Does Kindergarten Really Have a Culture of Success?

You may be familiar with the marshmallow challenge. It is an intriguing and engaging team building exercise that demonstrates the importance of failure in group interactions.

It is all fun and everyone gets a laugh regarding how, according to an accompanying Ted Talk I show, kindergartners do better at it than those who went to business school. By the way, I’d like to see that replicated because it makes a great story but I doubt that it is really true. But the most important lesson for leaders from it is not that failure eventually grows success. Rather, it is the call to action to create a culture where taking the risk should be rewarded and not only when the risk leads to immediate success.

What leaders should learn from the challenge is that it takes place in an environment that encourages risk taking. There is no one to say, “Let me tell you how we’ve done this before” or “If this doesn’t work out well we are in big trouble.” From this culture, most teams are able to accomplish something that at first seems unlikely in about 18 minutes. This should lead to a candid conversation about the barriers that exist to useful failure and what actions can be taken to change those aspects of the culture.

The nature of kindergarten is to reward process more than results. Incentives in business cannot be quite follow that model and lead to success. However, we can use learning to find the unnecessary hurdles creativity and problem solving.

Flexibility, Bench Strength, and Leadership

An attribute associated with leadership is determination. The idea that once a goal has been established and a plan laid out, effective leadership involves sticking to it and absorbing the inevitable bumps that come along the way. This may involve coaching or training, but requires confidence in the team.

But, what if things get really bad? Should the leader have faith in the plan and work harder on execution? Or, does effectiveness require that things get “blown up” and change on the fly?

There was an interesting example of this in the college football national championship game earlier this week. The University of Alabama (Bama) was playing the University of Georgia (UGA). Bama’s coach had won 5 national championships (6 was the most) going into the matchup, so he knows something about winning big games. While renowned for his success, he is also thought of as being a bit humorless and someone who has extraordinary attention to detail, the latter being a trait shared with other successful coaches, regardless of the sport. This is a person who meticulously plans practices and expects nearly flawless execution.

So, in the championship game, UGA took a large lead into halftime. Bama’s coach was faced with a choice: Conclude that his team was executing poorly and stick with the plan (with some adjustments) or decide that the plan was not working and implement a different one. The coach chose the second option, including replacing many of his star performers, and they won the game in dramatic fashion. What can we learn from this?

1) A plan is not destiny. If leaders view them as the ONLY path, then they will be blind to other opportunities to succeed.

2) Changing approaches requires bench strength (which is literally true in this case). When Bama changed their game plan they also replaced some key players. This was only possible because they had a reservoir of talent with a variety of skills. If they had recruited (the college athletics equivalent of employee selection) players with the same skills, they would only be able to execute one type of plan. Since they had more variety, it gave the coach more flexibility. Think about that when someone says, “We need to hire more people like so-and-so.

3) Effective leaders establish criteria for success and failure. We often here about measuring when we have achieved goals. Less frequently talked about is when it is time to rethink our approach. While perhaps not explicit before the game, Bama’s coach knew when it was time to change to Plan B and made the decision.

Do effective leaders need determination? Of course they do. No plan is ever going to be executed perfectly and without adjustments. But, they also need the humility to know when their plans are failing and the talent available to them to change directions.

What Do Grades Tell Us When Hiring?

Welcome to 2018! This first link actually highlights a look at valid personality testing on a largely read website. This makes me think that the year is off to a good start in the field.

Along those same lines of predicting behavior, a line of thought has always been that school grades are indicative of future success. The logic behind this makes sense. If a student applies him/herself and does well in school, then it is likely that he or she will do the same at work. Critics will say that grades measure something very specific that does not really translate to work and there are biases in how grades are given (which is why universities use standardized tests).

As always, what makes a good predictor really depends on the outcomes you are looking for. If your goal is to hire people who are good at following rules and doing lots of things pretty well, then this article suggests that school grades should be part of your evaluation process. But, if you want to hire very creative and novel thinkers, then GPA probably is not your best answer.

What also grabbed me about the article was the definition of success. The research article cited indicated that those who did very well in high school, nearly all of them were doing well in work and leading good lives. But, for the authors, this apparently is not enough. Why? Because none of them have “impressed the world,” whatever that means. And because there are lots of millionaires with relatively low GPAs (here is a suggestion: how about controlling for parents’ wealth before making that calculation?).

From an employment perspective, we need to be clear what valuable performance looks like when validating and part of the selection process. If your goal is to select people into positions that require developing unique solutions, then GPA may not be a useful predictor. However, if you expect people to follow processes and execute procedures, then GPA is likely to be a useful tool which should be used with other valid predictors.

And, if you are looking to hire people who are going to “impress the world,” good luck to you.

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