How to Tell the Difference Between Expertise and Salesmanship
This article was originally published in Inc Magazine (with Bill Fotsch).
The business world is filled with self-proclaimed experts. They write a book or work with a prestigious client and suddenly they're a thought leader. Their following feels good about what the expert is selling because it sounds good. That's because there's usually a kernel of truth in it--it's just not the whole truth. Plenty of companies spend a lot of time and money on just part of the truth. One of us (Bill) even spent over 25 years selling the value of Open-Book Management, driving seminar, workshop, and consulting revenue for just part of the truth.
Our attraction to "experts" isn't anything new. During Copernicus's time, popular experts posited that the earth was the center of the universe. It made people feel good. It seemed to make sense. But Copernicus tested that hypothesis with research, and found it wasn't true. The truth made him unpopular, yet no one could refute his data. What today's business experts lack is just this--real research that proves the validity of their philosophy.
Rank and Yank, the approach widely popularized by management icon Jack Welch, suggested regularly ranking all employees and firing those at the bottom of the list. (Welch disliked the name "Rank and Yank," but probably so did the employees being yanked.) Some of Welch's HR staff set out to sell their trendy expertise and generated a lot of consulting fees. Now most of them deny having anything to do with rank and yank, as it has largely been discredited. In recent years, companies like Microsoft and General Electric have dropped the practice, but not before a fair amount of damage was done, all at the advice of experts.
So how do you tell if the latest management pitch is sound advice or just the latest fad that will end up in a Dilbert cartoon? What you really want to know is:
Is the management approach repeatable?
Is there some way of diagnosing your company and estimating the value of the approach?
Is there research that validates the management approach?
A good example of an approach that addresses all three is Net Promoter Score, originated by Fred Reichheld and Bain & Company. Lots of folks offer advice on how to drive customer satisfaction, but Reichheld's insight was captured by the repeatable Net Promoter Score (NPS) tool. Several Bain competitors have criticized NPS, but they can't refute that it enables any company to benchmark itself against hundreds or thousands of others. Great as that is, it's lacking--it says nothing about how the company stewards its employees. And how it relates to its employees will ultimately impact how it serves its customers.
William Kahn (coiner of employee engagement) recently expressed that most of today's "expert" work on the subject misses the mark. Despite companies spending billions on it over the past three decades, employee engagement has not meaningfully improved. In Kahn's 1990 qualitative research, he clearly defined three key drivers of employee engagement: meaningfulness, safety, and availability. Given that these three are largely absent from most employee engagement work, Kahn's disappointment is understandable.
These three drivers parallel the three drivers that Dan Pink's MIT research developed: purpose, mastery, and autonomy. It's worth noting how similar his research results are to Kahn's. Pink analyzed four decades of scientific research on human motivation and found a contradiction between what science tells us works and what organizations actually do. Most experts seem to reflect on the latter.
Whether you prefer Kahn's drivers or Pink's, their likeness emanates from a common source: research. Both suggest that many of today's experts in their field are missing something essential: research. Experts on Agile, Scaling Up, KPI/OKR, Love + Work, Open-Book Management, Total Quality Management, Lean, etc., have either no basis in research or have adopted others' research and modified it to suit their needs.
That's why we've pioneered the concept of Economic Engagement, creating a survey of 15 questions that relate to five pillars: customer service, shared economic understanding, transparency, shared compensation, and employee participation. Our subsequent five years of research with Harvard Business School defined and tested our hypothesis. After 10 waves of 50-150 companies per wave, the results were captured in this article.
Our research showed time and again that companies in the top quartile of Economic Engagement were enjoying double the profit growth of their peers. In short, companies that adhere to these proven best practices around Economic Engagement also perform much better financially. We will be publishing an update, but the results in the last year were very similar, and our learning continues.
The research fits surprisingly well with Kahn's and Pink's. Maybe that's because we too were just trying to understand how employees relate to their work, and how that work relates to the customer.
Meaningfulness - Purpose - Customer Engagement, Economic Understanding
Safety - Mastery - Transparency
Availability - Autonomy - Employee Compensation and Participation
Moreover, our research also shows employees are willing to pay for work environments that utilize the features of high Economic Engagement--that is, workplaces where employees feel appreciated, receive development and training opportunities, and so on.
Too often, "experts" are trapped with a business model that is antithetical to learning the whole truth. So next time you hear a good speaker or read a good article (hopefully ours is included in that set)--ask questions. Is there data-driven substance underlying the claims, or is it just a series of well-spoken words? A true expert will jump at the chance to validate their ideas. If they hesitate, think twice before working with them.