Nudging

How do you get people to do what is good for them? How do you help them make a choice that works for you and for them? It’s all about the nudge.

This McKinsey podcast is a lovely primer on our cognitive biases and their use in recruitment, succession planning and performance feedback. You can find the podcast and a transcript here.

Here are some of the take outs for me:

i.e. don’t tell them how they can develop in their career at the same time you tell them what they’re doing wrong. So the once a year performance evaluation combined with the once a year here’s what you need to change, or even stop, start and continue needs to be reviewed. Reviewed. Changed.

separate developmental feedback from evaluative feedback

Recruitment is how you introduce change to your organisation’s cultural make up:

if you want to have a diverse set of leaders in the future, you have to be aware of… biases and fight them… right at the start of your recruiting process

And remember the power dynamics

never let the most senior person in the room speak first. Make sure that everyone notes their opinion right after having seen the recruitment candidate and before sharing their opinion

And don’t set and forget

check very carefully whether your algorithms are working… [succession planning or recruiting] we always advise our clients to… look back in the past and see whether those algorithms, if they have been used already in recruiting, would have predicted the success of those in their positions right now.