Leadership development is not immune from the hype. The latest “magical” cure-all for whatever ails your company is Big Data. Here’s one recent statement about how this will work:
“we want to ensure that we make decisions around employee selection, development and separation based on criteria that we know matters – because we have correlated them statistically with outcomes – and ignore the criteria that don’t.”
Wow. Statements like that present a utopian view of the future. But don’t clamber up on the bandwagon just yet. There’s a problem.
Leadership development depends on accurate rating
Most of the leadership development programs I’ve observed depend an awful lot on ratings of potential. Many companies even have a specially designated group of “high potentials” who receive the lion’s share of development opportunities and resources. But what if the ratings are wrong?
Human beings are lousy raters
Marcus Buckingham’s article “Most HR Data Is Bad Data” describes the magnitude of the problem. Here’s the money quote.
“Over the last fifteen years a significant body of research has demonstrated that each of us is a disturbingly unreliable rater of other people’s performance. The effect that ruins our ability to rate others has a name: the Idiosyncratic Rater Effect, which tells us that my rating of you on a quality such as “potential†is driven not by who you are, but instead by my own idiosyncrasies—how I define “potential,†how much of it I think I have, how tough a rater I usually am. This effect is resilient — no amount of training seems able to lessen it. And it is large — on average, 61% of my rating of you is a reflection of me.”
So, what can you do?
There are three things you can do. One is already a best practice in many organizations.
Use multiple raters and have them discuss their ratings. You can rate people relative to each other, rather than against some abstract standard. Human beings are better at relative rating than absolute rating. And, you can pay more attention to the actuality of performance and less to abstract potential.
