Psychology Is Dead. Or Is It ?

The recent article in The Onion about (http://www.theonion.com/articles/psychology-comes-to-halt-as-weary-researchers-say,36586/)  loudly sounding the death knell of Psychology, is a piece of sparkling wit that seeks to unearth a few uncomfortable truths about this discipline, which, for most people, holds a charm that is at once fascinating and slightly forbidding. And why wouldn’t it – for it’s about people and seeks, for its part, to unearth quite a few uncomfortable truths about people.

I loved the article for its tongue in cheek and mildly caustic depiction of ‘weary researchers’… The Amercian Psychological Association’s unruffled rejoinder was characteristic of the long suffering equanimity of the seasoned psychologist.

I don’t blame the Onion, although its underlying grouse reveals a narrow understanding of the field. But before coming to that, here’s my personal take on 3 ways in which psychologists make themselves effortlessly irritating:

1. I am a psychologist, because I like working with people and am drenched in empathy from head to toe.

Wrong. Reason. Yes, the unfortunate truth about psychology, according to me, is that the field often attracts all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons. You do not need to apply emotion to study the root causes of emotions. Like any other science, you need keen, relentless logic, coupled with sharp intuition to be able to look at a human being as an object – a very real, live and often irrational object powered by self-awareness. An accumulation of a lot of wrong people for a lot of wrong reasons invariably leads to a perpetuation of glib platitudes on ‘positive thinking’ and tired, time worn clichés about the inherent goodness of human beings and what not. I firmly believe, that social skills (getting along with people) are as important to a behavioural scientist, as mewing skills are to a veterinary physician.

           

 2. The truth about seeking safety in numbers

Then there are those in the field that believe statistics to be the panacea to all of its ills. The obsession with quantification sometimes reaches such gigantic proportions as to render the final objective largely irrelevant. So you’re often tingling with excitement over your multivariate analysis of variance; so what, if it was only to demonstrate that passing a coffee shop makes people happy ? This numeromania is also sometimes responsible for mistaking correlation for causation (Increase in the level of A leads to increase in the level of B, hence A causes B) – which is probably the reason, why you get to read a new article everyday about how coffee causes everything ranging from intense anxiety to uncontrollable happiness. My additional appeal to all psychological theorists is to desist from diagramming highly self-evident theories – really, that maze of arrows with everything pointing to everything else succeeds in confusing, rather than clarifying.

3. Self-help does not help

Nothing undermines the credibility of psychology like an exposition of ’10 ways to be interesting’ or ill founded and exaggerated accounts of ‘left brain’ and ‘right brain’ individuals. It is distressing to see the ‘Psychology’ section in most bookstores bedecked with self-help books. It must sadden several honest, intelligent researchers in this field, who spend years studying phenomena like development of self-concept or morality among children, language acquisition, cognitive biases in individuals, decision making in groups and so on – true researchers, who are primarily interested in asking the right questions, rather than suggesting miraculous, alliterative quick fixes.

‘Asking the right questions’ – that brings me back to the Onion and its recommended remedy to the field of psychology. The Onion suggests that psychologists refocus their effort and resources to the study of the physical sciences – physics, chemistry and so on as an antidote to the ambiguity involved in the human mind studying itself. There is a small problem with that – when we are studying ‘hard, observable’ phenomena in the natural sciences, aren’t we ultimately studying the sensory representations of these in our brains… and that is why steering clear of the ‘inescapable enigma of consciousness’, as The Onion characterizes it is easier said than done. However the more important and relevant point to consider is - While latest psychological research is becoming increasingly inter-disciplinary and seamlessly connected with the study of biochemistry, neuroscience etc., we do need individuals with the logic and intuition to ‘ask the right (and well thought out) questions.’ We need individuals who ask, ‘Why do people tend to conform to group norms ?’ or ‘Why does being observed by someone make your performance improve in some situations, but decline in others.’ Biology and physics and neuroscience will be key tools to answering these questions, but you need ‘psychological’ insight to make the relevant hypotheses in the first place. At the risk of oversimplifying the problem, I would say, that in many cases, you need psychological thinking to ask the ‘why’ questions and the physical sciences are crucial tools in demonstrating the ‘how’ part of the solution.

(Disclaimer: I was a psychology student a very long time ago, so a lot of my understanding may now be vague or erroneous, however, I can cheerfully claim that I have never stopped asking questions.)

Where Do You See Yourself In Five Years ?

Link to Complete Note

“Where do you see yourself in five years” has to be the most notoriously inane question most of us have ever been asked.
This is that classic portion of an interview, where you are expected to gaze in a dreamy, wistful way, while efficiently offering up a platter of wholesome, ready-to-eat (and SMART – duh) goal statements.
After I started working, I was placed in the unenviable position of having to both answer and ask the golden question (there – I never saw myself here 5 years ago and yet – ta da – here I am!)
And at this point I noticed a jarring disconnect in all the verbiage surrounding the “Where do you see yourself” question:
How many of us have flipped the question and asked:
“Where do you see me in 5 years ?”
This flipped question invariably attracts the time worn truisms (that are, nevertheless true), such as:
“The onus is on you – you are the architect of your development”
“We are in a dynamic environment; be prepared to adapt to changing expectations”
These declarations are not at all false, but they point towards an inherent imbalance - So, organizations, with all the strategic thinking and predictive analytics at their command find the question above to be impossible to answer and more important, irrelevant. However, one tiny little person during a campus placement interview is expected to play soothsayer, confidently anticipating what the world will look like five years from now, the various alternatives available to him/her in that “World of Five Years From Now”, determining which of those alternatives seems at least mildly interesting and doing a force field analysis of how to jump from here to there – to that fascinating “World of Five Years From Now”
All of this smacks of an inordinate emphasis on the individual’s ability to predict and influence outcomes regardless of changing contexts and worse still, often puts blinkers on our tendency to explore fresh, widely diverging, even seemingly crazy ideas of what the future could be.
I have never understood why it was so incredibly important to “see” myself in a particular place in five (or whatever number of) years – I have never done it and have ended up in newer, exciting and challenging places (where I never expected to be) all the same. To this day, I resolutely have more than four ‘possible’ ambitions (researcher, writer, linguist, manager and more)...
What, then is the more relevant question ? I never ask, “Where do you see yourself in five years ?” in an interview
All I ask, instead, is:
“What is your passion / What are you crazy about” – after all, that is more interesting part, isn’t it ? Knowing someone’s passion is like knowing the ingredients that will eventually make up that heady mix of what they will be five years from now. The same set of ingredients can be mixed, flavored and treated in various possible ways and will potentially be sharpened or blunted by different environmental conditions to derive various possible outcomes – but it’s the ingredients that matter. The rest works itself out. Or doesn’t. Who cares ? For all you can know for sure is the ingredients.

Where have all the words gone ?

Link to Complete Note

In a regular workday, we often need to make a point. And what better hope of deliverance from the struggle to make a point than Power Point ?
Now, I have always been partial to words – I simply like them infinitely more than shapes or colours or numbers. They make me feel so understood. Staring in satisfaction at a phrase that perfectly sums up your thoughts is like looking at a best friend winking back at you over a joke that only the two of you understand. Unfortunately for me, words are anathema to the world of work. Reading, assimilating, interpreting – who has time for that. Who is stupid enough to traverse a white paper, when they could content themselves with looking at a pretty picture on a slide ?
In the three and a half years that I have been working, I have seen countless employees around me squinting at their screens trying to embellish their Power Point presentations with colours, shadows, pictures – a dash of this and a smidgen of that, all of these, of course, purely superfluous to, but apparently ‘accentuating’ the point they are trying to make. But let me ask you this – do you REALLY need that picture of a pile of coins to know that I am talking about ‘compensation’ and do you seriously need to see the photograph of a multi-ethnic classroom to know that I am talking about ‘learning’ ?
Why, then, are we perpetuating this hackneyed tradition ? Don’t get me wrong – sometimes a picture articulates an idea just as well as a word; it’s about choosing the medium one is comfortable with. What I wish to decry are two factors that I think underlie the working world’s eschewing of words:
Firstly, often a picture or an ‘effect’ of any kind does not serve to accentuate a point, but rather substitutes the point itself.
The second aspect is symptomatic of larger malaise – a general laziness, when it comes to reading, and rapidly diminishing attention spans.  I have also often heard – XYZ (usually a senior leader) will not go through all of this (where ‘this’, for instance, is an explanation of the pros and cons of two approaches) My question is – Why not ? And, mind you, labelling anything that features more than two words as ‘gyaan’ is not a good enough excuse.
I choose not to lean on the phrase ‘studies show…’, but am inclined to think that the gradual decline of the reading habit has moderate to serious implications for our cognitive and emotional development – on how well we conceptualize, imagine, articulate, empathize and so on. In our world, however, progress up the echelons of management sometimes increasing immunity from reading.  It might be pertinent to ask ourselves – How many man hours are expended every week to ensure that one person does not have to go through tLink to FB Notehe trouble of reading ?
 

The HRBP's Search for Meaning

Note: As this post centers around the HR Business Partner, it would be useful to take a closer look at this strange animal, particularly for those, who have not been initiated into the slippery terrain of HR. CIPD defines HR business partnering as a process whereby HR professionals work closely with business leaders and/or line managers to achieve shared organisational objectives, in particular designing and implementing HR systems and processes that support strategic business aimsand proceeds to caution us: However, it is important to note that many varying definitions of HR business partnering exist and, where HR business partners operate, there are wide variations in their role. 

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A recent conversation, I overheard:

“So my HR Business Partner comes to me and says, “Why is your appraisal not complete” and I go, “Um, because it is pending with my manager…” And she has the audacity to ask me, “Why have you not followed up with him ?” I decided to give her a piece of my mind and inquired, “If I have to do that too, then what, pray tell me, is your job ?”

A conversation, such as this is likely to provoke an animated debate between HR and Non HR professionals, and will probably involve the expressions,  ‘lazy’, ‘clueless’, ‘arrogant’ and ‘unbelievable’ being ascribed by each party to the other.

Everyone laments about HR, HR laments about HR and HR laments about everyone. The root cause of this pervasive evil is contained in that statement, “What, pray tell me, is your job ?”

This lack of clarity in the ‘expected outcomes’ from HR, stems from three dangerous ideas or myths, which get entrenched in every HR professional’s mind right from the management trainee days:

Myth #1 The key to effectiveness is activity

Every fresh graduate in HR has to face the onslaught of words, such as “active”, “proactive” “initiative”, “enthusiasm” etc,. These bright and upbeat terms usually contain an implicit message “greater activity = greater effectiveness.” The more queries you handle, the more training programs and engagement activities you conduct, the more productive you are.

When was the last time, an HR manager got a pat on the back for having reduced the number of training programs necessary, or for the fact that there was no need for any ‘engagement activities’ in her / his team ?

And why do employees (as in my example above) think, follow ups on their appraisal completion are the job of the HRBP ? I suspect, this is in large part, because of the HRBP’s misguided zeal to ‘add value’ and be ‘responsive’ (more follow ups = more activity = more effectiveness).

True HR Business Partnering will consist in changing this mindset, and this mindset change will need to begin at home. The guiding principle for business partnering needs to be, “HR helps those, who help themselves.” Many HRBPs will, at this point, raise a pertinent question, “Why are we really needed, then ?”, which brings us to the second dangerous idea below.

 Myth #2 The key to success is indispensability.

There is a term in German called ‘Geltungsdrang’, which roughly translates as “the urge to matter”, which pithily expresses every HR (or any management) professional’s gut wrenching struggle. Consciously or subconsciously, everyone likes to feel ‘needed’; so much so, that they sometimes forget to think about ‘what’ they want to be ‘needed’ for.

If you are constantly needed for support on “how to open this link” or “how to file that claim”, then you are a trouble shooting assistant and not a business partner.

True HR Business Partnering lies in making yourself as dispensable as possible. It will involve enabling managers to support themselves, by acting only as a ‘consultant’ or ‘expert’, where your input is necessary. What this means is, for instance, that they should come to you, not for “how to access the performance evaluation tool”, but for “is my understanding of this performance rating correct and have I applied it consistently ?” I would urge any budding HR Business Partner reading this post to pause and reflect on which of the two questions s/he encounters more frequently. If the former is more frequent, the hapless HRBP is often given feedback about the importance of ‘influencing’ and that is the third dangerous idea.

·         Myth #3 The key to business partnering is ‘influencing’

‘The ability to influence’ usually figures among the top three competencies required of any HR Business Partner. The relentless focus on the need to ‘influence’ the business heads is symptomatic of a faint, subtle, perhaps unconscious notion within HR – that there are two distinct sorts of imperatives: ‘business imperatives’, which are the territory of the business head and ‘people imperatives’, which are the sole province of HR and that incompatibilities between the two necessitate all the much talked about ‘influencing’. Although HRBPs will be the first to wax eloquent on ‘alignment of people initiatives to the business’, they often overlook that categorizing them as ‘business initiatives’ and ‘people initiatives’ is not necessary, in the first place. Often (and here comes a somewhat controversial point), the need to influence contains a latent assumption among HR professionals, that HR managers are better at understanding ‘the softer, people aspects’ than non HR managers, which need not (and is often not) true.

True business partnering will require debunking this dichotomy of ‘business’ and ‘people’ in the most genuine sense; seeing oneself as an essential part of the team, rather than as an external 'influencer'.

Engaging Thoughts.....

I am not a big fan of Why-I-Have-Set-Out-To-Write-This-Blog posts. I believe, that once you have decided that your thoughts are important enough to be inflicted upon the world, it it is quite superfluous to defend / justify your decision. The astute reader may have noticed that the title of this blog does contain an overture to its raison d'etre - it is important to do what makes one feel important.

So let me plunge headfirst into an issue that has been gnawing away at my thinking time for some time now  - and that is the imponderable problem of Employee Engagement.
I have often been asked, "What are the engagement activities conducted for employees in XYZ organization / site / function ?" On the first such occasion, being a novice to the Switch-On-Your-All Knowing-Important-Look-When-You-Have-No-Answer strategy, I probed further on what constituted 'engagement activities'. I was assailed with a colourful plethora of examples: Hobby clubs, Diwali celebrations, Yoga lessons.
Later, as I embraced the dynamic and strategic field of Human Resource Management, I noticed, that 'Employee Engagement' constituted a distinct responsibility area within HR (similar to Compensation & Benefits or Recruitment), and consisted of the colourful plethora of activities mentioned above along with more innovative alternatives. Moreover, an oft used indicator of effectiveness in this area was 'the number of engagement activities conducted' in a specific duration of time.
Of course, appended to any report on Employee Engagement, one would be sure to find impressive statistics shouting out to you about the incontestable link between employee engagement and the organization's performance (80% of the organizations, which implemented employee engagement activities registered a growth in revenues, while the corresponding figure was only 30% for those that did not etc. etc.)

What is my point here ? Firstly, let us take a minute to pause and think: Is employee engagement a cause or an effect ? Is it a process or a result ?
It is clearly an effect, a result or an end. Engagement, thus, need not be treated as a distinct process; it is the reflection of the effectiveness of all of your other people processes - recruitment, development, talent, performance and rewards management. People in an organization can be said to be 'engaged', when the organizational policies, processes, culture and strategy motivate them to contribute, and not when they get to attend 4 team dinners in 3 weeks.

I am not at all against organizing Hobby clubs or Diwali celebrations or Yoga classes, however, it pains me that such activities get grouped under the banner of 'Employee Engagement', which then becomes a 'process' in its own right and worse still, gets comfortably tucked under the amorphous blanket of 'HR'. They are, by all means, good and useful activities to have, but 'quantifying' employee engagement based on these activities (also typically substantiated by five-point-feedback-forms) is not only ridiculous, but threatens to divert the focus of employee engagement, from being a desirable 'end' to being an entertaining 'activity'. It is redolent of a tendency to look for quick fixes and jump to solutions before understanding problems (Hey, look, this team has a low engagement score, let's plan a picnic for them!), which is an emblem of all that is wrong with HR management today.
It is important to understand Employee Engagement for what is really is - an indicator, that people see a reason to perform and persist. Employee engagement is the accountability of everyone; we don't need an 'engagement specialist' for it.

Whose Right Is It Anyway ?

Have you ever noticed, that having a belief is, in general, far more useful than not having a belief ? Having a belief endows you with one inalienable right:

The right to be offended.

Whether it is religious ardour or ethnic pride, or staunch vegetarianism, environmentalism, feminism or patriotism, they are all characterized by a singularly unfair characteristic – they cloak their adherents with a special immunity – the garb of a ‘morally superior’ position.

This automatically confers on them, a little discussed, but infinitely important right – the right to be offended.

If you, like me, have been a non believer in most beliefs and a non adherent of most ideologies, you would have been assailed by countless admonitions from passionate ‘believers’ and if you, like me, have been a tolerant, let-me-mind-my-own-business-and-i’ll-gladly-let-you-mind-yours ish person, you would have often consented to do things you did not believe in, just because they mattered so much to people who mattered so much to you, just so that you did not hurt their sentiments.

But what happened to YOUR sentiments, in that case; were YOUR sentiments not hurt ? Now, if you, like me, are a person of rather dubious emotional depths, you would merely scratch your head and say, “Um, no, not really…didn't think about that.”

Somehow, the guiding principle here appears to be: the more tolerant thou art, the more thou shalt tolerate.

Now consider this – can you easily recall an instance of an irreligious person loudly proclaiming, that her / his sentiments were wounded on seeing someone prostrate themselves before the idol of a particular god ?

Or do you remember the last time that a speech seething with patriotic fervor offended the sensibilities of someone who didn't particularly think that their country was any better than another ?

Why do occurrences like these seem inherently improbable ? Do irreligious persons have no sentiments ? Is their non belief not as sacred to them as belief is to the believer ?

We are quite accustomed to respecting a particular ‘standpoint’ of others; when will we learn to respect the act of not having that particular standpoint ?

Having a belief (any belief) is invariably seen in a far more favourable light than not having a belief. This general tendency aggrandizes those who readily espouse beliefs and views and ideologies and severely penalizes those who doubt, those who hesitate to jump to conclusions, those who are painstakingly skeptical…and of course, the most unfortunate victims – those who are irreverently humorous.

The need for a charter of rights for ‘those without belief’ has never been more salient. It’s time we had interest groups, such as the ‘Fraternity of Fun pokers’ or the ‘Society for Protection of Bitchy, Befuddled Bloggers’…or as a reference from a tattered, time worn Enid Blyton book suggests: the ‘Five Fine Doubters’.

On Being Particular About Generalization

As our freedom of expression gains alarmingly greater significance with each passing day, people have been increasingly likely to shun being 'labelled', being 'typecast' or...God forbid...being Stereotyped ! It is this intense disdain for stereotyping that makes people turn away from personality testing in high dudgeon, even to question possible patterns among the results of IQ tests and to add highly creative politically correct terms to our lexicon every year (relax, you're no longer ugly, you're just 'visually challenging')

Human beings are 'cognitive misers', as Fiske put it. It has been demonstrated experimentally that the complexity of stimuli from the social environment leads people to systematically ignore chunks of information in order to be able to process it with ease, by aiding the brain in storing data based on similarity. Racial and gender based stereotyping have been extensively studied. There exists some evidence that stereotyping is, to an extent, automatic or implicit, rather than being subject to a person's conscious control. (the Implicit Associations Test sheds some light on the phenomenon). Furthermore, the tendency to stereotype is heightened in certain situations; experiments involving greater time pressure have been seen to increase subjects' tendency to stereotype. Also, the more accessible the information regarding a particular category (say, Indians or lawyers or blondes), the greater is a person's propensity to stereotype. Information regarding a category can be made more accessible to a person's brain, by sub conscious 'priming' (for instance, there are experiments, where subjects are asked to read or view material containing very subtle hints about a particular stereotype and this, in turn, leads them to apply the information in making their own judgements).

Does this mean, that human beings have an innate, non conscious tendency to stereotype? To a certain extent, yes. But is that such a bad thing, anyway? We all love to label each other and more than anything else, we love to label ourselves. It's only when the labels do not conform to our preferred self image, that we begin to carp about stereotyping. From shoes to phones to status updates, a lot of what we wear/say/use has the intended or unintended purpose of labelling ourselves. Labelling is our way of making sense of the social world.
Of course, like every innate tendency, this tendency needs to be tempered and like every freedom, this freedom cannot be exercised with abandon. But, it helps to understand the source of stereotypes before mindlessly dismissing them. And as much as try not to crack HR jokes these days (even to actively and fervently oppose them), I will be the first to admit that the world is a much more fun place with them in it !