What I learned today

Today was the last of my two day corporate training class. Our company is moving from a traditional style of interviewing to a behavioral style. For those not familiar with the difference, a traditional style asks the hypothetical questions we all hate, such as "what would you do if you saw another employee lighting the office on fire," and "we need a hard worker, are you a hard worker?" The behavioral style uses specific examples from a candidates past, such as "tell me specifically about a time you took leadership in a project, what you did, and what the result was." The idea is that you will gain a better insight into the experience of the candidate, which will help choose the right one.

Ok, so why did I just ramble on about all that? Well, in addition to our formal training, I was also able to gather a lot of interesting information about my upper managers who happened to be in my training class. I learned that nearly all of them were so rigidly stuck in their own way of doing things that even with a structured interviewing guide, they were unable to interview candidates without interjecting their own personal bias and leading candidates to the answers they wanted to hear. In other words, even when my bosses express the desire to "buy in" to a new concept, they cannot let go of how they have always done business and change.

Another component of the behavior style interview is the notion of compentencies demonstrated by a candidate by answers given. For example, a particular question may be under the category of "Demonstrates Communication," with four compentencies that if demonstrated by the candidates answer, are considered met. But my upper management would tend to judge an answer based on what they wanted to hear vs. what the stated judgement criteria is.

The reason this bugs me is because it showed that the only way to truly gain favor with those above me is to learn what they like and do it. It has nothing to do with my actual performance, only their perception of my success. If I succeed, but in a way that is different from what they would do, I fail to get recognized for it.

I suppose I never realized the level of bias in my upper management, though it does explain a few things (like the notion that high revenue growth is more important than an improved pretax profit, and the fact that when I suggested a twitter account for our store, the first question was "What's twitter?"). My question is whether or not this bias ultimately poisons our mission and objectives. I personally feel it does, and I suppose I will continue to pay a popularity price for radical thinking, though it produces results, which seems to astound them.

Ultimately, though, I've learned an important lesson beyond our formal training. I've learned to be aware of my own potential biases against my own employees. Is it wrong or just different. Sometimes, many times, different can be just as good and even better and I need to be sure I don't kill the enthusiasm for my employees who have potentially good ideas just because it seems odd to me. Something tells me there might be a life lesson here too, from my marriage to my daughter to my friends and even to those I have yet to meet. Bias that we bring with us will never lead to different results because we will always continue to do things the same way. Said another way, we can't ever improve if we already know the answer to the question we haven't asked yet.