Review: Nine Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

In their well-received management book Nine Lies About Work, A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall seek to debunk nine ‘lies’ that prevail in the contemporary workplace.

But do the authors fall into the very trap they successfully expose?

Review by Gareth Williams

The nine common ‘lies’ - or, less sensationally, fundamental misunderstandings - identified by Buckingham and Goodall arise from the HR departments of larger organisations and the various consultancies that feed off their budgets.

The critique is based on two general insights. Firstly, people are not machines that can be programmed, measured, upgraded and fixed. Secondly, this is just as well: the world is a dynamic and uncertain place where employees need autonomy and flexibility if they’re going to deal successfully with the challenges and opportunities that will be thrown at them. In a nutshell, treating people as individuals who need to be understood, appreciated and enabled is good business.

This is an important message. However, there are problems with the book that make it less compelling than it should be. Firstly, there is a fair bit of overstating and exaggeration going on - the use of ‘lies’ is emblematic.

Then, methodologically, the book is too dependent on the sort of survey data that underpin the HR worldview that is the target of its criticisms. It seems that facts about people’s behaviour can only be discovered, and then established as reliable, through the deployment of scientifically respectable measurements. However, as this book shows, human behaviour in all its complexity and uncertainty often eludes the quantitative approach. The lack of other tools in the analytical toolbox undermines the whole enterprise.

Finally, the book ignores or dismisses strategy, i.e. the importance of developing and executing a coherent, tailored and effective plan to achieve an important goal. How strategy is formulated and applied is unexamined. The most that one can infer is that people when managed correctly (i.e. as per the authors’ recommendations) will arrive at their own plan and execute it themselves pretty much spontaneously. As the sub-title to the book is A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World this is a serious lack.

The first lie presented to us is People Care Which Company They Work For. Survey data and interviews appear to show that this is untrue - it is the health of the team that determines whether people enjoy their work and stick with a company. Even the attractiveness of the company’s mission is decided by how it’s experienced at team level with stark differences between teams in the same business. Company culture is largely irrelevant to how employees experience their work - it’s trumped by team culture. According to the authors, culture is more a tool for communicating something to the outside world: it’s ‘plumage’ that signals ‘come join us’ to the sort of employee that the firm would like to attract. It has no organisational heft beyond the moment of hiring.

This is a large claim that is undermined later in the book when the authors laud the importance of ‘meaning’ in inspiring and guiding workers. ‘Meaning’, it turns out, sounds an awful lot like culture (and as we’ll see from #3 below, it’s crucially important).

Nevertheless, and despite the exaggeration, building good teams is clearly a good thing.

The Best Plan Wins is the second lie. This is a standard critique of rigid, unwieldy and top-down when flexible, agile and bottom-up should be preferred. Tick.

Number three is a particularly interesting one: The Best Companies Cascade Goals. The critique is sound: don’t over-specify one year ahead what you want your people to achieve. This is a subset of the critique in the previous chapter, that over-determining what you want your people to do will hamper them in a fast-moving world with distributed information. They should know better than the people higher up what’s important and what’s achievable and how. So far so good. But the alternative put forward by the authors is unexpected: it’s not ‘agree with your team a set of goals and let them work out how to achieve them’; instead it’s give them ‘meaning’ and let them get on with determining their goals. If you tell them, and keep on telling them, why and how the firm does what it does - sensible goals will follow.

As noted above, ‘meaning’ as it’s defined in this section, merges into ‘culture’ (despite the last being discounted as something of importance in motivating and guiding employees just two chapters earlier), absorbing ‘mission’ on the way.

According to the book, ‘It is shared meaning that creates alignment, and this alignment is emergent not coerced’. Meaning for employees relates to ‘the purpose of their work, the missions and contributions and methods that really matter … and the values we should honour in getting it done’. Alignment, purpose, mission, methods, values are all words usually used when defining a workplace culture. ‘Meaning’ in this instance differs from culture only in that it incorporates an element of strategy: ‘purpose’ is to ‘goal’ as ‘meaning’ is to ‘strategy’.

This lack of emphasis on conscious strategy is quite a lacuna as is inadvertently revealed in the anecdotes used to illustrate meaning. The authors inter alia use the example of Facebook to show how meaning is more effective than goal-setting at creating momentum. For instance, employees are meant to absorb the company’s mission to connect people from Zuckerburg’s weekly town-hall style meetings, glass doors and partitions in head office and the widespread use of posters around the place. More, they are motivated and informed by this message of meaning to such an extent that they originate their own goals and the company’s strategy presumably takes care of itself.

This is surely a fundamental misreading of how Facebook works. At the top of its hierarchy sits one man - founder, controlling shareholder, chairman of the board and chief executive - and to think that the firm’s strategic goals don’t flow from his keyboard is, er, mistaken (I won’t use the more pejorative term). One wonders how Facebook’s crucial decision to acquire competing social media businesses and then put them all on a common commercial platform was arrived at and then turned into specific, actionable goals for the company? I’m pretty sure this wasn’t instigated by employees suffused with the meaningfulness of working at Facebook.

Chick-Fil-A is offered as a second example of a company that is animated by meaning rather than goals. However, as the business operates through franchising it has a legal structure and set of financial incentives for managers (i.e. franchisees) that are designed to obviate the need for operational direction from the centre. Using this company as an example is therefore quite bizarre.

In summary, ‘meaning’ is not an alternative to cascaded goals. It’s not even much of a thing in itself: culture, mission and strategy together do a better job of organising a company.

Next up, Lie Number Four: The Best People Are Well-Rounded. As is Lie Number Five, People Need Feedback, and for similar reasons. The authors’ messages here circle around positivity being more powerful than negativity.

First, it’s better to build on a strength than correct a weakness and, second, encouragement is more effective than criticism. These propositions may be true in general terms and worth having in place as a default managerial approach. However, if relied upon too heavily in specific situations they might, of course, prove catastrophic.

Weakness in attention to detail may not be something to glide over in a safety inspector at a nuclear power station. Inability to assert oneself may hamper a safeguarding officer who sits halfway up a management hierarchy. It’s the role of the manager and leader to address such serious weaknesses, mend them or ultimately, if not rectified, move the employee out of the role. This is impossible without a significant degree of negativity. Similar issues arise in all jobs and it’s utopian to pretend otherwise. Personally, I think a more useful counter to these two ‘lies’ is not to rely too heavily on infrequent (i.e. annual or six-monthly), highly structured, schematised feedback. Much better to establish a supportive and positive relationship with an employee that accommodates, if necessary, regular questioning and promptings as to how things might be done differently, accompanied by good follow-up at the bigger meetings. That way, surprises are at a minimum and there’s a common set of reference points.

The sixth lie is People Can Reliably Rate Other People. This critique hits square on the nose what I originally took to be a major target of the book: misapplied scientism. ‘We may be able to say something intelligent about what drives sales, say, or piece-work output, because both of these are inherently and reliably measurable - they can be counted. But for any other work - and that means most work - we have no way of knowing what drives performance, because we have no reliable way of measuring performance’. The first part of this suggests it’s impossible to reliably and scientifically measure the output of knowledge workers? Fair enough, I can believe that.

However, they spoil this reasonableness by concluding that there is therefore nothing we can know about how good performance happens. They continue, ‘Until we come up with a reliable way to measure individual knowledge-worker performance … any claim about what drives performance is not valid’. This premise doesn’t survive contact with what the authors would call ‘the real world’.

Football managers and rugby coaches would dismiss as ridiculous the idea that there is ‘no way of knowing what drives performance’ absent a ‘reliable way of [numerically] measuring’ it (even in today’s data-drenched world of professional sports). Another example plucked from the air: book reviewers, literary critics and biographers who seek to understand why a work is as good as it is through reference to its author would have to give up their practice until they were able to come up with reliable numerical measures of writerly performance.

This particular problem exposes what is one of the book’s general and, indeed, fundamental issues: does it make sense to criticise a misapplied scientistic approach from a perspective that only permits opinions on those things that can be reliably, scientifically measured? Significant parts of the book suggest that there is something so mysteriously subjective in human behaviour that a mechanistically objective approach is misplaced. But it’s repeatedly stated that absent scientific measurement of a work output we can’t conclude anything about behavioural input.

This prohibition disallows many established ways of seeking the truth of things concerning people: for instance the methodologies that inform literary enquiries (as in history, biography, fiction), or various forms of philosophical explanation for behaviour (as in a priori reasoning, pragmatism). Incidentally, I assume this issue arises, at least in part, from a credentialist reluctance to abandon the pursuit of what pretends to be a social ‘science’. It’s a crippling deficiency in the book’s reasoning that leads the authors down some strange paths.

Anyhow, in this instance the authors’ aren’t deterred by what they’ve just proposed as a disabling absence of objective knowledge. They fill in the knowledge gap by suggesting we conduct surveys of an employee we know extremely well: ourselves. We can all rely on our own measures of our own experience, apparently. They’re ‘reliable’ even if not ‘accurate’ as ‘you know your own experience’. We can then use our own experiences of others to provide a measure of how they’re doing.

So my team leader’s subjective experience of me is always more reliable than any attempt on their part to be objective. But isn’t their subjective experience inevitably informed by objective factors? And how reliable is our understanding of our own experiences let alone our own experiences of how others are? Moreover, even if I look deep inside myself and come to a firm and stable view of how I experience someone else, can my truthfulness be relied upon? Can we be sure I’m even being truthful with myself? Shakespeare’s plays deal with these questions repeatedly and the answers the audience arrives at do not inspire confidence in the book’s proposition. Other criticisms of the idea that subjectivity beats all attempts at objectivity abound - the concept of the ‘user illusion’ springs to mind. Perhaps their counter to this chapter’s lie might actually be Lie 6(b) in the list.

The seventh deadly lie is People Have Potential. The critique elaborates on those of lies 4, 5 and 6, which all relate to the pitfalls in attempting to measure people reliably and accurately. In this instance, we can’t measure potential - defined as ‘the ability to grow more and learn more regardless of setting or circumstance’ - in any scientific way and we therefore cannot prove that it exists as something separate from ‘being a human’.

This insight is used to argue we shouldn’t rigidly separate out ‘high potential’ from ‘low potential’ employees in a company, something which seems fair enough. Keeping routes to promotion open and maximising career development options is sensible for both the company and the employee. The message here is treat people like human beings with all their associated idiosyncrasies, seek to understand what they want to achieve, and help them do so. Do this in preference to creating a rigid corporate typology of employees. Yes.

Incidentally, the status quo described in this chapter offers the clearest glimpse yet of a conformist and controlling corporate environment - a sprawling, everyday dystopia that we don’t criticise enough, in my view at least. But I suspect the description of the potential-based ‘apartheid’ described by the authors also serves as something of a straw man.

#8 is Work-Life Balance Matters Most: if you love your job you are unlikely to burn out; so focus on the things you love about it and aim to do more of them. ‘Burnout isn’t the absence of balance it’s the absence of love’. And we need to really apply ourselves to loving our job. Probably all true.

But this doesn’t really address the importance of ‘work-life balance’, the problem of living as if you are mostly an employee with not much room for other aspects of life. For most people other claims on their time and energy are important and commitment to work needs to be balanced against these. That is if you are aiming for broad-based success in life. On the other hand, you’ll probably find it easier to become rich and/or professionally successful if you sacrifice other aspects of your existence (friends, family, socialising, hobbies, etc.). This important personal choice and the role companies play in it is not addressed here. Should one be suspicious about this? Being told by HR professionals employed by corporates that burnout is because you’re not working hard enough at loving your job is, let us say, somewhat self-serving.

And ninthly*, Leadership Is A Thing; that’s apparently a lie. This chapter gives full vent to the confusions pursuant on maintaining that if a thing can’t be reliably measured it doesn’t exist. The authors believe, ‘Leadership isn’t a thing, because it cannot be measured reliably. Followership is a thing, because it can’. But then a couple of sentences later it turns out that ‘What’s true in the real world is that leading is many different things’. Which is just as well because the rest of the chapter describes what these things are and ultimately identifies them as a single thing.

Followers are attracted to leaders as the latter are all in possession of an extreme and ‘spiky’ characteristic that they’re unusually effective in communicating to the world. Why? Because ‘spikes’ denote confidence and that’s what we all need from a leader. So: ‘Every truly effective leader cultivates his or her mastery in a way that communicates something certain and vivid’. If that’s not a leadership thing I can’t imagine what is.

The authors continue to ignore strictures about the unreality of the unmeasurable to elaborate on their own particular leadership thing. They reject the standard HR model, which incorporates words such as ‘empathy, authenticity, vision’. Instead, after quite a long essay on Martin Luther King and the struggle for civil rights, they advise aspiring leaders that ‘if you understand who you are, at your core, and hone that understanding into a few special abilities, each of which refracts and magnifies [sic] your intent, your essence, your humanity, then, in the real world, we will see you. And we will follow’.

But surely there are many people who fulfill this description and aren’t leaders and whom we won’t follow? For instance, one can imagine a hermit-like writer of literary fiction being able to say they had gone through a process very like the one described - understanding their core self, honing abilities, magnifying and refracting [sic] their intent, essence and humanity - and yet remain nothing like a leader.

Additionally, there are surely many leaders who don’t really understand who they are let alone at their ‘core’ (whatever that is). Do we really think Donald Trump understands honestly and truthfully who he really is? To take a less contemporary example, did Achilles and Agamemnon? Did any one of the leaders dramatised in Shakespeare’s plays? And do leaders always assume the role because they’re really good at something special that’s honed, refracted and magnified? Did Clement Attlee have special abilities that shone forth and dazzled the world into following him? No. We finish on another fib.

I’m conscious that I’ve spent most of this review being critical. This is a shame as I wholeheartedly agree that the HR-driven ideas enumerated here desperately need debunking or at least seriously modifying. It is just that the book seeks to substitute too many of these lies with fibs of its own. And that these fibs mostly arise because the authors are fundamentally wedded to treating their subject as if it’s entirely a social science.

Is there a better alternative to replacing egregious lies with some possibly more palatable fibs? For a start, one should slot science and data into a more modest role in the enterprise. Rather than using the impossibility of achieving statistical objectivity about, say, employee performance as a reason to dismiss objectivity as a goal, persist in aspiring to get a fair view but do so using all the means at one’s disposal. Objectivity is a worthwhile aspiration that may be informed as much by art as by science: so be humble, seek out all forms of relevant information, use judgement and experience, discuss thoughts freely and collaboratively.

And trust in your workforce? It feels risky but actually isn’t - strategic direction then delegation, empowerment and latitude will, more often than not, win out over centralised command and control.

Finally, leadership may not be amenable to measurement but that doesn’t mean it is complicated or inexplicable. In my view, effective leadership is about communicating and collaborating with respect to an enterprise over which you have some authority in such a way that people respond and success becomes more likely. There are a million and more ways to do this but every effective leader does it in some way. A manager aspiring to a leadership role would probably be best served by learning more about strategy, communication, delegation and team-working. There’s lots of inspiration out there, and much of it is found outside books on business.

* ‘And ninthly...’ was supposedly overheard in Port Meadow as two Oxford dons strolled past; it’s an ambition achieved to use it myself.