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2015-11-17 09:13:43
Francesca GinoBradley Staats
Virtually all leaders believe that to stay competitive, their enterprises must
learn and improve every day. But even companies revered for their dedication to
continuous learning find it difficult to always practice what they preach.
Consider Toyota: Continuous improvement is one of the pillars of its famed
business philosophy. After serious problems in late 2009 led Toyota to recall
more than 9 million vehicles worldwide, its leaders confessed that their quest
to become the world s largest automobile producer had compromised their
devotion to learning.
Why do companies struggle to become or remain learning organizations ? Through
research conducted over the past decade across a wide range of industries, we
have drawn this conclusion: Biases cause people to focus too much on success,
take action too quickly, try too hard to fit in, and depend too much on
experts. In this article we discuss how these deeply ingrained human tendencies
interfere with learning and how they can be countered.
Bias Toward Success
Leaders across organizations may say that learning comes from failure, but
their actions show a preoccupation with success. This focus is not surprising,
but it is often excessive and impedes learning by raising four challenges.
Challenge #1: Fear of failure.
Failure can trigger a torrent of painful emotions hurt, anger, shame, even
depression. As a result, most of us try to avoid mistakes; when they do happen,
we try to sweep them under the rug. This natural tendency is heightened in
companies whose leaders have, often unconsciously, institutionalized a fear of
failure. They structure projects so that no time or money is available for
experimentation, and they award bonuses and promotions to those who deliver
according to plan. But organizations don t develop new capabilities or take
appropriate risks unless managers tolerate failure and insist that it be openly
discussed.
Challenge #2: A fixed mindset.
The psychologist Carol Dweck identified two basic mindsets with which people
approach their lives: fixed and growth. People who have a fixed mindset
believe that intelligence and talents are largely a matter of genetics; you
either have them or you don t. They aim to appear smart at all costs and see
failure as something to be avoided, fearing it will make them seem incompetent.
A fixed mindset limits the ability to learn because it makes individuals focus
too much on performing well.
By contrast, people who have a growth mindset seek challenges and learning
opportunities. They believe that no matter how good you are, you can always get
better through effort and practice. They don t see failure as a sign of
inadequacy and are happy to take risks.
Challenge #3: Overreliance on past performance.
When making hiring and promotion decisions, leaders often put too much emphasis
on performance and not enough on the potential to learn. Over time, Egon
Zehnder, a global executive search firm, had developed a sophisticated means of
evaluating candidates that considered not only their past achievements but also
their competencies. However, it found that in numerous instances, candidates
who looked equally good on paper performed differently on the job. Why?
A partner at the firm, Karena Strella, and her team believed the answer was
individuals potential for improvement. After a two-year project that drew on
academic research and interviews, they identified four elements that make up
potential: curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination. They developed
interview questions to get at these elements, along with psychometric measures
applied via questionnaires. This new model now plays a key role in the search
firm s assessments of job candidates. Egon Zehnder has found that
high-potential candidates perform better than their peers with less potential,
thanks to their openness to acquiring new skills and their thirst for learning.
Challenge #4: The attribution bias.
It is common for people to ascribe their successes to hard work, brilliance,
and skill rather than luck; however, they blame their failures on bad fortune.
This phenomenon, known as the attribution bias, hinders learning (see Why
Leaders Don t Learn from Success, HBR, April 2011). In fact, unless people
recognize that failure resulted from their own actions, they do not learn from
their mistakes. In a study we conducted with Chris Myers, we asked participants
to work on two different decision-making tasks spaced one week apart. Each task
had a correct solution, but only a few people were able to identify it. We
found that participants who took responsibility for doing poorly on the first
activity were almost three times as likely to succeed on the second one. They
learned from their failure and made better decisions as a result.
Leaders can use the following methods to encourage others to find the silver
lining in failures, adopt a growth mindset, focus on potential, and overcome
the attribution bias.
Destigmatize failure.
Leaders must constantly emphasize that mistakes are learning opportunities
rather than cause for embarrassment or punishment, and they must act in ways
that reinforce that message. Ashley Good, the founder of Fail Forward, a
Toronto-based consulting firm that helps companies learn how to benefit from
blunders, often begins by asking a client s employees questions such as Do you
take risks in the course of your work? and Is learning from failure formally
supported? The answers help leaders understand whether their company has a
culture in which failure is openly discussed and accepted, and what steps they
should take if not.
Embrace and teach a growth mindset.
Leaders need to challenge their own thinking about whether people can improve.
Research by Peter Heslin and colleagues found that managers with a growth
mindset notice improvement in their employees, while those with a fixed mindset
do not because they are stuck in their initial impressions.
When people are taught a growth mindset, they become more aware of
opportunities for self-improvement, more willing to embrace challenges, and
more likely to persist when they confront obstacles. So tell employees that you
believe they can expand their talents if they apply themselves. Reinforce that
message by educating them about the research on growth mindsets and relaying
stories about high-performing employees who were dedicated to their jobs and
developed skills over time. Finally, in formal and informal performance
reviews, praise their efforts to learn.
Consider potential when hiring and promoting.
Doing this and making it clear to employees that it is being done will help
counter managers incorrect first impressions, along with their natural
inclination to hire and promote people like themselves. It will also encourage
employees to try new things and seek support in developing their competencies.
Considering someone s potential to improve will almost certainly surface
candidates who otherwise would be overlooked for jobs and promotions. When Egon
Zehnder began including potential in assessing possible contenders for
managerial positions, the resulting pools of candidates were more diverse in
terms of race and gender.
Use a data-driven approach to identify what caused success or failure.
Most leaders know that data is critical to uncovering the true causes of
successful performance, but they don t always insist on collecting and
analyzing the necessary information. One exception is Ed Catmull, the president
of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios. He is a big believer in conducting
data-based postmortems of projects including successful ones and stresses that
even creative endeavors like moviemaking involve activities and deliverables
that can be measured. Data can show things in a neutral way, which can
stimulate discussion and challenge assumptions arising from personal
impressions, he says (see How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity, HBR,
September 2008).
People who are taught a growth mindset see more opportunities for improvement.
Of course, collecting the data is one thing; accepting what the data tells us
is another. We have both worked with all too many organizations where
data-driven decision making is code for contorting the facts until they reveal
whatever senior management expects to see. It s the role of leaders to ensure
that they and other executives are sensitive to this tendency and don t succumb
to it.
Bias Toward Action
How do you usually respond when you are faced with a problem in your
organization? If you re like most managers, you choose to take some kind of
action. You work harder, put in even longer hours, and place added stress on
yourself. You re more comfortable doing something, even if it is
counterproductive and doing nothing is the best course of action.
Consider professional soccer goalies and their strategies for defending against
penalty kicks. According to a study by Michael Bar-Eli and colleagues, those
who stay in the center of the goal, rather than leaping to the right or left,
perform the best: They have a 33.3% chance of stopping the ball. Nonetheless,
goalies stay in the center only 6.3% of the time. Why? Because it looks and
feels better to have missed the ball by diving, even if it turns out to have
been in the wrong direction, than to have stood still and watched the ball sail
by.
The same aversion to inaction holds true in the business world. When we
surveyed participants in our executive education classes, we found that
managers feel more productive executing tasks than planning them. Especially
when under time pressure, they perceive planning to be wasted effort. This bias
toward action is detrimental to improvement for two reasons.
Challenge #1: Exhaustion.
Not surprisingly, exhausted workers are too tired to learn new things or apply
what they already know. For example, research conducted by one of us (Brad)
with Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman, and David Hofmann found that hand-washing
compliance by hospital personnel widely known to be critical for preventing
hospital-acquired infections fell nine percentage points, on average, over a
typical 12-hour shift. The drop was even greater when health-care workers had a
particularly busy shift. However, compliance increased when the workers had
more time off between shifts.
Challenge #2: Lack of reflection.
Being always on doesn t give workers time to reflect on what they did well
and what they did wrong.
Research that we conducted at a tech-support call center of Wipro, a global IT,
consulting, and outsourcing company based in India, illustrates this. We
studied employees during their initial weeks of training. All went through the
same technical training, with a key difference. On the sixth through the 16th
days of the program, some workers spent the last 15 minutes of each day
reflecting on and writing about the lessons they had learned that day. The
others, the control group, just kept working for another 15 minutes. On the
final training test at the end of one month, workers who had been given time to
reflect performed more than 20% better, on average, than those in the control
group. Several lab studies we conducted on college students and employed
individuals in a variety of organizations produced similar results.
The following antidotes to the bias for action may sound obvious, but they are
infrequently applied.
Build breaks into the schedule.
Make sure workers take sufficient time to rejuvenate and reflect during the
workday and between shifts. In many organizations, hourly workers are entitled
or actually required to take periodic breaks.
However, our research suggests that companies should provide even more downtime
than they do. At Morning Star, a vertically integrated tomato-processing
company, the workers in the fields not only get mandated breaks, but they also
sometimes have to suspend their work for periods that can last nearly an hour,
as a result of glitches in other parts of the system (such as a tomato trailer
s failure to show up). Company data that we examined revealed that workers were
actually more productive over a 12-hour shift if their day included such
unexpected breaks. The message: Leaders should conduct experiments to determine
the optimal number and length of breaks.
For many management and knowledge-worker positions, of course, there are no
mandatory breaks. Individuals have to decide for themselves whether to pause
and recharge. Virtually everyone in such jobs recognizes the benefits of
watercooler conversations for learning and exchanging ideas. People also agree
that it s important to get enough sleep and take vacations. Yet many of us don
t practice what we preach. A recent survey conducted by Staples drives this
point home. When Staples asked more than 200 office workers in the United
States and Canada about their work habits, more than a quarter reported that
they took no break other than lunch. The vast majority of those cited guilt as
the main reason. Yet 90% of the bosses surveyed said that they encouraged
breaks, and 86% of employees agreed that brief respites from work make them
more productive.
Make sure workers take time to rejuvenate and reflect.
So urge employees to take breaks and vacations, and set an example. Research
shows that the restorative benefits are greatest when you get out of your
office or go for a walk. Don t have lunch at your desk then; head outside for a
stroll instead, especially in a park. It will put you in a better mood and
reinvigorate you, allowing you to accomplish and learn more.
Take time to just think.
In the same way that you block out time on your calendar to plan an initiative
or a presentation, you should block out a short period each day even just 20 to
30 minutes to either plan your agenda (in the early morning) or think about how
the day went (in the late afternoon). If time is really scarce, try to reflect
on your way to or from work. A study of commuters in the United Kingdom that we
conducted with Julia Lee and Jon Jachimowicz showed that those who were
encouraged (through text messages) to plan for their upcoming day during their
journeys were happier, less burned-out, and more productive than people in a
control group.
Leaders can help by thoughtfully structuring the workweek for instance, by
insisting that no meetings be held on Fridays, as Tommy Hilfiger and other
firms have done.
Encourage reflection after doing.
Through reflection, we can better understand the actions we re considering and
their likelihood of keeping us productive. Don t avoid thinking by being busy,
a wise mentor once told one of us.
Some organizations are finding ways to incorporate reflection into their
regular activities. One powerful approach treats reflection as a post hoc
analytical tool for understanding the drivers of success and failure. The U.S.
Army is well known for its after-action reviews (AARs). To ensure that a
rigorous process is followed, AARs are run by a facilitator rather than the
project s leader. An effective AAR involves comparing what actually happened
with what should or could have happened and then carefully diagnosing the gap,
be it positive or negative.
Whether reflecting with a group or by yourself, keep a few things in mind.
First, remember that the goal is to learn. That means being honest with
yourself something an outside facilitator can help ensure in group settings.
Second, try to get a full and accurate picture of what occurred. That requires
considering multiple perspectives (because we all have incomplete and often
biased opinions) and using data. Third, work to get to the root of why things
played out the way they did. Finally, think about how the work could be
improved. Beyond the obvious fixes to the existing process, take time to
imagine how you would do things completely differently if you could.
Bias Toward Fitting In
When we join an organization, it s natural to want to fit in. But this tendency
leads to two challenges to learning.
Challenge #1: Believing we need to conform.
Early in life, we realize that there are tangible benefits to be gained from
following social and organizational norms and rules. As a result, we make a
significant effort to learn and adhere to written and unwritten codes of
behavior at work. But here s the catch: Doing so limits what we bring to the
organization. As Steve Jobs famously said, It doesn t make sense to hire smart
people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what
to do. In fact, being unafraid to stand out can actually garner respect,
despite beliefs to the contrary. Research conducted by one of us (Francesca)
with Silvia Bellezza and Anat Keinan found that nonconforming behaviors (such
as dressing down at a business meeting or using one s own PowerPoint theme
rather than the organization s) raise others estimation of a person s
competence and status.
Challenge #2: Failure to use one s strengths.
When employees conform to what they think the organization wants, they are less
likely to be themselves and to draw on their strengths. A Gallup survey of
thousands of people across the globe shows that an affirmative answer to the
question At work, do you have an opportunity to do what you do best every day?
is a significant predictor of engagement and high operational performance.
When people feel free to stand apart from the crowd, they can exercise their
signature strengths (such as curiosity, love for learning, and perseverance),
identify opportunities for improvement, and suggest ways to exploit them. But
all too often, individuals are afraid of rocking the boat.
Leaders can use several methods to combat the bias toward fitting in.
Encourage people to cultivate their strengths.
To motivate and support employees, some companies allow them to spend a certain
portion of their time doing work of their own choosing. Although this is a
worthwhile practice, firms should strive to help individuals apply their
strengths every day as a normal part of their jobs.
Following workplace norms may limit what we bring to an organization.
Toward that end, managers should help individuals identify and develop their
fortes and not just by discussing them in annual performance reviews. One
effective method is to give someone an appreciation jolt in the form of
positive feedback. It s particularly potent when friends, family, mentors, and
coworkers share stories about how the person excels. These stories, our
research shows, trigger positive emotions, cause us to realize the impact that
we have on others, and make us more likely to continue capitalizing on our
signature strengths rather than just trying to fit in.
This approach helped a major global consulting company address a problem: Its
employees tended to view their jobs as money-for-labor contracts and often
would do the bare minimum instead of seeking to create win-win outcomes for
themselves and the firm. We found that the jolts delivered during the
onboarding, or orientation, process gave new hires a more personal, less
transactional relationship with the organization and correlated with reduced
burnout, less turnover a year after the intervention, and improved performance.
Earlier work that we did at an Indian call center generated similar results: A
focus on individuals and their strengths during the onboarding process was
associated with significantly lower turnover and higher customer satisfaction.
To understand whether their organization is helping people identify and
leverage their strengths, managers should ask themselves the following
questions: Do I know what my employees talents and passions are? Am I talking
to them about what they do well and where they can improve? Do our goals and
objectives include making maximum use of employees strengths?
Yuko Shimizu
Yuko Shimizu
Increase awareness and engage workers.
If people don t see an issue, you can t expect them to speak up about it. Lowe
s, the home-improvement retail chain, prides itself on its commitment to worker
safety, and most employees report in anonymous surveys that they feel safe on
the job. Yet for Hank Jones, the company s director of safety and hazardous
materials, even one safety lapse is too many. His team takes a multipronged
approach to get employees to speak up about potential safety hazards in stores.
During meetings with workers throughout the organization, team members increase
awareness of specific problems by asking questions such as Do you know how
many people we injured last year, and do you know where those injuries
occurred? The company has also started publishing safety outcome data in its
annual social responsibility report.
In addition, Jones changed the way managers run safety meetings: Instead of
reading the latest safety policies or rules, they ask questions or pose issues
and give the group time to tackle them. Meetings become less about passively
learning material and more about actively improving processes.
Model good behavior.
During store walks, Lowe s executives look for opportunities to highlight the
importance of safety and get to the root cause of unsafe behavior, including
their own. When one senior executive stepped onto a pallet a clear hazard a
store associate asked him to get down. The executive complied, hugged the
associate, and thanked him in front of others, sending the message that the
organization values employees who speak up.
Bias Toward Experts
Beginning in the early 20th century, the scientific management movement
introduced a rigorous approach to examining how organizations operate. In the
process, though, it solidified the notion that experts are the best source of
ideas for improvement. Today companies continue to call in consultants,
industrial engineers, Six Sigma teams, and the like when improvement is needed.
The bias toward experts creates two challenges.
Challenge #1: An overly narrow view of expertise.
Organizations tend to define expert too narrowly, relying on indicators such
as titles, degrees, and years of experience. However, experience is a
multidimensional construct. Different types of experience including time spent
on the front line, with a customer or working with particular people contribute
to understanding a problem in detail and creating a solution.
A bias toward experts can also lead people to misunderstand the potential
drawbacks that come with increased time and practice in the job. Though
experience improves efficiency and effectiveness, it can also make people more
resistant to change and more likely to dismiss information that conflicts with
their views.
Challenge #2: Inadequate frontline involvement.
Frontline employees the people directly involved in creating, selling,
delivering, and servicing offerings and interacting with customers are
frequently in the best position to spot and solve problems. Too often, though,
they aren t empowered to do so. Even in organizations that espouse lean
thinking a process-improvement approach that is intended to involve all
employees standard work practices seldom change, and only expert
recommendations are implemented.
The following tactics can help organizations overcome the tendency to turn to
experts.
Encourage workers to own problems that affect them.
Make sure that your organization is adhering to the principle that the person
who experiences a problem should fix it when and where it occurs. This prevents
workers from relying too heavily on experts and helps them avoid making the
same mistakes again. Tackling the problem immediately, when the relevant
information is still fresh, increases the chances that it will be successfully
resolved.
For example, at Morning Star s tomato-processing facilities, individuals are
expected not only to meet specific targets for themselves but also to look for
ways to improve their work and the overall performance of the operation. When
something goes awry on a worker s watch, she is responsible for fixing it. That
might involve enlisting others to help or even going out to purchase new
equipment (although there are understood limits to what workers can spend
without authorization). The company encourages problem-solving behavior not
only through its culture but also through its compensation practices: Pay is
based both on meeting goals and on improving over time.
Give workers different kinds of experience.
In our research at a Japanese bank, we looked at how data-entry workers
performed when they were doing the same task repeatedly ( specialized
experience ) and when they were switching between different tasks ( varied
experience ). We found that over the course of a single day, a specialized
approach was fastest. But over time, switching activities across days promoted
learning and kept workers more engaged. Both specialization and variety were
important to learning.
In addition, giving workers new types of experience and greater depth within
each of them is valuable. One of us (Brad), along with Jonathan Clark and
Robert Huckman, studied the operational performance of radiologists who read
digital images (X-rays or CT scans) remotely for hospitals. Although a doctor s
total experience mattered, another important predictor of performance over time
was how often that individual worked with a given hospital. As the radiologist
gained experience with a particular hospital, he could respond more quickly to
its requests and help it improve its processes.
Yet another factor that affects improvement is team members familiarity with
one another. In studies across settings including software development
companies, consulting firms, health care organizations, and laboratories we ve
found that working repeatedly with the same people can enhance coordination,
optimize the use of valuable expertise residing within a group, speed the
response to new circumstances, and improve how people combine their knowledge
to solve problems effectively. In light of research showing that software teams
were more likely to deliver projects on budget and with higher quality when
their members had prior experience working together than when they did not,
Wipro began staffing its projects accordingly.
Given such findings, leaders should strive to deepen their understanding of the
kinds of industry, customer, and team experiences that affect their operating
environments. They should then use this information to develop employees, track
their experience portfolios, and deploy them strategically. Companies may have
to change their enterprise systems, analytics capabilities, and staffing
models. But the investment will help them build a richer understanding of how
to improve learning and performance over time.
Empower employees to use their experience.
Organizations should aggressively seek to identify and remove barriers that
prevent individuals from using their expertise. Solving the customer s problems
in innovative, value-creating ways not navigating organizational impediments
should be the challenging part of one s job. Ethan Bernstein found that
employees at a leading global manufacturer were working less productively when
managers were watching them (see The Transparency Trap, HBR, October 2014).
The company claimed to be in the lean camp, but its practices suggested
otherwise: For example, workers were not sharing their ideas for improving
processes with others. Bernstein s innovative solution was to put curtains
around a factory production line so that employees could work in privacy. The
result: Productivity increased significantly. Leaders should identify ways they
can truly empower employees whether by giving them more privacy, publicly
acknowledging their contributions, or providing monetary rewards.
It may be cheaper and easier in the short run to ignore failures, schedule work
so that there s no time for reflection, require compliance with organizational
norms, and turn to experts for quick solutions. But these short-term approaches
will limit the organization s ability to learn. If leaders institute ways to
counter the four biases we have identified, they will unleash the power of
learning throughout their operations. Only then will their companies truly
improve continuously.
A version of this article appeared in the November 2015 issue (pp.110 118) of
Harvard Business Review.
Francesca Gino is a professor at Harvard Business School, a faculty affiliate
of the Behavioral Insights Group at Harvard Kennedy School, and the author of
Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan
(Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). She cochairs an HBS executive education
program on applying behavioral economics to organizational problems. Twitter:
@francescagino.
Bradley Staats is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina s
Kenan-Flagler Business School. Twitter: @brstaats.
The Neural Implications of Different Mindsets
What happens inside our brains when we make mistakes? That depends on our ideas
about learning and intelligence.
Individuals with a growth mindset, who believe that intelligence and talents
can be enhanced through effort, regard mistakes as opportunities to learn and
improve. By contrast, individuals with a fixed mindset, who believe that
intelligence and talents are innate and unchangeable, think mistakes signal a
lack of ability.
Jason S. Moser and his colleagues at Michigan State University examined the
neural mechanisms underlying these differing reactions to mistakes. The picture
below illustrates neural activity in people performing a task and making
errors. Those with a fixed mindset display considerably less brain activity
than those with a growth mindset, who actively process errors to learn from
them.
Blinded by Expertise
To examine how experience can increase resistance to change, we looked at the
ways cardiologists and investors with different levels of experience responded
to bad news that required some professional judgment.
One standard cardiology procedure is placing coronary stents in constricted
arteries to maintain proper blood flow. In the early 2000s a new kind of stent,
with a drug-eluting coating, was released to the market. Because reimbursement
rates were comparable for the new and the traditional devices, cardiologists
could primarily consider the medical merits when deciding which one to use.
In reaction to evidence that the drug-eluting stents might be dangerous in
certain situations, an advisory panel of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
recommended in late 2006 that they not be used in off-label applications. But
doctors were not obligated to follow this advice. Our empirical analysis of
data from before and after this shock revealed that experienced cardiologists
were less likely than newer doctors to respond to the recommendation by
discontinuing their overall use of drug-eluting stents.
Since the data was unclear as to whether drug-eluting or non-drug-eluting
stents were better for patient outcomes, we conducted follow-up laboratory
studies with people making investment decisions and receiving unequivocally
negative news. We found the same results: Decision makers who had significant
expertise weren t as willing to heed the negative information as their less
experienced peers were. The message: If you are not careful, your experience
may hinder your learning.