It offers an alternative explanation
for human evolution.
[205]
And he lost his position as a manager
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and even got fired after a few months.
[213]
And still today, five years later,
[216]
he hasn't been able to find a new job
[218]
mainly because he often felt
too depressed.
[221]
And he and his wife
had to sell their house
[224]
and they now live in a small apartment.
[228]
This made me very angry
and still makes me very angry
[230]
if I see that desperate
or vulnerable people are lured in.
[236]
So I decided to join the skeptic community
and like a Don Quixote,
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I set out on a mission to reveal the truth
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about the many HR models
and questionnaires.
[248]
I consulted the scientific literature
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to see whether these models
were theoretically sound
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and what was the available evidence,
be it positive or negative.
[260]
So of course I started looking
at the practices
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we used at the bank first, where I worked.
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There was the practice
of employee performance scores,
[269]
giving people a score every year,
[272]
and we even applied
a forced ranking on that.
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And we also created big pay gaps
[278]
and paid individual bonuses,
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and we imposed top-down
performance goals on people.
[286]
And in coaching I had to attend a training
[288]
based on John Whitmore’s GROW model,
[290]
and of course, Transactional Analysis.
[294]
And I was led to believe in training
[296]
that people have
four distinct learning styles.
[300]
I learned about Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs.
[303]
I learned about the so-called
Communication Rule by Albert Mehrabian.
[307]
And our leaders had to follow a course
in Situational Leadership by Ken Blanchard
[313]
or a training based
on the Stages of Grief model
[317]
by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross,
[318]
and they applied this
as a guidance for change.
[322]
I even had to follow a training
in speed reading.
[327]
Now what did I find out
about all of these models
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when I applied these criteria?
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Well, all of these models
were quite simply wrong.
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Now this left me very confused
and sometimes angry.
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I felt confronted.
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And maybe by now some of you have
recognized some of these models
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and have the same feelings already.
[349]
Because indeed,
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changing our deeply held convictions
can be very challenging.
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This reminds me of this famous quote;
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("The truth will set you free,
but first it will piss you off.")
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But I decided to search
for the truth, so I continued.
[369]
In recruitment I came across
[372]
practices such as graphology
or brain scans,
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allegedly predicting
your future performance or your honesty.
[382]
And I found out
that a lot of the questionnaires
[385]
used the ipsative format
or the forced choice format,
[389]
basically making you choose
between apples and pears
[393]
even if you like them both.
[396]
And in development I found out
[398]
that Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
or MBTI was very popular -
[402]
it's a fad that never dies.
[404]
And there's also the ever-increasingly
popular Insights Discovery.
[410]
There was the Herrmann
Brain Dominance Instrument,
[412]
making us believe that we have
four distinct thinking styles
[415]
and they're located
in nice areas in our brain.
[419]
And there's the Enneagram,
and there's the Belbin Team Roles.
[425]
And in coaching I found out
[426]
that Neuro-linguistic Programming
was very popular, or NLP.
[430]
But also Alpha training,
[432]
making you believe
that you can become more creative
[436]
or be ever more intelligent
by plugging into the universe.
[444]
And believe it or not,
but some people actually believe
[447]
that you can become
a better leader of people
[449]
(Audio: horse whinnies)
[450]
by getting feedback from a horse.
[453]
(Laughter)
[455]
And what is it with human resources
that they so often follow the latest myth?
[460]
Take for example the 70:20:10 model
by Charles Jennings.
[464]
He is an Australian engineer
who claims to be an expert at learning.
[469]
But the research sucks,
[471]
and the true experts
in the field of learning
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say it's total nonsense
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and some of them
even call it an urban myth.
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So maybe by now you can raise your hands
[483]
if you have ever been subjected
to any of these models.
[487]
(Indistinct chatter in the audience)
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Why doesn't it surprise me?
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(Laughter)
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So I continued, and there's many more,
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and the list behind me
is really very long,
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and this is evidence of the fact
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that human resources
and management thinking
[502]
is really very problematic.
[506]
Let me give some examples.
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In HR systems for example,
[510]
there's the practice
of giving people an annual score
[513]
and applying a forced ranking.
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Some organizations even follow
the advice of Jack Welch,
[519]
who was the former CEO
of General Electric,
[522]
to fire, every year, the bottom 10%.
[526]
Fire or yank - that's why
they called it "rank and yank".
[531]
This is very strange,
because already in 1996,
[536]
Kluger and DeNisi had conducted
a meta-analysis demonstrating
[541]
that giving people a score
has a zero effect on performance.
[548]
But only in the last few years
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have some organizations
started to abandon this practice.
[555]
And take, for example, the big pay gaps
created by Rank Order Tournament Theory.
[561]
It was a theory
invented by two economists.
[564]
But this led to less information sharing,
[568]
more fraud,
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lowered group performance,
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the best people actually leaving first,
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and a lot of people perceiving
the payment policy as highly unfair.
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This theory, in the US,
[585]
led to the CEO to worker
average pay ratio explosion.
[591]
In 1983, the average CEO
gained 46 times more.
[595]
By 2013, it had already increased
to 331 times more.
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But if you compare it to the minimum wage,
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it's even a staggering 774 times more.
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And it doesn't need to be like this,
[613]
because we know in HR systems
there are good frameworks and tools.
[622]
Take for example
[622]
the Productivity Measurement
and Enhancement System - ProMES:
[626]
a meta-analysis has demonstrated
that it increases productivity
[630]
whilst people keep their autonomy.
[632]
And they can participate
in their goal setting
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and in the decision
about their performance indicators.
[640]
And sometimes theories are really absurd
[642]
and it doesn't require
a lot of intelligence to understand.
[646]
Take for example the Enneagram.
[649]
It's very old,
[651]
it goes back several thousands
of years ago to a Sufi sect,
[656]
but the most important
proponent was Gurdjieff.
[659]
And he believed that we are
three-brained beings,
[663]
here on this Earth to serve the Moon.
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Because we are forever in debt
towards the Moon,
[670]
because the Moon was split from the Earth.
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Can you believe that?
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Or take Organizational Constellations
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where they put people in a room,
[680]
and through a kind
of paranormal or quantum process,
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they solve their problems.
[686]
The only problem is,
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quantum mechanics simply cannot operate
in a warm environment like our brain.
[695]
And some believe in the paranormal.
[697]
Few people realize that Carl Gustav Jung
believed in the paranormal
[701]
and that tests like MBTI
or Insights Discovery are based on it.
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They prefer me to call it
a questionnaire but…
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He believed that in a far away
parallel universe information is stored.
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And this information contains
pre-existent psychological archetypes.
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And you can get access to them
through a paranormal process.
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Very absurd.
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Some theories are just dead wrong.
[730]
Take for example LIFO,
Enneagram, or MBTI,
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that make us believe
that the distribution in the population
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looks a little bit like this:
a dichotomous distribution.
[746]
If you compare it to other features
of humans like physical height,
[750]
this would mean that we would
almost have noone
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between 1.60m and 1.80m.
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And that is, of course, simply impossible.
[759]
And indeed, we know
that most human features
[761]
and also our personality traits
[763]
follow a nice continuous distribution.
[767]
Like this.
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And this is something
that already Charles Darwin had told us.
[773]
Because he explained
that evolutionary processes
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lead to variation, resulting
in this nice Gaussian distribution.
[782]
And take the myth of NLP
or the learning styles.
[787]
They are both based on the false premise
[789]
that some people are more visual,
others are more auditory,
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and yet others are more kinesthetic.
[799]
And this is entirely wrong,
it's entirely false,
[802]
because just like all other primates,
[806]
our visual sense is the most dominant
in literally everyone,
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as extensive research has demonstrated.
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Sometimes theories are wrong
in other respects like,
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they offer wrong measurements.
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Take again these forced
choice questionnaires:
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they often lead to entirely
opposite selection advice,
[825]
compared to normative tests for example.
[828]
Or take the MBTI again: it has many flaws,
[831]
and the US National Research Council
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has calculated that if people
take the test a second time
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after only four weeks,
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then the median of people having
an entirely different personality type
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is a staggering 60%.
[850]
Imagine what it would do
to your family life…
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(Laughter)
[854]
if you had to wonder every four weeks
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what personality type
will your family members have?
[860]
And again, it doesn’t need
to be like this,
[862]
because in recruitment and selection,
[864]
we know what kind of tools
are good predictors,
[867]
like intelligence
and some aspects of personality.
[870]
And indeed if you look at personality,
[873]
there are theories based on that,
[875]
like the five-factor model
or the six-factor model.
[877]
And we have good tests like the NEO-PI-R,
[879]
measuring the five-factor
model of personality
[881]
or the HEXACO, measuring
the six-factor model of personality.
[885]
And if you look at the real research data,
[887]
then we indeed see that these traits
follow a nice distribution,
[891]
like this in extraversion.
[894]
So there is no such thing,
there are not four types like in LIFO
[897]
or nine as in Enneagram or 16 as in MBTI.
[901]
There are literally more combinations
[905]
than the number of people
living on this Earth.
[909]
Finally I also found out
that many people lie,
[912]
not only about the so-called
scientific status of their theories,
[915]
but also about their own degrees.
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I contacted several universities
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and they told me that a lot of people lie
about their PhD for example.
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So the problem
with all of this is, of course,
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if you put in garbage,
then inevitably garbage must come out.
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Nobody has ever been able to prove
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that you can take right decisions
based on entirely false information.
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And the burden of proof, of course,
is on them, not on us.
[945]
And I know some people say
it's only a tool,
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or only a discussion starter.
[950]
Let’s consider this:
[952]
imagine you are on a city trip in Paris
[954]
and you're lost and you ask
someone for directions
[957]
and that person says,
[958]
"Well you can have my map
because I'm going home."
[962]
And you gratefully unfold that map,
[964]
only to realize it's a map of New York.
[968]
So you ask that generous
person what it means,
[971]
and that person says,
"Well, it's only a navigation starter."
[976]
(Laughter)
[978]
Of course that's silly.
[979]
Like that city map - that wrong city map -
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won't get you anywhere in the city,
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a wrong personality test
or intelligence test
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won't get you anywhere,
for example, for your career decisions.
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So the best option we really have
is science and reason.
[995]
And we don't have to be
so negative about science
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because after all, it's only a method
we have invented ourselves
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to overcome our biases
and thinking errors.
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It has allowed us to abandon practices
[1006]
like magic healing or witch burning,
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and it has given us many benefits
[1011]
like purified drinking water
and lately, the internet.
[1016]
So we don't have to be scientists
ourselves but we can enjoy science.
[1022]
Would you accept having surgery
by a surgeon who never updates her skills?
[1028]
Would you accept taking a drug
[1030]
that doesn't help,
but has a lot of side effects?
[1033]
Would you accept it if an engineer
lies about his degree as an engineer
[1038]
and builds an unstable bridge?
[1041]
Would you dare to fly with somebody
[1043]
who has never been trained as a pilot
and fly on this plane?
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I think the answer is a clear no.
[1050]
So if you don't accept
a flawed blood test,
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you should not accept
a flawed personality test,
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and if you don't accept
a bogus cancer therapy,
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you should not accept bogus coaching.
[1062]
Think of the damage it can do
if you use pseudoscience.
[1068]
So if we don't accept bad practices
and lies in other fields of our lives,
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we should not accept them in HR.
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Especially not since there are
so many valid alternatives
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that often are cheaper,
easier to understand, and more accurate.
[1084]
And we have them in training,
and we have them in coaching.
[1090]
And we also have good explanations
like psychology based on biology,
[1094]
explaining things like why we both compete
and collaborate for example.
[1099]
So the list of valid alternatives
and approaches is very long too.
[1103]
So there's really no excuse
not to use them.
[1106]
It's high time to abandon
these bad practices,
[1109]
it's high time we abandon
the gurus like NLP guru Emile Ratelband
[1115]
and Richard Bandler,
[1116]
and turn towards the Champions League
of biologists and psychologists instead,
[1121]
like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker.
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I have made a choice to abandon the bad,
the wrong, and the pseudo models
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because they can do
possible harm to people.
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And I embraced the science-based instead,
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because they're much more reliable
and they allow me to act morally.
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And that is, of course,
a choice we all can make.
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Because with knowledge
comes responsibility.
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I urge all the leaders
to critically question your HR practices.
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Thank you.
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