Why We Benchmark When the Mind's Eye Goes Blind
When former Washington Capitals defenseman, Brian Pothier, suffered a concussion in a 2008 collision with Milan Lucic of the Boston Bruins, he expected the normal recovery time of two to three months. He continued to suffer near-constant nausea and dizziness long after the normal recovery period, however, sidelining him from even the most basic physical activity. Most frightening was the perplexing nature of his symptoms, which would sometimes subside only to come crashing back as soon as he stood upright.
The 11 months following the injury were defined by non-stop visits to neurologists, all running the same scans, all trying to find answers behind why his concussion-related symptoms remained. An answer began to form when Dr. James Kelley of Aurora, Colorado discovered an abnormality, not in Pothier’s brain, but in his fourth cranial nerve – the vision pathway from the brain to the eye. Suspecting the damage resulted from the collision with Lucic, Kelly sent Pothier to see vision specialist Dr. Susan Durham, in Cary, North Carolina. What Durham found challenged every concussion-related assumption about Pothier’s condition. The concussion had healed, but he had astigmatism.
Pothier needed glasses.
Cognitive Bias
Milan Lucic delivered the body check that damaged Pothier’s cranial nerve, but cognitive bias cost him 11 months out of his career. Cognitive bias is the most common of human frailties, allowing us to decide what we believe and then cherry pick the facts to fill the puzzle. We use it to convince ourselves that our choices grow from knowledge, when they merely externalize a worldview. Bias creates the tunnel vision within our mind’s eye that allows us to focus entirely on an expected but wrong pathway, while leaving us blind to unexpected but often better directions. In Pothier’s case, it was the bias that his symptoms related to the previous concussion rather than a different problem altogether – his altered vision secondarily related to the blow from Lucic.
Cognitive bias is the result of a failure to check our assumptions -- a refusal to ask ourselves whether what we have always believed remains true, has evolved, or whether it was ever true at all. We have all seen this phenomenon. The pain of watching a highly-valued employee fail in a role they are unsuited for, simply because we never took time to assess what the position demanded. Or, standing in amazement while a formerly underperforming employee moved to another position of equal difficulty and transformed the work role.
Outsmarting Our Mind’s Eye
Without a ground-level review of what critical positions require from the people who fill them, cognitive bias relegates resource decisions to the stuff of “folklore," drawing on rationales such as, “Well, this is how we’ve always done it,” or, “Well, Mary’s got seniority. She should get the promotion.” The older and more established our organizations are – the longer the historical mindset – the more folklore we have available on which to draw. Also, the older the organization, the more difficult it becomes for its leaders to see a need for change.
MasterMinds Leadership works with companies and non-profit organizations to outsmart the mind’s eye of cognitive bias by benchmarking. Benchmarking instills analytic rigor in personnel decisions through a process where industry-standard assessment tools strip down required competencies and styles to their barest form, so that hiring managers can find the best matches for their positions. Critical for new hires as well as forming developmental plans for existing employees, benchmarking helps organizations check assumptions, biases, and expectations, ensuring that hiring and developmental decisions are based on current realities rather than cognitive bias.
Choices
I was once part of an organization that did not benchmark positions. When I counseled a difficult employee on the friction his behavior was creating on his team, he responded, “I like my illusions that everyone loves me. So, I think I’ll just stick to those.” As an organizational leader, I did not have the luxury of his illusions and he soon found another opportunity. Every decision is a choice. Organizations can choose to endure the short-term pain of benchmarking for the right solution or risk the long-term pain of poor personnel decisions later. One is clearly better than the other.
Check back next week when we discuss the second reason we benchmark: Transparency.
Written By: Greta Creech, Manager of Client Analytics at MasterMinds Leadership
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