Overestimating Your Capabilities?

David Dunning, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Cornell University explains in a Gallup Management Journal article that most people overestimate their capabilities. If you just had enough time, or started earlier enough, or had the right gear, you too much just play golf like Tiger or tennis like Vanessa or sing like those folks on American Idol; right? A Business Week survey supports Dunning's finding by noting that 90% of American middle managers believed themselves to be in the top 10% of performers.

We overestimate our capabilities because:

1. Normally people will claim credit for their success and blame other people or conditions for their failures. As a consequence, the overall sense is one of success.
2. Feedback from others is often couched in softened terms, may be incomplete or less than honest, and may well not be understood or heard.
3. Frequently people have no way to know how something could have been done differently or better; they are unconsciously incompetent.

Confidence is energizing and can bring its own rewards. Identifying the blind spots and acting on them can be equally rewarding.

Whether with your boss at annual performance appraisal time, with trusted peers, or with an external coach, asking for feedback remains a key step in identifying improvement areas that you just cannot see.

Today's conventional wisdom suggests that you should build on your strengths. That's very true, but without awareness of our weaknesses and finding ways to mitigate them, you may be winning a battle and losing the war. Strong leadership requires that you set high expectations for yourself and others, and demonstrate the ability for continuous learning and growth.

Executive coaching is a tool that supports the identification of blind spots and the development of successful behaviors and skills. To learn more about this investment in your career and the careers of your employees, contact me at Sherry@ReadSolutionsGroup.com .

90% in the top 10% of performers?

Business Week just published a survey of 2000 American middle managers and above, over the age of 25, and found that an astonishing 90% believed themselves to be in the top 10% of performers.

While just a couple of days before this publication, Marshall Goldsmith on his blog entry, The Success Delusion, writes:

Without even being aware of it, we often:

• Overestimate our contribution to a project;
• Have an elevated opinion of our skills and standing among our peers;
• Conveniently ignore the costs of time-consuming dead-ends that we have created;
• Exaggerate our projects’ impact on profitability by discounting real and hidden costs (the costs are their issue – the success is ours).

Many of our delusions can come from our association with success, not failure. Since we get positive reinforcement from our past successes, we think that they are predictive of great things to come in our future.

Self-esteem and confidence are powerful tools in driving success. Yet how best to temper those with a bit of humility? Picking one thing to work on, practice the art of reflection (what will I do differently when I next encounter this situation?) and watching for skills in others that you may want, all will help you to keep a learning mind. You may still believe that you're a top 10% performer, but there's always more to learn.

Self Assessments & Performance Management

Kris Dunn over at the HR Capitalist in What's That Smell? Self Assessments & Performance Management writes:

As an individual who recently revamped a performance management system from the old subjective system (everyone gets the same 80 items, rank on a scale of 1 to 5) to one driven by cascading goals driving individual objectives across the organization, I've had a lot of time to ponder things in the performance management space. One thing I have ran into is the value of allowing employees to evaluate themselves as part of the process (Self-Evaluations!!)....

Now, I don't want go all Dennis Miller and get off on a rant here, but the prospect of self-evaluations is more riddled with holes than the final season of the Sopranos.

Here's why I don't like Self Evaluations:

1. There is always a gap between real and perceived performance, and the gap is always largest with your lowest performing employees.
2. Self Assessments set up managers who struggle with performance management to fail unnecessarily.
3. Self Assessments are often crutches for managers with poor writing skills.
4. Most employees confuse behavior and performance that "meets" expectations as "exceeding" expectations.

Every system has pros and cons. Certainly the downsides listed for self assessments are valid. A self assessment should NEVER be the sole tool of the performance evaluation. Yet just as managers can be lazy about the writing, most of us are over influenced in evaluation of performance by recent events. The manager, who no doubt should take the time to track and discuss performance throughout the year, frequently only gets to it once a year. Should the employee then be penalized because the manager only deals with the issue infrequently?

I argue that the employee has the responsibility to write up their own performance review and offer it up to the manager. They have a greater vested interest in seeing that the performance period is looked at in total; that all of the performance criteria are considered. And besides, who has the most to learn from really thinking about the performance - the manager or the employee?

See my blog posting at Writing Your Own Performance Review for recommendations to the employee on this process.