The Performance Improvement Blog

More Examples of Correlation Without Causation

In a previous blog post, I wrote about the common misconception that a statistically significant correlation between variables means that one of those variables is causing the other. For example, having a best friend at work correlates highly with an overall measure of employee engagement (according to Gallup Inc.), but that doesn’t mean that if you have a best friend at work, you will feel engaged in your work. "Level 5 Leadership" correlates highly with successful companies (according to Jim Collins), but that doesn’t mean that if you have a "Level 5" leader, you will have a successful company. This doesn’t take away from the value of these studies, it just cautions against making a causal leap in logic.

I am reminded of another correlation that has serious repercussions for many college-bound teenagers. This is the finding that students who attend elite colleges are more likely to have highly successful careers than students who attend other colleges. Parents make the mental leap from this finding to the belief that their children must attend one of these prestigious institutions (e.g. Ivy League) in order to be successful. This is absurd. Many other factors could explain success (graduate school enrollment, income, job satisfaction, etc.) of a high percentage of students who attend these so-called “elite” schools. Maybe they are successful because they are highly motivated with a great deal of family support. Maybe they would be successful no matter where they went to school. And many students who attend these elite institutions do not achieve success, as defined by the investigators, while many others attend less prestigious institutions and become very successful in their fields. So, what might be true statistically for a large group might not be true for an individual. Some individuals will do well and be quite successful at less prestigious colleges and universities…and at a small fraction of the cost. (Full disclosure: I serve on the Board of a community college.)

Are you bothered by other correlations without causation? What are they?

 

Does Your Organization Suffer From ADD?

Organizations, as well as children, can have ADD (attention deficit disorder)? Do your managers have trouble keeping their attention focused on new performance-improvement initiatives? Do they get excited about new management models and new (or reconstituted) management/leadership theories but lack the persistence to follow through on implementation. Many executives, because either they are desperate to achieve performance goals or they are afraid they will miss out on the latest management trend, will flit from one new program to another. Wally Bock aptly describes this phenomenon in reference to a client who worked in an ADD organization.

He worked for a large company for seven years. In that time, the company had at least one management fad per year. They found their cheese, learned about some fish market, discovered their strengths, and tried to master the carrot principle. When they found that they couldn't balance their scorecards, they aspired to develop into Level 5 Leaders. They only got to level 1 before they moved on to something else.

Each “fad” could be helpful to managers in this company, but by not following through on one method and giving it a chance to take hold and improve the management practices of the organization, two detrimental things happen. First, the company wastes time, energy, and money on activities that do not help the organization achieve its goals. Second, the company creates a culture in which employees don’t want to commit themselves to new initiatives because they assume management will move on to something else within a short time. Managers might go through the motions of attending training events, or company-wide meetings, or becoming familiar with a new method. However, if they are not committed to change, they will not support implementation. They will not talk about the new approach with the people they supervise, they will not provide resources for the initiative, they will not make time available for teams to work on related projects, and, worse, they might intentionally sabotage efforts to change anything.

Then the management method gets blamed for a lack of results.

• “We tried lean six sigma but our quality ratings didn’t improve.”
• “We gave all of our managers 360 feedback and they still don’t talk to each other.”
• “We sent everyone to three days of emotional intelligence training and it seemed like things improved for awhile but now it’s back to where we were before.”

Usually the problem is not the method; it’s the way the method is implemented. If managers don’t see how the method will help them achieve important business goals, if managers don’t have clear expectations for learning and success, if managers aren’t being supported by their bosses, if managers don’t have any immediate opportunities to apply the new method, and if managers aren’t held accountable and rewarded for applying the method, then the company can’t expect to reap any significant benefits. Like a diet, it doesn’t matter which one you choose. It could be Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Zone, or Biggest Loser. You won’t be successful unless your goal is clear, you have support from others, you are persistent, and you get feedback on your progress.

 

Temps: They're Here to Stay

The latest labor data indicates that in the current economic recovery, temporary workers have become a permanent fixture in many companies. The New York Times reports that …

…there are signs that this time around, the economy could be moving toward a higher reliance on temporary workers over the long term…This year, 26.2 percent of all jobs added by private sector employers were temporary positions. In the comparable period after the recession of the early 1990s, only 10.9 percent of the private sector jobs added were temporary, and after the downturn earlier this decade, just 7.1 percent were temporary.

Temporary workers can no longer be thought of as tangential to organizational performance. They often are the first person to whom customers have contact, they become key members of ad hoc project teams, they sometimes offer expertise that can be found nowhere else in the company, and some have a longer history with the organization than many so-called permanent employees.  

As I have written before, temporary workers have become critical members of our organizations and, therefore, we need to pay attention to their on-boarding and development. Very quickly, a company needs them to acclimatize, contribute, and be team players. There’s no time for a gradual learning curve. Typically, the hope is that they will hit the ground running, whether on the front desk or on a new product team.  Yet, at the same time, a poorly prepared, low performing, poor attitude employee (temp or permanent) can have a devastating impact on work climate and team performance. Examine and continually improve the process of hiring, training, developing, and retaining temporary workers much as you would for permanent employees.  

 

Just-In-Time Learning

Facts and figures everywhere…not a drop to drink (my apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge).  We are inundated with information and advice about what leaders should and should not do. Books and blogs are full of ideas. The problem is in having easy access to the best of this information when and where we need it.

Mobile tools have promise in this regard. In their simplest form, mobile phones and PDAs of various types provide ready access to the Web. Wally Bock identifies some Web sites that are rich resources of information. Clark Quinn writes about mobile learning and also formal social learning and informal social learning as formats that open up tremendous possibilities for providing information where it is needed. He argues that integrating these technologies will do things for us that our brains can’t do. It’s not only about accessing information; it’s also about processing that information in creative and useful ways.

RealTime Performance has a product called Inspire which is an example of making information useful to leaders. Inspire is “…a web-based tool that empowers employees to take ownership of their leadership development by enabling them to build, drive and track their own leadership development plan.” From that tool, RealTime Performance has created something that they call Inspire 10X10 which is 10 tips matched with 10 resources on topics that are most important to managers and leaders in organizations today. 

RealTime Performance has done the work of taking mountains of information on leadership/management skills and synthesized it down to short, useable suggestions and then paired those suggestions with books, videos, and other materials that a manager can use to delve into in more depth. You can download a free example of Inspire 10X10, the one on Building and Developing Talent.  

However, even with a tool like Inspire, to really learn, that is, to really internalize these tips and make them part of the way we work, most of us need help from others. We need to understand in conversation with others how managing in this way will help us be successful, we need opportunities to practice these skills, and we need feedback on how we are doing. This is where a boss, supervisor, or coach comes in. They can provide a relationship that facilitates and reinforces learning. Knowing what to do is only part of learning; we also need others to help us with goal-setting, practice, and feedback. 

 

Correlation Without Causation

Organizational leaders often misinterpret social science data. That might be okay on a quiz show like “Whad'Ya Know?”, but not when making important organizational decisions. The problem is that executives, like all human beings, are wired to see causal relationships between behaviors and events that happen at approximately the same time. Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons talk about this problem in their new book, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us.

Everyone is susceptible to what these authors call the” illusion of cause.”  Even David Brooks, a highly respected journalist and editorial columnist for the New York Times, demonstrates this bias toward causation in his December 7, 2010 column. He summarizes behavioral research that was reported to him by Kevin Lewis, a social science writer. In these brief summaries Brooks implies causal relationships between behaviors and events. These are the causal relationships Brooks describes in his column:

• Periods of peak fertility in females makes them avoid male relatives
• People who strongly doubt their own beliefs will strongly argue in favor of those beliefs
• Touching among team members improves the team’s performance
• Daylight savings time lowers SAT scores
• Gun shows have no effect on crime
• Low glucose levels result in a loss of self-control and increase the likelihood someone will commit murder
• Extroverted leaders do best when their employees are passive and don’t take the initiative
• Men increase risk-taking in the presence of attractive women
• Men are not attracted to women who dumped their last boyfriends, whereas women are attracted to men who dumped their last girlfriends

Each of these findings from social science research is an excellent example of how even very smart people make the mistake of attributing a causal relationship to two variables that, although correlated statistically, might each be caused by a third variable or the interaction of four, five, six, or more other variables. Maybe when sports teams are winning, players are more likely to touch each other in the excitement of the moment. Maybe when things are going well in a company led by someone who is extroverted, employees don’t see a need to initiate new programs. Many alternative theories can explain why each of those findings summarized by Brooks could be untrue. The problem Brooks, Lewis, and the social scientists have is the "illusion of cause".

Within companies the “illusion of cause” occurs, for example, when executives attribute business success or failure to their leadership, or to a new marketing program, or to a reorganized sales department, or to innovative products, or to a change in the economy. These events might be highly correlated but they are not necessarily the cause of business success or failure. Another area where leaders suffer from the "illusion of cause" is in judgments about the value of employee training and development programs. If there is no significant improvement in the performance of employees who go through training, the training is considered ineffective when, in fact, it could be a host of other behaviors and events that are barriers to learning and to learners applying what they learned. Conversely, if leaders observe an improvement in individual or team performance, they attribute it to the training. That might also not be true for the same reasons. What are examples of the “illusion of cause” that you see played out in your organization?

 

Just Listen!

Bosses, supervisors, co-workers, coaches, and mentors need to listen more and give advice and commands less. This is a poem that expresses this belief. 

Please, just listen.

When I ask you to listen to me and you start giving advice,

you have not done what I asked.

When I ask you to listen to me and you begin to tell me

why I shouldn't feel that way,

you are trampling on my feelings.

When I ask you to listen to me and you feel you have to do

something to solve my problem,

you have failed me, strange as that may seem.

Listen! All I asked was that you listen,

not talk, or do... just hear.

Advice is cheap: twenty-five cents will get you both

Dear Abby and Billy Graham in the same newspaper.

And I can do that myself. I'm not helpless.

Maybe discouraged and faltering, but not helpless.

When you do something for me that I can and need to do

for myself, you contribute to my fear and inadequacy.

But when you accept, as a simple fact, that I do feel

no matter how irrational, then I can quit trying to

convince you and get about the business of

understanding what's behind this irrational feeling.

And, when that's clear, the answers are obvious and I don't

need advice. Irrational feelings make sense when we

understand what's behind them.

Please listen and just hear me, and if you want to talk wait

a minute for your turn, and I'll listen to you.

Many versions of this poem can be found on the Web, sometimes attributed to Ray Houghton (Teen Times, Nov/Dec 1979) and sometimes to “Anonymous”.