As of March 28, 2011, the blog can now be viewed on Canadian HR Reporter‘s home page, www.hrreporter.com.

You can read Dave Crisp’s current blog on the website: Tigers can change their stripes

No additional blogs will be posted here.

By Dave Crisp

Can we constantly expect brand new ideas in the area of leadership and HR strategy?

Probably not, but hope lives eternal and it’s amazing what keeps emerging from a continuing focus on one key question: What stops so many senior executives, teams and organizations from applying basic HR and leadership concepts that we know for certain make for better results, engagement and retention of key employees?

Bloggers, speakers and journalists will continue to write about this until we get an answer everyone can absorb and apply. I was surprised to see a great contribution about this recently. But I suspect, like many, I got excited by it and then a day later I can hardly recall why I got wound up. It seemed so obvious and logical and so much like information we already know that it’s easy to discount it. As a result I have to get myself wound up again, and I wondered why.

The answer seems to be that, because it sounds like much we’ve heard before, it loses some of its validity. Do you find yourself reacting that same way?

The piece I saw is from ‘strategy + business’ (a site I wasn’t familiar with) talking about how to change people’s behavior and organization culture, also known as habits, via a “modern understanding of brain research.”  Here’s the thing: they refer back to Adam Smith’s theories (in the 1700s) – that’s how long this discussion has been going on, not just (like most HR concepts) the last 100 years or so.

The drift is that to change habits is tough and requires constant repetition and encouragement… and habits are what perpetuate behavior and “culture” of organizations (which is just everyone’s combined habits). They’ve wrapped this old observation in new jargon — brain research — and some of the findings are generally interesting, but they simply reinforce these basic observations we already know, have known since at least Adam Smith’s time and yet don’t find management people acting on very often.

Yes, it clearly bears repeating but, having repeated it, have we learned anything new? That’s what we always ask ourselves. The answer in this case is yes. We learn a couple of big organizations have changed their cultures through this process. (That’s important, but minor because although we hear lots about change efforts that don’t work, these aren’t the only ones that have.) We learn modern scientific research confirms what we generally know, so we are on the right track. There’s some biology at work that it helps to understand and counterbalance — and our beliefs are validated. (Those are always helpful, but again, not totally surprising.)

More importantly we learn a couple of seemingly minor techniques for developing new, better habits that actually could be very important.

First it’s clear the objective isn’t to eliminate old habits (you can’t), but to install new, stronger ones that will take precedence over the old  through endless repetition (in this case endless means you can’t let the focus shift rather than meaning it’s drudgery).

You can figure out your old habits by watching your behavior closely, decide rationally what you want to change and start practicing — and persist despite how scary or annoying or frustrating it seems at first. And we ought to surround the core habit with as many new, supporting habits as we can possibly develop. Eventually the new behaviors become “the way we do things here” and you’ve achieved your goal, provided you keep practicing, the more consciously the better so as to ensure when people aren’t thinking about these things they will automatically do the right thing. What you can’t do is order it, enforce a bit of practice and then stop and expect the new, good behavior to continue.

So it’s been logic, it’s been observed for centuries, now it’s scientifically proven and it’s what we all strive to figure out — how to change culture. Shouldn’t that seem unbelievably exciting? Let’s actually do it this time.

Dave Crisp is a Toronto-based consultant with a wealth of experience, including 14 years leading HR at Hudson Bay Co. where he took the 70,000-employee retailer to “best company to work for” status. For more information, visit www.crispstrategies.com.

By Dave Crisp

When you consider the book Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin (mentioned in an earlier post), there are many interesting implications for leadership and development of leaders. We do very little training of leaders. At best, most companies might manage the equivalent of a couple of days in-house or a week-long seminar at various institutions, some better than others. That’s once or twice in a typical career — hardly continuous learning.

Often what’s taught in such programs is more supervisory basics – how to discipline, how to give and follow up an assignment. That’s hardly advanced leadership. In fact, the concepts of the boss setting fixed goals, following up and disciplining shortfalls, if over-used, are certain to detract from the deeper objectives of leadership — which include coaching and encouraging employees to take initiative, risk trying their own new ideas and driving further than the coach/leader expects.

So if training isn’t extensive, how do our leaders get the 10,000 hours of concentrated practice needed to develop true skill at this highly complex task. The answer seems to be that in most cases (82 per cent, as we’ve pointed out from one study previously) they don’t. They remain at a “starter” level of leadership skill that in turn extinguishes employee engagement with a few months.

The best practice organizations in leadership development use a range of tactics. They train, they ensure coaching and mentoring (whether internally or externally provided), they send people on developmental visits, they rotate people from assignment to assignment designed to fill in gaps in their experience and background. They try to ensure these on-the-job projects and roles are increasingly challenging and they try to support learning continuously.

If the best we can expect is about one-half of a manager’s time dedicated to new or “leadership” tasks versus routine stuff, it would take about 10 years to get 10,000 experience on those skills. That’s probably pretty optimistic, since most people won’t be continuously challenged, but will be marking time at least some of those years. Moreover they may not have support or guidance steadily to push progress.

However, we know that, given the right background, some individuals can learn at highly accelerated rates in jobs they’re “not quite ready for,” that challenge them enormously in ways they haven’t experienced before, but find an ability to live up to. The person who suddenly finds themselves in charge in a crisis and excels is a well-known phenomenon. That way, you pack 10,000 hours into a much shorter duration.

The problem is we can’t always engineer that sort of exceptional learning experience. As with so many events in life, it’s only if the individual decides for herself she wants to try and exerts immense effort that this can work. You could throw lots of people into challenges that seem over their heads only to find they are in fact swamped and you’ve hurt that individual’s chances. Some would do better in the next challenge, but there is no guarantee of that and in the mean time, you’ve created a bad result for the organization as well.

From a complexity science view, your best bet is to assume it may take at least 10 years to hone leaders skills and set them on a path with continuous learning challenges, support and varied experiences, watching all the time for those who seem to have the potential to make a significant learning jump in a very large challenge.

Complexity science, however, doesn’t suggest the success rate will be 100 per cent. More likely fewer than one-half would survive a big jump in responsibility. The science shows situations advance through continual trial and error with the emphasis on a few succeeding while many fail. So it’s probably better to encourage many managers to try small jumps, take relatively small risks and see who emerges with greatest effectiveness. At least then you have a learning culture that supports the bigger jumps when they occur.

If the penalties for small failures are negligible, you can move those who don’t do as well to a new learning experience quickly and keep them growing. The more you can engineer this right across the board in your organization, the more effective leaders will begin to emerge along the way. And these will be true leaders who can take the organization far into the future faster, exactly the type we need for the continuous innovation companies need to survive and thrive.

Dave Crisp is a Toronto-based consultant with a wealth of experience, including 14 years leading HR at Hudson Bay Co. where he took the 70,000-employee retailer to “best company to work for” status. For more information, visit www.crispstrategies.com.

By Dave Crisp

On the subject of interesting new books, I stumbled on another, Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin, in an airport. Just had to have it and couldn’t put it down until the end. Like Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, one could say the main premise is it takes 10,000 hours of solid work to produce a “genius.”

Colvin refers to Gladwell, but takes the subject in a useful new direction. What he focuses on is debunking the common belief some people are simply “born with talent.” He covers eye-opening stories of “geniuses” that can clearly be explained as due to hard work and consistent, life-long application to a particular subject.

Of course, if you aren’t the person who started singing, dancing or playing the violin at the age of three, and kept at it religiously into your teens, that doesn’t change the fact you aren’t likely to perform at Carnegie Hall. But what it does impress on us is that continuous lifelong learning is the route to becoming better and better at whatever our chosen talent area is — and those who don’t do it are destined for mediocrity. Of course, we’re all born with or learn some skills early, but to be really good at something a tremendous amount of practice is necessary.

When you choose to pursue what you love, practice comes naturally. You simply do more of what you like, so getting people into jobs they really enjoy is critical in talent management and leadership.

Another key learning to draw from this for organization strategy is that internal candidates for leadership have a distinct edge due to longer experience within the industry and operation. Colvin makes a very good start, if not a totally researched argument, that their “practice” is hard for outsiders to duplicate. It’s an interesting challenge to the idea that innovation requires outsiders to be brought in. He acknowledges the truth is that both are needed in some proportion. Insiders can get stale and simply repeat the same routines year by year, learning and developing nothing better, but they are the backbone of the operation. And setting an outsider in the CEO role, where everyone has to do as told by the new person, rarely works.

Colvin promotes the idea of deliberate practice — choosing a target area to improve and working hard, trying hard. He points out most people do not do this. I can certainly confirm that many appointed to leadership positions don’t do this with the skills of leadership. These appointees rarely get training and even more rarely practice to improve after the first years, which are mostly pure trial and error. A few have some prior skills, but hardly the level of practice Colvin finds necessary.

Instead many managers settle into routines that get them by. They apply their own brand of psychology of handling people – “don’t give too much praise or they’ll get lazy; keep them on their toes; challenge everything because people can always do better than their first effort.”

Many executives apply such shorthand guidelines blindly to every one of their people as if every person responds to the same approaches. They argue doing otherwise “takes too much time.” Well, Gladwell and Colvin are expecting 10,000 hours or 10 years — not just of experience, but of deliberate practice at this critical skill that most people don’t start developing until their mid-20s at the earliest. Sure they may have had some leadership experiences to copy or draw on from earlier days and some are truly insightful, but there is rarely dedicated or guided practice in these key skills. What are we doing to promote the extensive learning periods and continuous struggle to grow that this reveals is required to turn out the best?

Dave Crisp is a Toronto-based consultant with a wealth of experience, including 14 years leading HR at Hudson Bay Co. where he took the 70,000-employee retailer to “best company to work for” status. For more information, visit www.crispstrategies.com.

By Dave Crisp

Just when you think it’s all bad news, a writer comes along with a fundamentally optimistic view. That’s certainly true of a new book, The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley.

It’s so optimistic, you are bound to find something unbelievable about it, but it makes you question the prevailing pessimism and perhaps rightly so. He even argues we don’t have a global warming crisis and we can overcome our energy shortages, though he’s slightly less optimistic about water shortages.

The Sawyer family harvests their crop of wheat with combines near Acme, Alta. For generations, people have been fearing we were going to run out of food — but that hasn't happened yet. Author Matt Ridley makes a strong case against pessimistic thinking, and the ability of humans to overcome problems through innovation, in his new book. (Photo: Todd Korol/Reuters)

What he argues basically is what I’ve been harping on — we can solve pretty much any of the problems facing us with ingenuity if we build our capacity to innovate in all our organizations. He makes his arguments in the context of a very interesting survey of history in which he insists the urge to trade, to do business with each other, leads to each of us specializing in some skill set we can get exceptionally good at… therefore producing far more than if each of us tried to produce all the things we individually need.

By becoming specialized we can overproduce beyond what we each need and thus trade the surpluses among ourselves so we all have more of everything. It’s fascinating to view the history of the world in this light (and I have to agree generally with his conclusions).

Overall, it’s a great, positive message for those who choose to work in commercial endeavors. Of course, not surprisingly, my copy was a gift from a Canadian mutual fund company, Vertex One, that stands to gain if we believe the future is literally worth investing in. Good marketing (the second year in a row they’ve chosen a book that is definitely worth not only reading, but thinking about).

On a cautionary note, this isn’t a fund recommendation. But for the purposes of full disclosure, it is one I hold a small stake in. It definitely promotes the concept that business can have a significant role in saving the world, perhaps not a surprise from a company based on the West Coast.

Of course, we can never be sure of the future, but Ridley makes a good point that throughout our spectacular rise to the technological superiority of today, there have always been pessimists predicting we would run out of the ability to improve things. Every generation has predicted we’d run out of food, but so far we haven’t… so far.

What we can’t disagree with is his conclusion that we better continue to innovate at a rapid pace or we most certainly will be faced with problems the globe can’t overcome. Innovation has become the prime strategic imperative and we know a unique sort of leadership and human resources environment is required to support that.

In one sense, we’ve set ourselves on a treadmill and have to keep it going at least until we find population numbers decreasing significantly (hopefully not due to catastrophe). His view of “evolution” is most interesting, too, arguing we’re the only species to have evolved through social restructuring, education and development. It’s a powerful conclusion, but just how true or how much we can count on this continuing remains to be seen.

Suffice it to say, I enjoyed the new insights and would recommend this for many college curricula.

Dave Crisp is a Toronto-based consultant with a wealth of experience, including 14 years leading HR at Hudson Bay Co. where he took the 70,000-employee retailer to “best company to work for” status. For more information, visit www.crispstrategies.com.

By Dave Crisp

When we have a critical issue to resolve, putting it front and center in the spotlight and getting every willing person working on it can produce amazing results. Almost every one of us has participated at one time or another in a crisis/solution event and has seen how a committed team can turn things around.

We have a crisis — of leadership, or rather the unfortunate lack of it. Only about one in five leaders appear to fit the description of what is most effective and many of them are likely working in cultures and job situations where their effectiveness is stymied. That accounts for the fact so few organizations, especially bigger ones, have leadership we could hold up as a model.

Isn’t it time for all great leaders, at every level of every organization (and they are there), to identify each other and plan together to change their cultures? This clearly isn’t coming from the top in very many organizations. We know division heads and group leaders can make a huge difference in their divisions.

They can choose to work with like-minded division heads to expand the sphere of coaching and positive leadership, to avoid, turn around or get rid of the weak, ineffective, unacceptable leadership behaviors in their areas. They can model, coach and require better behavior in their units whether or not it is formally recognized in the organization’s bonus system or performance appraisals (as it should be).

We know there is considerable public sentiment against old-style, command and control leadership that doesn’t listen to employees or customers, that dishes out orders for “my way or the highway.” People have seen what that sort of leadership produces in terms of massive bank and corporate failures resulting in millions of layoffs. I see the frustration in every presentation I do, but of course I’m presenting to people who come out to find out how to improve themselves and others as leaders, not those who won’t waste a moment on this objective.

After a recent presentation, an audience member described how their head of research and development believed lab work was the only solution for innovating and stifled other ideas and suggestions from his staff with the result that, in the economic downturn, the company decided R&D was too costly and not producing enough useful ideas. Where they had once been innovative leaders in their industry, they re-strategized to become just a day-to-day service organization and not surprisingly lost out to others who already delivered better in that area. They ultimately went out of business.

When every organization is innovating as fast as they’re capable, a decision to eliminate innovation is fatal. Only with engaged, motivated people delivering ideas beyond getting everyday work done can companies survive and thrive today. We owe it to our companies to get that message out and develop the learning, coaching, growth oriented cultures that will ensure our own as well as our companies’ well-being into the future.

OK, that’s two soap-box posts. (See part one here.)  I’m happy to entertain comments.

Dave Crisp is a Toronto-based consultant with a wealth of experience, including 14 years leading HR at Hudson Bay Co. where he took the 70,000-employee retailer to “best company to work for” status. For more information, visit www.crispstrategies.com.

By Dave Crisp

Recently, a group of 23 senior vice-presidents of HR (the top people in their companies) met for three hours to listen to and discuss with a panel composed of:

•a highly respected CEO (now chair of his organization)

•a PhD researcher in the field

•a highly specialized and successful consultant and a very senior coach of C-level executives with a long history in the field.

The topic: How can we get the C-suite involved in actively understanding and promoting employee engagement?

The issue:  We see mountains of research proving engaged workers deliver vastly superior financial and company results that accumulate dramatically over time. Still, 82 per cent of leaders seem to ignore these results and in almost every company only about 20 per cent of employees are substantially engaged in their work. It seems no coincidence that these figures work out as they do — the 18 per cent of effective leaders are reaching about that proportion of staff apparently.

The conclusion: By the time executives gain top authority, they either believe employees contribute and need to be engaged and treated so they will be… or they don’t (and most still don’t despite the concrete evidence). Those who don’t still find many ways to slough off the figures — doesn’t fit my industry, wouldn’t work in our culture, too difficult, expensive or time-consuming to be bothered, too slow, too distracting from “the real business.” You name it, you’ve probably heard it. And yes, boards demand quarterly results, so CEOs have to dish out orders, not wait and hope creative leadership will produce results sometime.

The recommendation: (This is where it gets frustrating.) There’s not a lot you can do except hold up examples of positive, people-oriented leaders who are getting good results and then try to make the connection. Even then, most nay-sayers will do their best to find other reasons for the success that do not suggest the nay-sayer should improve their behavior.

Two days later this posting appeared on a learning officer site:

Does anyone have any suggestions on ways to sustain participation in leadership development offerings? We have a lot of great programs and a wonderful framework in place to continue to develop our leaders. We have monthly lunch-and-learn type exchanges, bulletin boards, blogs, wiki sites, book clubs, online learning, mentor programs and formal classroom style learning.

We select topics either from leader suggestions, developmental gap areas or from business driven timelines. Some leaders are actively seeking self-development and they attend and participate in almost all of the offerings, and other leaders either attend sporadically or infrequently. Any suggestions on how to truly engage all the leaders in their own development? Does anyone else see the same things in their organization?

My answer: Everyone sees this. We have to convince all our positive leaders to coach every possible individual they’re in contact with. I believe the message is spreading, but if we hope to see a “tipping point” in our lifetime, where the majority of leaders take this stuff for granted and keep on improving themselves and their staff, we all have to get this message out. Period.  A single powerful CEO can influence major improvement, that we know, but we also know there are very few of these and developing more probably waits for new generations to make it to C-level. In the meantime all any of us can do is try wherever we work to influence as many as possible.

Dave Crisp is a Toronto-based consultant with a wealth of experience, including 14 years leading HR at Hudson Bay Co. where he took the 70,000-employee retailer to “best company to work for” status. For more information, visit www.crispstrategies.com.

By Dave Crisp

Now that WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange is preparing to go after a business in addition to his government targets, perhaps that casts some light on what he or the justice system should or shouldn’t do.

Shares of the suspected target, Bank of America, tumbled 3.5 per cent or $4 billion worth in a few hours. Of course, that’s the stock market for you and presumably some seemingly savvy investors would then take advantage of buying low and help stabilize the price almost as soon as it was perceived to be dropping.

After all no one actually knew at that point (and we still don’t) whether Assange’s claims to have damning evidence of downright illegal dealing actually were being made about this particular bank or not. Only by putting together information he dropped in earlier interviews was any connection guessed.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange holds up CDs containing data on offshore bank account holders, which he received from former Swiss private banker Rudolf Elmer at the Frontline club in London, on Jan. 17, 2011. (Photo: Paul Hackett/Reuters)

Whatever the outcome, a few things seem clear. Assange has found a new use for the Internet and hacking (which he was convicted of earlier in life). Many people seem OK that he’s revealed classified documents from governments. Whether they seem as willing to stand by now that he’s moving on to business is an unknown. The debate will no doubt rage extensively.

What his move toward business revelations raises is the question of what would have been the right approach if this isn’t. If you or I had evidence of illegal activity of a business or an individual, the more accepted course of action would be to present it to legal authorities, the police or SEC, and expect them to deal with it.

Innocent until proven guilty clearly falls into a grey zone if such information is simply published. No matter how clearly damning the “evidence” might be, there are rules about whether it is validated, admitted into judicial process and more. Simply dumping into the public domain may be a journalistic scoop approach applicable to public figures, institutions and public information, but when it is classified or proprietary material, however obtained, one would expect going through proper authorities first might be more appropriate. Would that be any less public? Perhaps initially, but certainly not as soon as charges are laid… and that, too, removes much of the right to presumption of innocence unless convicted.

What’s also clear is there are very few true secrets one can or should depend on staying secret, no matter what line of work or social endeavor you’re in. In one sense it’s great if we operate all the time as if anyone should be able to know what we’re saying or doing. Companies with rules against negative, behind-the-back gossip, for instance, clearly are straying into questions of confidentiality of individual conversations, hearsay and innuendo.

On the other hand, if a manager has a clear discussion with an employee about short-comings, isn’t gossiping behind their back, and puts this on record as a warning or developmental advice and that sort of personal information is made public by something like WikiLeaks, both we and law enforcement would take a pretty dim view of that. It seems likely we’d conclude the information would be damaging to all concerned. The employee’s reputation and future job prospects would suffer and so would the ability of managers to act properly in evaluating work in the future, thus damaging the ability of employees to improve. Some might argue pure verbal discussions should suffice, but we all know that until something is in writing, it’s often ignored.

It’s not like any of this is completely new. It’s probably more that a single individual with no grounding or connection to established process, like editorial oversight, for instance, has been able to rock some very large boats single-handedly in a dramatic way. Like so many new initiatives fuelled by wide open Internet and technology, this simply raises old questions in new ways and suggests that we’re all going to be extremely busy trying to figure out what’s best and what policies are needed to ensure that.

If it’s all right for Wikileaks to leak your information, how can you ensure your employees don’t routinely use conduits like that to reveal what they cannot themselves? Interesting?

Dave Crisp is a Toronto-based consultant with a wealth of experience, including 14 years leading HR at Hudson Bay Co. where he took the 70,000-employee retailer to “best company to work for” status. For more information, visit www.crispstrategies.com.

By Dave Crisp

At a time when many observers are calling for evolution in human thinking so executives make better decisions, it isn’t only individual executives who need to think more clearly, with more emphasis on facts and opposing views, but entire organizational decision-making teams.

A new website has seen remarkable growth recently focusing on just these sorts of questions and others having to do with innovation in management thinking. “The MIX” — or “Management Innovation eXchange” — is worth a look if you’re following changes needed in managing organizations. They describe themselves as an innovation ‘project’ to which contributors are welcome. You’ll recognize some of the originators like prominent management guru Gary Hamel, for instance.

I liked one recent article in particular, pointing out that in the years since “shareholder value” became the nearly exclusive measure of success in many businesses, success on that measure has actually declined on average almost 30 per cent, arguing the worst performances in the latest financial crisis were turned in by those with the most “independent boards” and worst of all were those boards weighted with institutional shareholders — shareholders big enough to drive their own direct shareholder interests. They argue there are other reasons to run organizations.

On one hand, that clashes with some of my earlier posts in which I’ve argued against letting senior executives determine directions alone, since they have been shown to tend to favor decisions that benefit themselves. Yet, clearly, the idea of shareholder oversight is equally being called into question here.

What alternatives are there? The key would seem to be that strategies have to be looked at from multiple points of view — that neither individuals nor one or two large groups should be allowed to drive agendas exclusively or almost so. That suggests a need to review decisions more broadly.

What this argues for is that strategies need to serve composite, multiple needs. We live in the midst of complexity that is growing more complex all the time. The best solutions are rarely likely to be one-sided, no matter which side is favored. The challenge, of course, is that all of us as individuals have reasons that seem eminently reasonable to each of us for tilting decisions in our favor.

This, of course, is supposed to be the strength of democracy as a system. Everyone gets a vote. The problem is what political scientists took to calling the “tyranny of democracy” many years ago — the tendency of the largest group in society to suppress interests of the minorities in favor of rewarding themselves. If you have the power, whether it is to out-vote or simply to outweigh the “opposition,” it is tempting to see the other interests as “less important” and decide to suit yourselves.

Going forward we have to find better ways of ensuring inclusiveness, not only in hiring or accepting people who are different, but in terms of including differing interests and agendas. Everyone with every agenda has to work together to ensure as many constituencies benefit as possible.

Unfortunately, we only have to look south to see the worst behavior in years to ignore this in public political debate, to use negative campaigning to try to win and eliminate opposing interests and points of view. And worse, we can see it spill over into their press, which has the freedom to say and campaign for what it likes exclusively, apparently. So although we see more written by researchers and observers for more inclusiveness, we see less public debate paying any attention to clear facts that pure partisanship hurts results.

Dave Crisp is a Toronto-based consultant with a wealth of experience, including 14 years leading HR at Hudson Bay Co. where he took the 70,000-employee retailer to “best company to work for” status. For more information, visit www.crispstrategies.com.

By Dave Crisp

In my last blog post, I commented on conclusions from the book Kluge, written by Gary Marcus, about the odd ways human beings think due to the history of how our brains evolved. The word kluge describes a haphazard assembly of stuff that is put together the way it is because it works, it solves some immediate problem and then further developments tend to institutionalize the earlier, odd, less than fully logical set up.

We needed instant emotional reactions to help us deal with predators and other dangers in our early evolution, but later needed more logical thinking to get beyond that stage. Nevertheless, while instant emotional “conclusions” don’t help as much as logic in today’s world, the latter has never developed enough to fully balance or overcome emotion. So often we make decisions based on emotion and rationalize them afterward rather than logic first — even when that would be better.

Marcus makes a solid case that our thinking tends to be biased consistently to see things as we want to see them and to be overly optimistic at times about our own powers of observation and thinking in ways that facilitate conclusions we hope for. We think we’re worth more or otherwise overestimate our contributions when we’re actually fairly average, for instance, so everyone, including CEOs who more or less have the power to leverage better rewards for themselves, routinely expect larger than average pay increases even in tough economic times when they’re laying off others to save money.

A recent study of executives showed they know managers are generally better at technical skills than people skills like dealing with conflict, coaching and developing others, which consistently rank lowest for the large majority of executives. People skills are where emotions get in the way of logic. So one might think that’s good news — they see the problem, which is usually the first step to improving. But you’d be wrong — it’s not that they realize they are short of people skills themselves. Executives see that other managers are weak, but Korn Ferry’s extensive studies estimate 82 per cent of executives need to improve in people skills. Since they don’t know this, only 15 per cent actually said they felt these were areas where they needed help. While they could correctly identify such needs in general (probably areas they think others need to improve at), they were woefully off on where they themselves fit.

So what does Marcus recommend we do with this sort of information?

First, make it widely known. Help people see these sorts of limitations apply so widely we ought to assume some apply to ourselves, at least to some extent, and work on doing something about it. In other words, reflect. Pay attention to research and knowledge that’s developing in the field of human thinking and behavior and take into account that your own decisions and habits may need to become more logical and careful. Pay attention to whether you’re about to make a decision others will recognize as illogical. Get others’ input, work as teams (but not just with senior members), add diversity of thought and viewpoints. And, for boards of directors, do all you can to ensure individuals aren’t deciding their own pay and perks or granting top teams compensation that will inevitably put upward pressure on their own.

Pay is just one easy example of where these flaws become highly visible. Early, well-known research shows everyone would like 20 per cent more money, but that pay increases, no matter how good, become taken for granted in a year or so and 20 per cent more again becomes the new objective. This is just as true if you make $2 million a year as $20,000.

It’s also been shown that when CEOs order studies of the best place to relocate head offices, they almost inevitably concluded it should be closer to wherever the CEO lives. More research shows more pay doesn’t equate to more long run happiness above a fairly moderate pay level. How many other corporate decisions are being made the same way, based on how one or two people feel?

And, of course, it isn’t just CEOs deciding in their own favor, but all of us tending to. They just happen to be somewhat more visible. Are we smart enough to find ways to balance these all too human pressures?

Dave Crisp is a Toronto-based consultant with a wealth of experience, including 14 years leading HR at Hudson Bay Co. where he took the 70,000-employee retailer to “best company to work for” status. For more information, visit www.crispstrategies.com.