Your Performance Rating Isn't About You (It's About Your Manager)

Most of your performance rating reflects your manager, not you. And after a career in HR designing performance management systems the old way, I just can't unsee this anymore. I was aiming at the wrong thing. I just didn't know what I know now. And if you are an HR professional, talent management, learning and development, or just a leader who cares about developing your people, this is for you. I never knew to question those gurus and experts who were telling me to follow their best practices. And today, Tom Palmer and I, we're going to talk about worldview paradigms. Not those kind of weird, oh, you need a paradigm shift kind, but the more silent, invisible kind. Those hidden assumptions that actually source how we're thinking and how we develop our people. Tom and I both learned a non-traditional theory of change from the late Carol Sanford, and we realized that our people deserve better than what we were giving them previously. So I'm going to share some of the frameworks that really shifted, disrupted my thinking, along with what I think about bell curves now and the use of using them. Tom will share how he Still sees these patterns running out in organizations and maybe even in himself. And if any of this conversation matters to you, like really helps other people find it too. I think you and I, with these recordings, are trying to preserve— while preserving the essence of the work, how do we magnetize more of the people who we believe need this work instead of repelling them.

I think it's a certain kind of person that is going to be ready to dive in deep like they do at Regenesis or even like Carol did. And there's a lot of people that I think are not ready for that or not wired quite in that way. I don't know. Or they're just like, it is very high-level concepts, which I love, but I get that. Yeah, I like geeking out on this stuff, but I also, That's one of the things I'm working on is understanding that's not everybody wants to geek out on systematics right away.

Yeah. And then I had a chat with the first chat with the woman who's a CEO and her site looks like, oh my God, she loves developing her people and all this. But then it's like milestones and deliverables. That's how they talk and they think and it's different. So it's anyway, we won't get all of them. Okay.

Yeah.

So let's try it with this one. And, and I'll say this, and I might show 2 1-minute video clips as I think about what I'd like to do. And I'll invite you to think about, like, how paradigms affected you.

Yeah.

And I'm going to share my story that is the real story of how I assessed My own work. And then from there I went, oh, okay, wow, this is disruptive. I did this with Carol the Cat. Let me now— and then I said, let me dig in a little more, and I used these 2 videos. And so I'm— they're on top of mind for me because I'm doing the video clips that go with the book, you know, videos. So I might do those. I think it'll be interesting. Okay.

Yeah, great.

And I'll be real curious.

You'll actually play those on the call here, or you'll add those later?

No, I'll play them on the call here now, and then Aaron might do something with them. But you're welcome to have the clips as well if they help you. But it'll be interesting to see because we— I'll say that I think this one might be for more learning and development people or leaders who go that way.

All right. Okay, before we start, can I just ask one thing? Because I'm just curious. I was watching the recording of the first one, which I thought seemed to go pretty well. I do not like watching myself on video, but it's also a good practice, but I— good practice in non-judgment. But I think I was just, just wanted to ask like anything that you would like to do a little bit differently this time from the first one, or?

No, I think it's, I don't know. I looked at some of the clips. Aaron made some clips for me and I, and I said, give you the whole thing and you decide. Because he has some software that makes clips, but he didn't like any of the clips. So I haven't seen the clips. I just saw a little— I don't even go back and look because I don't like to.

I know, hard.

You know the really weird thing? I've spent a lot of money trying to learn how to market myself, and it's my, my own self because I can't follow all these online marketing things too much. So I— but I've learned probably quite a bit. And what surprised me is these, the videos that we think are so embarrassing, you stammer, your hair's icky, all the, those are the ones get the biggest reactions, not viral. And I'm now, I'm not going to be perfect. I'm just, my thing sometimes is I get the talk too much, too fast, all that. So I guess that's where I want to slow down.

Mm-hmm. It's almost like in this, this age of AI where there's this great post or something, it's maybe it's AI. It's like people want, people are almost hungry for emotion, I think, right now.

Yeah. What I do have, what I, I have a little camera that is magnet on my screen. So I have my screen right here. This is the camera. And then I can, what I do is I move our Zoom So I can't see my face because I— maybe that's a bad thing, but I'm like, I'm looking right at you now. Here I'm looking— I don't know if you can see that, if it made a difference. No, that didn't make it. Here I'm looking at you and you're right under the camera. This is me looking at me over there.

Okay.

That box. So I don't— I like, I try— that's just something that I do is I look more at the other person.

Yeah, yeah, I have you big and I am small. I'm kind of small above you, but it's small enough to ignore myself, I think.

Do you have any feedback that would be helpful for me in terms of making these and what we can do to improve them?

No, I don't think so. I think I thought the first one went pretty well and it seemed like a good flow and stuff. I just wanted to see if you had any thoughts, but—

No, you're very calm. I like your calmness because I can be Italian.

I didn't— yeah, I don't know how calm I felt. Necessarily, but if I came off that way, I'm trying to be even calmer today.

Okay, great. Maybe we'll do tapping.

Maybe I need some tapping.

Maybe we'll do that one time. All right, so let's begin again. I didn't really prepare. All I do want to have— give me a second because I actually thought we— okay, I have it up. Yep. Let me just— I'm now behind it. Paradigms. Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

So I have that behind— oh no, let me move this out of the way. Find you again.

Zoom.

Okay. So I'm looking at you and then behind you I have some slides from that I'm making and I'll just explain that. But there are some—

Okay.

No, of course. Yeah, there are 2 that I think are relevant. To my story. And so I'll be curious to see, because I think it goes with development, how we did it ourselves. So ready? 3, 2, 1. After how long we just chatted, and now we're beginning. Tom, welcome back. It's great to see you, and I'm glad you're willing to go on this journey and share your experience, my experience, uh, how we've Both come from learning and development backgrounds, still in that area. And today we're going to talk about the second myth that I have in the book. And this one is around paradigms. And we're going to be talking about paradigm mastery. I would like to share how I— the insights, the ahas, the mental and emotional disruption that I got along the way. And I'd love to hear your story because you've been in this work for quite a while now. Love to hear your story too about how you— what the paradigms did for you. Any reactions on that?

Yeah, first off, great to be back with you today, Janet. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so the thing around paradigms, I mean, I think when I was first introduced to Carol Sanford's work, which we've talked about, we both have in common working with Carol. And I think I had some understanding of paradigms in the world of organizational development and learning and development. It's there.

Yeah.

But I think really what was, what shifted for me was seeing the frame or Seeing paradigms through the lens of a framework as an instrument to self-reflect on our own thinking, right? And really the understanding too that you might be introduced to the idea of a new paradigm, but it's not that simple in terms of actually shifting your world to another paradigm, right? So I think gaining a little bit of literacy around paradigms, but also learning to see it as a continuous practice. Because for me, I can see certain paradigms that have been very influential in my thinking and my work for a long time. Like in the world of learning and development, behavioral paradigm is very prominent. And once you learn to see it, you start to see it everywhere. And even, and it's interesting too, right? Because that's a paradigm that's been challenged for a very long time as well.

Yeah.

And, but it's to see how it's still very dominant in many ways, and still much is focused on controlling people's behavior or being able to predict their behavior. So I see that all the time in my client work. Often I'll go into an organization and there's a lot of that type of thinking around learning and development. What's the behavior? that we need to focus on? And how do we get people there?

Yeah.

I'll be honest, like, it's very easy to get sucked into that kind of thinking as well, right? So I may be exposed to other paradigms and even actively working on developing into other paradigms for many years, and still it's easy to collapse back down into that. So I think that's one of the big learnings for me is Don't underestimate how difficult it is to actually shift your worldview and how those old patterns can pop back up.

Without us knowing. You're so right. Whether it's parenting or grandparenting in my case.

Especially parenting.

Yes, especially parenting. I was talking to someone earlier today recommending Carol Sanford's book, No More Gold Stars. And I remember putting gold stars on a chart for my kids. And so very behavioral. behavioralist. I remember early on in my career— fortunately, this was several decades ago— saying the words, I don't care what they think, I only care what they do at work. And now this chapter on paradigm mastery, and what we're going to cover today, is the, the myth that if we can change the behavior That there's gonna be some transformation here. And I think that, and I'd like to be able to share my story of how it was, 'cause now how I've shifted that, right? 'Cause that's how I used to think. What I realized is that we didn't share the framework. I'm wondering if that would be really helpful just to share for folks the framework that I'm going through, that we're referring to. Or one of them.

Yeah, I think for me, frames have helped me really be able to see and think about this. So I think that'd be a good idea.

It's, it's such an important thing that it's helping us think together. Now, this has a lot of words on it, but this is my edited version, just slightly tweaked to make it more accessible to the work of Carol Sanford's. And where we have the extract value is— and I think what I will— curious to hear your reaction to this— but all of these, as you go up the level, the next level up is kind of trying to repair the damage of the one below it. They all added value and they're all needed. So if you're at the top, you're doing something at the bottom. So extract value basically means, can I make some money off of this. And in some— the downside is it could mean no matter how you do it, right? It's just, I want to make money for myself. The next level up that I think is trying to say, wait a minute, extracting value, that's not that positive. That's not a value that I want to keep. How do we plug the hole and fix that problem. So I find it to be very reactive, plug the hole. It's for me, Carol called this arrest disorder. And what I've changed it to, you're reacting to the problem, but you're just delaying the damage. You're kicking the can down the road. The next level up is do-good. I spent decades there, very well-intended emotional intelligence and team building. Ropes courses, noogies on the head, let's all be a good team member, psychological safety. Now these, I believe, all get better the higher we go up, but that's what I aimed at. And now I've written an article that says if you aim there, you're leaving money on the table, because if you— if that's where you get— There's another level, and that's How do we evolve the inherent potential of not only myself and our team, but the customers, the whole system, the ecosystem? That's how I understand it. And so I wanted anyone who's watching this to hear a shortened version. Tom, what would you add or change or react to this, given your understanding?

Yeah, I think one thing that this can really help us do is just to discern patterns in thinking and behavior, right? Better understand where certain things are coming from. One thing for me, working with a very similar framework that has been kind of eye-opening is also the idea that there, there's a place for each of these levels, right? And I think one of the, one of the patterns that I see also in my work is For example, working up on that do-good paradigm, but neglecting the lower-level work that's focused on existence, right? So sometimes we see purpose-led organizations that maybe aren't that good at the operations and the problem-solving level. And so to see how these levels work together. Or maybe they're not that good at a return on their investment, getting value back from what they're investing in. And then they're struggling financially, right? So I think it's, there's also this pattern of aiming high and neglecting the low.

Fascinating.

You have to have a viable— And then there's this pattern of collapsing down into the low and losing touch with the purpose, right? It's, and seeing the framework as a whole and learning to discern These different levels is where I'm exploring in my practice and finding a lot of value too. Because I can see, for example, in my— I can see both of those patterns showing up for me sometimes collapsing down into just going through the motions and earning a paycheck and solving problems. And it's one problem after the other. And you know, you feel like drowning in problems.

Whack-a-mole energy.

Whack-a-mole energy output. Yeah, exactly. So there's definitely, that's not an uncommon place for me to be. And then I can see other examples where I'm very hyper-focused on a higher purpose and maybe I'm neglecting the day-to-day operations and the maintaining my books and all that kind of stuff that sometimes feels boring and monotonous compared to.

Yeah.

the exciting high-level stuff. So how do you— how do we hold this together as a whole? And how does that relate to our ability to be effective?

Such a good point. Yeah, I like that you brought up the fact that sometimes if we're too aspirational in the potential levels, that you neglect having a viable business that is healthy enough to sustain the environment we're living in. And you can't even— let's say you don't deserve to evolve capacity if you can't pay your bills or bring money in to run the business. So fair point that I always focus on the top, but great for bringing that up. Thank you.

Yeah, sometimes I think about that, or lately I've been thinking about that lower level as kind of a a foundation in existence, right? We can get, and it's a grounding, I think, in existence and reality that we need to be able to be effective on those higher levels. Because I see many examples, and again, I'm guilty of that myself, of kind of head in the clouds and being idealistic or being overly focused on purpose. Yeah.

So The thing about— I was so much in corporate that I would always focus on results and return and on investment and milestones. And then when I neglected more of this, I didn't understand these paradigms at all. I didn't know they existed. I knew, oh, you got to have a paradigm shift kind of lingo.

Right.

But I didn't understand that there are actually these different levels. When I was with Carol, she had us— because these ideas can— and even whoever's watching this, they could do this themselves, I invite them to— is they seem abstract and conceptual. So let's use them on a real concrete, specific project, program, process. I did that using ruthless rigor to self-assess my own work on the levels of paradigm. And then I went, oh my God, I thought I was doing better than I am. I realized I was at Arrest Disorder and Do Good, and I didn't know that intentionally. It wasn't like I was going there. I didn't even know that these parrotists did. And I thought, oh my, all my education and training from good consulting, name-brand consulting firms who taught me to run performance management, talent management, learning and development, organization development, They taught me to go after these best practices and the research, and I just blindly said okay. And then now I'm looking at my through the lens of the paradigm, and I'm seeing things like you said. I can't unsee them anymore. I'm tempted to share my story now, but a little bit more like how the process went. That was the first. Kind of step in the leg in the journey, if you will. Anything you'd add about yours before I go to the what happened next for me?

Yeah, I can certainly relate to that too, because I, you know, I was exposed to a lot of the literature and best practices in organizational development and learning design and how do we develop people and a big focus on performance. And I was really into that for a while. Oh yeah, perform. It's all about performance. Performance is self-evident. You can even blend in good ideas with that. And again, it's, I think I would come back to now realizing it's not to say we're throwing all that away. This is my perspective. It's more of kind of an integral perspective, which is that we're not— there's also a danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, I think, and going too far in the other direction where it's like, no, everybody's going to do their own thing and we're not going to tell them Not going to give them any direction. We're not going to give them any guidance, or let's just support them. They can make their own decisions. So right now, I think that's what I'm exploring is how do these levels all work together? And how do we hold this as a whole so that people can— because I think one thing for me too is the realization that these paradigms emerged to address certain levels of complexity. So there's a whole history to these 2 that we could really go into, because understanding where they came from, right? The kind of those lower-level paradigms emerging in the Industrial Revolution when we're training people to work in factories. And then as history progresses and things become more and more complex and we reach the limits Of those paradigms and we need a new way of thinking in order to be able to manage a new level of complexity. I think arguably that's one way to look at it, probably not the only way. But I think, yeah, for me, it's also not all things are complex, right? And I think you can overuse complexity thinking. Some things are technical puzzles to solve and there is a solution. And I think working, in my experience, Working with a lot of different organizations, a lot of different roles, and designing a lot of training programs for different roles.

That's—

I've been trying to bring this back into the real practical, grounded world where sometimes people have certain things they need to do, and sometimes there is kind of a more or less right way to do that. And sometimes it's a dangerous job and People need—

Safety, risk management, GM practices, protocols, science, healthcare. Absolutely.

So how do you, how do we reconcile that fact with the need to liberate people from some of these systems that are dehumanizing and develop their capacity to be more self-directed and think for themselves and not just treating people like Machines to be programmed.

You bring— before this recording, I remember you talking. I don't have that much of an experience, but you mentioned now at least a couple of times I've heard this, the idea of more self-managing teams. I don't necessarily have that request. And I guess what I'm getting, gleaning from you is that managers who want to do good and be a good manager in these modern times, They think a self-managing team is the way to go, yet you can't just delegate the work to them if they don't have the capabilities to be able, in the discernment, in critical thinking, systems thinking, to be able to think for themselves real-time on the job. Is that a fair statement?

Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of that comes straight from Carol Sanford for me. I, when I first started working with her, I was really excited about this movement of self-managing organizations and flattening hierarchies and doing away with managers. And there was a big movement at that time. Frederic Laloux published this book called Reinventing Organizations. And I was really excited about that.

Yeah.

Carol really disrupted my thinking around that. And she's very— she was— she has some very— had some very interesting criticisms about that whole movement. And I think her— she talked about functional hierarchies, and she talked a lot about building the capabilities that people need to be self-directing and seeing it more than just changing the structure of the system. to liberate people from hierarchy, from being directed.

Don't get on the bandwagon.

Yeah. So yeah, that's definitely a space I've been very interested in. And I think a lot of those experiments in flattening hierarchies, not all of them, but a lot of them failed and the movement struggled to get traction.

Holacracy and the Zappos movement. And she would say it was because they didn't build the inner capabilities.

Exactly, exactly. So I think that's— because I, I personally, I do believe that there's a lot of potential in building more self-managing organizations or self-managing ways of working that don't rely on controlling people's behavior and manipulating people with extrinsic rewards. And I think there's a higher level of potential for human beings To work in more self-determined ways and think for themselves on higher levels. And that's how we get to more creative, innovative organizations. But yeah, back to the capability gap. We can't just release people to think for themselves if they haven't developed the capability to think for themselves. And I'll tie that back to paradigms, and I'll maybe loop back to your story because I think learning to—

Yeah.

Learning to think about where our thinking is coming from, to see it and see those paradigms and understand where that some of that stuff is coming. That's a fundamental part of unlearning those patterns.

Yes. A lot of unlearning. Yeah. So going, I want to share a little bit because it's almost like you don't know what you don't know. Unconscious, in common, I think, was the framework, remember. And so if we could— I'm going to share my screen and share a couple of— maybe these are salient to me right now because I'm creating a video course to go with the book that introduces it. So I have them up somewhere. Hold on.

I'll share.

Okay, I think that— so one, one of them that I want us to— I'll just jump through a few pictures like this one. We don't know what we can't see. And can you see here in this picture the hidden baby?

The hidden baby? No. Oh yes, now I see it. Yeah.

So this is—

I started with the foot.

And you see that? So these are the things that I find that our paradigms are hidden, and we have to really find ways. And then once we find those ways, we can use those levels of paradigm to see where we're thinking from. Here's another one that I use, a visual of the rhinoceros who sees the world because he has a horn in front of him, in between his eyes. as always having a horn. And we don't realize this. I found in my research a word I never heard of before called phism, meaning that there's this path dependence. It's also called the horseless carriage effect, meaning when an innovation arrives but people initially only understand it through The old lens. So this first car looks like— the picture of this car looks like a horse and buggy. Or the first electric light looked like a candle chandelier. And then the first computer looks more like a typewriter because there's a new innovation, but we can't grasp it yet because we're still seeing—

The old lens.

through the invisible assumptions of the previous one. And that's my story that I want to share, that I first used those levels of paradigm to assess my work around performance management for a global company. So owning that work, and that's a lot of work, it's a whole year cycle, and there's a cost, an opportunity cost, energy cost that goes to the organization. So is it worth it? And that was the first one I said, oh my God, I mean, I'm teetering on existence and sometimes potential, but I'm leaving development on the table. Then I read a book by, by Todd Rose, called The End of Average. And this kind of scared me because he talks about bell curves. And we would put our beloved people on a bell curve of performance, potential, and also their income of what they would get in terms of a bonus. All of the— we applied these bell curves. So this is just— it gets back to what you just said, Tom.

Yeah.

It's a 1-minute video. I'm going to make it a little louder. Let's see what he has to say. It's quick.

It's no accident how we got here. Our educational system was originally designed in the industrial age by people who were absolutely obsessed with averages because averages seem to work so well in managing factories. And the truth is, their system more or less accomplished what it was originally designed to do. Prepare generations of students for standardized jobs in an industrial economy. But the world's changed. Our demographics have changed. The skills that we need have changed. And our economy has changed. We know this. We also know that to meet the needs of society today, education must change.

So I don't know, have you read that? Or what are your think— what's your thinking around averages and bell curves before I go further?

I haven't read the book, but I've heard I'm familiar with some of the ideas with it. And I've, because I know Carol talked about it a lot and I've seen some of the, some ideas illustrated out, but yeah, I think that's such an interesting point. And I think especially at this moment in history, that's what's coming up for me right now is talking about a transforming economy, for example, and the uncertainty that we're facing right now. about what does the economy, what does the job market look like 5 years from now? Nobody knows. But we have maybe some clues about what types of jobs may not exist. And I think you can make a case that they're the types of jobs that are more mechanistic, more like those old standardized jobs that just simply won't exist for human beings because we're just, we just aren't that good at it and we're expensive and—

Robots can do it even. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's like, so the question kind of becomes, I think it's a very fascinating one, which is what are the capabilities that are going to be required for us to contribute and create value? And what does that mean for how we need to rethink and redesign systems of education and learning and I think we're facing this, we're in this moment where a paradigm shift in how we think about developing people is not just a nice to have, but an imperative. And it's not to say we have the answer to that necessarily, but it does begin with thinking about paradigms. And again, there's that unlearning.

Yes.

To come back to that, right? It's like, we need to understand where our thinking is coming from. It's not just adding more programming onto it. It's more like a meta level. kind of a capability to be able to start to reflect on, oh, where do my views and my thinking come from? Because we've been bombarded with this stuff our whole lives and we have been programmed to think in certain ways. And there is a history behind why and where this stuff comes from.

It's, yeah, I had to unlearn so much of my education that I wasn't aware of. And I revered research, and I took years ago, I took a Belbin test. It's like the Myers-Briggs of Europe, I think, or at least England. My colleagues did it on me, and I was called the professor, and it was very much, I want to know all the best practices. Was the study done well? All of that. And what I learned is that I was outsourcing. My own development, my own thinking to those best practices. And so now I've flipped this. The unlearning is, wait a minute, if I have some of these systemic thinking frameworks like the levels of paradigm, and we know there's hundreds of them that we could use, and I think I can start thinking for myself. That's what happened to me. And it created such an internal disruptive shift. Oh, I don't feel good. My people deserve better than what I've been giving them. And that shifted me to where— what I'm doing now. And so it was all done on an internal level. I want to share just some other— we're building on this case here, talking about the industrial level. The bell curve did work for scientific management. And people working in factories. There was a case for that. But then it went into our educational system, and we're trying to do it the exact same way. I did it in business. I was taught to stack rank and put people into unique beings, into high, low, medium, or no potential. Never know, but that was the joke. And then it even went into intellect, the bodies, putting people's intellect on a bell curve or their body size on a bell curve. So all these things I started questioning my— in building my own punto de vista, point of view around, wait a minute, I don't need to outsource the thinking. I need to think for myself. And imagine if we can do this with others. Now, I told you my work was looking at all of this was when I was assessing that I own talent management, succession planning, performance management. Here is a little bit longer video, maybe 2 minutes, and then this is my last video I want to share. But this really got me questioning a lot of what I was doing. So this is by Buckingham. He's written a number of books. This was around his book Nine Lies About Work, and he's going to talk about performance management and feedback and ratings. I owned that. I designed it, would redesign it. Every company I worked with, I played a role in And this shocked my world. I had to unlearn a lot. So let's hear what Marcus Buckingham says.

8% is the other 5 questions in strategic thinking. So they cluster together. 8% of it is my rater perspective on you. Am I your boss? Am I your peer? Am I your direct report? So 8% is explained by which one of those I am. 13% is what's called measurement error. And 54% of them are idiosyncratic rater effects. What does that mean? That means that when I rate you on anything, Chris, there's a pattern to my rating. I might be a very broad rater using the whole scale.

I might be a tight little rater clustered in the middle.

I might be a very lenient rater moving all the way to the right. 5, 4, 5, 5, 5, 4, 5. I might be a super tough rater because I'm just tough. 3, 2, 3. There's an idiosyncratic pattern to my rating. You with me? When I then rate Tom, the pattern should change because I'm looking at a different human. When I then rate Mark, the pattern should change again because I'm looking at a different human. It doesn't change. My pattern moves with me. My idiosyncratic pattern of rating moves with me. At least 54% of my rating of you is a function of me, not you. That's a problem because we pay you as though my rating of you reflects you, and it doesn't, it reflects me. This was really annoying to a lot of people, so they tried to get rid of the effect by making definitions of all these competencies ever more detailed and anchoring the scale 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ever more behaviorally so that we could get rid of this effect. And as a result of making the rating systems and the 360 systems even more detailed, the effect went up. So today, if you took the biggest studies of this kind and you said basically how much— not one study, but lots of studies— how much of my rating of you reflects you versus me. You could hang your mortgage on this number. 61% to 62% of my rating of Chris reflects me, not Chris. Yeah, that's a problem, guys. This effect is big and it's enduring. You can't get rid of it. Human beings are not objective. Human beings are not God. We do not look down and go, ah, strategic thinking, I'm the perfect rater of that, you're a 5. Okay, we're not that. We'll never be that. We are unconsciously biased. And I don't mean biased in terms of race and gender and age. I mean, we are biased in terms of the idiosyncratic pattern of our rating. It moves with us and you can't get rid of it.

That's those—

this—

that was my journey around kind of lifting up and looking under the hood, starting with assessing using the levels of paradigm and not being happy with that, then reading No More Averages. And there's a few— anyone can look on YouTube and see some more videos by Todd Rose. And then seeing Marcus Buckingham talk about this idiosyncratic rating effect, and I'm— it shocked my world. It's like a child saying there's no Santa Claus. It was a paradigm shift. What are your thoughts, Tom?

I'm curious to hear more about that. So when your world was rocked in that way, what was that experience like for you and how did you navigate Through that? What, and also, I guess I would ask, what did that enable?

Yeah.

For you?

I didn't get to finish this work because then COVID happened and I ended up leaving during COVID my corporate role and going on my own. But I did create a direction, a draft that was pretty well accepted by my ATE leadership team. of the organization. Given that this data was so broad and we want to do the right thing by our people, it's our responsibility. What I ended up doing was creating questions that asked the leader certain specific scenarios. When you need someone to build a cross-functional team that could be highly political and siloed, who do you go to on your team? And then the— and so it was questions around not what me as the leader, what I think I should rate you, Tom, in terms of your capabilities of working across a complex organization, It was asking me what I did in my own experience. And I would say, I would go to— in this case, it was Elaine. She knows who I'm talking about. I would go to Elaine for this, or I would go to Sam for that. And who did I go— and it was someone who could deal with a potentially explosive situation, or I needed strong analysis. These were the certain questions, like the capabilities that we were looking for in an organization. And you can name what is needed to get the job done, what your department does, and then saying, who do you go to get that done? That was my experience that I could as a leader, and that's what we tested out in the HRLT. That seemed— that's as far as we got, and they seemed to be on board, and then COVID hit.

Mm-hmm.

So I don't know what you think about that, but it was a totally different way than my trying to use what I was taught before.

Yeah, it brings to mind, I think, one of the, one of the core assumptions or beliefs that, that shift when we, let's say, transcend the more behaviorist paradigm is, I think, a view of human beings. In the behaviorist paradigm, there's this very clear belief that people are not capable of Introspection. People cannot. So, you know, that's why it's always an external, you know, it's all, it's focused all on external rewards and punishments and how do we manipulate and control behavior because people are not capable of managing themselves.

So add 360-degree feedback from others and ratings on the competencies.

Yeah. So there's a core belief there. People inherently are not capable of managing themselves. They don't see any potential in that from that worldview. And so it's all about, okay, they can't manage themselves. How can the environment manage them? And once you see that, you can't unsee it and you see it everywhere. But the challenge to the behaviorist worldview was very much centered on that and the kind of the humanist movement. Where it's like, no, wait a minute, we are capable of reflecting and learning to manage ourselves. And, but I think what's, what's interesting too is, and Carol talked a lot about this as well, and I know you're familiar with the limits of that movement that came after that, which is probably has a lot to correlation with the do-good paradigm that you showed earlier, where it's still not— it challenges that.

Yeah.

That old paradigm of that industrial mechanistic/behavioral.

Yep.

Those lower paradigms that look to control us and treat us like machines, but it's still not necessarily focused on developing that self-managing capability, right? It's, and I think that's the blind spot for a lot of organizations that are interested in Transcending more mechanistic ways of working or behavioral ways of managing people. Back to the self— the struggles with building self-managing organizations. And it's like, we assume that people have that capability. We challenge the behaviorist view that we don't. But I think what's missing is we have the potential for that capability, but it has to be developed.

Capacity. Yeah, that, that do-good level that I worked in. And so I've rejected and realized I don't want to extract value, and just the world isn't just a linear ABC, it's more jagged. And so we need people who can keep their knees bent and be more adaptable. So I tried to move up, and where I landed for the most of my career was on this do-good, and it's like Myers-Briggs and colors and team building, all of these fun activities. And we would try to do dialogue and other types of giving feedback. And I didn't know that there was another level. So that's where I aimed.

Mm-hmm.

And I think to close this conversation, at least the thinking here is that we as leadership and organization development people— and this could be HR and talent and developmentally minded leaders— that we don't need to rely on that external 360 feedback like I used to, or the competencies and someone rating you and then packaging that up and giving you your feedback. If we as professionals can learn to use Socratic methods, use more systemic thinking, that we don't give the answer, we don't know the answer. And so we're helping to build people to help them think on their feet real time. That's where I think our industry is lacking. They're still going back to the things I learned 3 decades ago, like 360 feedback. I don't know, maybe what's your reaction to that comment?

Yeah, I think, well, again, it's easy to— I'm observing myself in real time now because I can see, right?

Are you still doing that, Tom? Any of the 360s? You could be asked to do it.

Yeah, no, not currently, but I could be asked. And that's one of the things that I was going to I'm observing it myself now because it's like, right, you step into these paradigms, in these organizations that might be working at a certain paradigm, and there's an expectation, right? And I could even see it on this call where we've been named for, I would say, for a knowledge economy rather than an industrial economy, for me anyway, kind of.

Yeah.

Coming out of that, that in the era that we came up in, the goal was to become an expert with the answer. And that's, and become a problem solver, especially in the consulting world. Geez, you know, it's like, that's who you are. That's who you are hired to be. That's the expectation.

Yeah.

And it's, you're so thoroughly bombarded with that and marinated in that kind of thinking. Even as we're here talking about paradigms, I could see it Coming up like, oh, I need to be the expert here with something clever to say. Like, and then—

It's so seductive and expected.

Yeah.

So it's, yeah, learning to see that for what it is and be like, actually, there's a limit to all that. That again, just like the old industrial stuff, the knowledge era stuff worked to some degree. And that was the level of complexity. We were at. Of course, there's a price to pay for all of this, and the world has always been complex. All living systems are complex, but people have always been complex, right? So we paid a huge price for treating people like machines for so long. I think now we're at a point where the level of complexity that we're facing— again, back to the uncertainty that we're— the trend, everything's transforming right now. We have to learn how to unlearn some of those. Yeah, the, the being an expert right now, maybe in certain domains it still makes sense, but in many domains it's like, that's not what we need.

2 things come to mind is I said recently to a client, I'm an expert on non-expert pedagogy, and I'm— I don't think I'm an expert on it, but that was the point I was trying to make, in that we made our living on being an expert problem solver. And there certainly is a time and a place for that, for sure. And it's not just when there is a fire or someone asks you what time it is and you tell them the answer. But, but I think for us to be able to just pause and discern Is this the best? Am I serving by giving the answer? Is that the best service I can offer if we take a systemic view? And that's why these paradigms, I think, helped me. And you heard my story now. When I just assessed that, I found I wasn't proud and thought that our people deserve more.

And yeah, you can have the best of intentions, but if you can't see your own thinking, it's very easy to, for those, those patterns to pop back up and take over. And I think too, it's, I think when you start to develop some of these capabilities, it does change how you see people. Because again, you realize you've been seeing people through these categories and Maybe there's a lot of unconscious stuff happening based on all that programming. And slowly, but then through work, you start to break free from some of that stuff. And the world becomes, I think, for me, a lot more interesting in realizing a lot of that stuff really sucks the life out of the world, right? It's to see, even if it's all happening unconsciously, to see people Through, through the lens of their personality type or, you know, their level of potential and things like that.

Put them in a box.

Yeah, that has a huge effect on how you're going to interact with that person, how you're going to think about that person. And so I think that's what's needed now, especially, is learning how to see people as living beings that are unique and complex and interesting and evolving and Be able to interact on that kind of level where it's not just this mechanical transactional kind of relationship.

It's reminding me, years ago I read a book, Team of Teams. It was about the Iraqi War. I forget the general's name, McChrystal perhaps, something like that, and the Team of Teams. But I remember reading that they were trying to manage the war from their kind of war room in Washington or the Pentagon or wherever they happened to be. But the war and the soldiers on the ground, feet on the ground, the world is so different. And I think that how they built the— they were able to build the capacity in those people, first give them the authority. To make those decisions. And some of the examples I remember, I'm here in the Boston area, and over a decade ago, there was the marathon bomber. And it was the story, people were running the Boston Marathon, and then crazy guy creates a— blows up a bomb, and people died. And it was horrific, all over the news, and really bad. And the story was the hospitals and the doctors in the emergency rooms were just flooded with all of the people who were wounded in this tragedy. There was no playbook on how to— oh, what page do I go to when there is a Boston Marathon bombing? And then the other example he gave was— this is like gory, so I still remember it— a lady comes into the hospital With— got eaten, her face got ripped off by a dog who bit her. There's no place that you can go, and I think, to find the answers. This is the world we're living in. Those are two— let's forget those gory stories, but the world we're living in is so complex and dynamic. How do we build the capability to make the right decisions when there's no No Excel spreadsheet in standard operating practice to go refer to.

Yeah, it's such a great point. What we're talking about here, I don't think it's not, oh, this would be nice to do this stuff and maybe we make work a little more comfortable or whatever. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about like a, I think an evolutionary imperative.

Beautiful.

Because that's the, the old way is are not going to work anymore. That much I think we can be fairly certain about. Things are changing too quickly. There's too much complexity. We don't have these clearly laid out roadmaps and career paths and things that we can just follow. And we don't have this whole economy of experts that with answers that we can just hire to solve all our problems. And at least to a significant degree, right? Not to say that there's—

yeah, they do. Sometimes you can hire them, but that doesn't mean that their recommendations are going in strategy is going to be implemented.

Yeah. And there's, again, there may be a place for that, but there's a limit to that. And so, but you're not gonna be able to do that into the future that's emerging. I think right now, the capability to manage that complexity and the capacity to manage ourselves. Because, you know, again, I haven't read The Team of Teams, but it sounds like that does focus on being able to self-manage in a complex environment and why that's essential. Because, again, if everything's changing so fast, you need that capacity on the front line to be able to adapt to those changes and make sense of things and innovate and If it's coming from on high in a place that's disconnected from the front line and there's that separation and there's not that understanding of what's happening there.

It is a great book because he was talking about, wait a minute, we're such a great strong military and these little cells that have far less resources and uniforms and all that, how are they beating us at our own game? And it's with different ways of working and thinking differently. Tom, thank you so much once again for a great Talking Shop. This one on paradigms is certainly near and dear and close to my heart because it changed so much of how I think and how I work.

Yeah, thank you, Janet. Thanks for the invitation. That was a lot of fun. Appreciate it.

We'll see you next time for another lively conversation.

See you next time. Thanks a lot.