279. The Leadership Assessment Tool we're ALL using wrong, with Chartered Occupational Psychologist, Juliette Alban-Metcalfe

0:00Quick question. How good a manager do you think you are? Out of 10, whatever number just popped into your head, the science says your team almost certainly disagrees. Not a little bit and not in a few areas, almost completely.

0:13Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:There tends to be pretty much zero correlation between self-perception and that of managers, of peers, of direct reports, of colleagues in direct reports. But those people tend to agree actually about their reflection. So they tend to correlate with each other, which suggests that as human beings, we're not very good at being accurate in self-reflection. Our guest today, Juliette Alban-Metcraft, is a chartered occupational psychologist and CEO of Real World Group. She spent 25 years helping organisations figure out why good intentions at the top produce terrible results at the bottom. And she's got a very specific problem with the tools that most of us are already using.

0:51You know that 360 did last year? Well, Juliet says it might not be the best way to learn anything useful about you or your people. Today we're asking, what's the one tool that can genuinely transform how your whole organisation behaves? And more importantly, how do we use it correctly? Yes, today we are talking about the 360 review and Juliet tells us we've been using it all wrong. Welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture. Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne, I'm a choice occupational psychologist.

1:30My name is Al, I'm a business owner. And we are here to help you simplify the science of work. Now here's something I found genuinely uncomfortable preparing for this episode because I have been a founder. I did at one point have around 30 staff and I genuinely believed I was a pretty decent manager because I cared about them. I worked hard. I led by example. And according to the research Juliet's about to share, my self-assessment was probably wildly inaccurate in ways I couldn't even see. Juliet is CEO of Real World Group and a chartered occupational psychologist, like me, who specializes in using evidence-based assessments to strengthen leadership and culture, all the way from founders with small teams up to executive boards.

2:10She follows in the footsteps of her mother, Professor Beverly Alimo Metcalf, an incredibly influential leadership researcher who founded Real World Group over 25 years ago. So after this short break, we'll find out why the review mechanism sitting in your HR toolkit probably isn't doing what you think it is. See you in a second. HubSpot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers. And here's a perfect example. Lee, your turn. Morehouse College needed to reach new students with fresh, engaging content. But with a massive 900-page website, even the tiniest updates took 30 minutes to publish.

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3:11So, we are joined here by an incredible woman who is following very much in the footsteps of her mother by producing some incredible stuff. I don't want to introduce her because I'm going to make a mess of this. So, Julia, can you tell us who you are and what you do?

3:25Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:I'm a tasked occupational psychologist, like your lovely wife, and I'm the CEO of Real World Group. And what we do is we create evidence-based assessments and also provide consultancy to help organisations to strengthen leadership culture, team performance, all the way up to board level, and whole organisation culture. through applying psychology, organizational psychology specifically, to create like basically a win-win between organizations and the employees. So the conditions where employees are giving their very best, creating their best performance for the good of the organization, their customers, their stakeholders, but at the same time, the way that the culture is, it's maximized for their benefit too.

4:12Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:So they're maximally well at work, they're maximally motivated, satisfied, fulfilled and so on. So it's about, essentially, it's about creating that win-win between the organization's aims and the individual's needs and desires. So I want to talk about the assessments here. I think a lot of people, when they think about assessments, they kind of think of DISC or Myers-Briggs. This is not what we're talking about, is it? So in answer to your question, Al, they are similar in the sense that the application is similar. So people would apply something like DISC or Myers-Briggs if they wanted to help leaders understand better how they operate or to help teams understand why individuals in the team behave as they do, which might then help an organization or a team to understand the way people behave in certain ways.

5:01Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:But what we do is rather than looking at personality, which is what things like DISC and Myers-Briggs do, we go straight to looking at behavior, which is kind of, it's hard to describe in a podcast without using visuals. But if you think about what predicts performance that an individual influences, whether they're a leader or whether they're, you know, just a non-positional leader, someone in a team, then, of course, it's useful to understand what their motivations and preferences and values are, which is where the personality bit comes in. those things that are sort of stable and consistent over time, you know, in us as human beings.

5:43Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:But there's another layer between that and performance. And that is then how people actually, you know, enact their behavior day to day. So if you start looking at behavior rather than, you know, looking at personality, then what you're doing is you're getting much closer to understanding how this person performs in the job. And that's ultimately what, you know, we should be concerned about. Not to say that personality doesn't have its place because it can be really valuable. But what we're sort of saying is that when it comes to predicting performance, you're going to get much more value from looking at behavior rather than looking at personality because there's very little aspects of personality that predict performance in role.

6:28Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:It's more about what behaviors you choose regardless of your personality type. It's kind of like i said it's a bit easier to explain with a visual but it's all about predictive um you know validity basically a bit of a technical term i threw in i love it i love it i learn every single day i learn something from from leanne and and today i've learned this predictive what was the term you used predictive predictive validity which is one of the things that um it's a scientific term from the sort of the world of of psychometric center statistics and what it's saying is that you You know, it's a bit like that old adage.

7:04Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:Do you remember that? I think it was a cuprinol or something. They used to have an advertising slogan, which was does what it says on the tin. And that's, you know, a form of predictive validity. It's saying, you know, can you trust that this product will actually achieve the results that you want? And so a nice way of using that in our world is sort of saying, you know, you can do a nice or, you know, an engaging and a colorful personality assessment. assessment, you know, and we all, as human beings, we tend to enjoy self-reflection and, you know, you know, safe self-reflection, obviously, you know, things like therapy can be uncomfortable, but we tend as human beings to like to do things like complete personality tests.

7:44Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:So, you know, this is why the, you know, we get, we go down, you know, internet wormholes when it sort of says, oh, test your IQ type or test your personality type or, oh, do you have ADHD or whatever it is, people love that sort of thing because we love to be able to basically predict the future. And looking at personality and understanding our different preferences and traits and so on is one way of us having a sense of control. So we like doing that sort of thing. And it can be really fun. And then you can sort of debate, well, I'm an INTJ, well, I'm an ENFP, or I'm a fiery red or amber you know whatever it is but the the problem the problem lies where people overextend um their sort of assertions that you know this understanding personality will then improve team performance or it will then improve leadership performance or it will then make you a better performer in the in the role and and the bottom line is it won't do that to a great degree.

8:49Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:It definitely is useful for things like understanding job person fit. So it can be really good for helping people to understand, am I in the right role? Do I have a good alignment of what is required of me professionally and competently to do this job well? It can help with things like interpersonal relationships. You know, a lot of people don't understand or don't fully grasp that we all see the world very differently. And so if you explore a personality, for example, in a teen, then it can help us to start to build that level of understanding of the very different perspectives we come from. Or it can also help us to understand, well, now I can understand why Dave behaves in this kind of way when I approach him with something, or I can understand why Carly likes to work in this sort of way.

9:38Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:And that's where personality can be really, really useful. There are some great tools as well that explore things like, Like, you know, do you have a style under pressure as a leader that is more or less likely to derail you, basically? Because, of course, our behavior could be quite different under pressure. That's all the good stuff. And there is lots and lots of good stuff about the personality approach. The challenge is around, like I said, the overpromise of predictive validity. because people will run whole leadership programs around personality tools with the mistaken belief that that will then enable them to develop the leaders and they won't need any other type of introspection.

10:20Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:What they're doing is they are looking at some aspects of what makes a good leader. We need to understand, do I actually want to lead people? Do I actually want to influence in this particular way? you know, this is a good role for me fundamentally. But a very, very large proportion of what it takes to be a good leader, and you know, just to sort of give you a sense of how much, sort of 85 % or more is not explained by personality. Whereas if you look at things like, you know, aspects of leadership behavior, they can predict like 60 or more percent of how much people feel motivated in their role, how much they feel satisfied, how much they feel fulfilled.

11:07Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:So in other words, it helps to predict critical parts of leadership, which is all about how do I influence and motivate and engage my people so that we can really get the job done. This predictability is really, really important. You need to know it's about the right tool for the job, basically. That's what it comes down to. And being able to show that what you're looking at really does have an impact rather than just feeling nice or being fun or enjoyable. So we've just heard Juliet explain why personality tools like DISC and Myers-Briggs aren't great in measuring behaviour. In fact, I think Leanne will go so far as to say they're not really useful at all in the modern workplace.

11:45And I'll be honest, I think Juliet was being quite diplomatic and polite there. She was much more polite than I am when I talk about said assessment tools. But the thing is, as Juliet says, 85 % or more of what makes somebody an effective leader is simply not explained by personality. And that's not a small gap. That's most of the picture. So let's go back to Juliet and talk about real world scenarios. No pun intended. I think this is the bit that every founder and leader needs to hear before anything else. So imagine I'm a founder. I've got like 25 people I've built this business and I don't really know what I'm doing with my people I've just I know how to build a business but now I'm an accidental manager firstly what tool in the real world group do you think that I should go through and secondly what would the actual results look like for this fictional founder

12:36Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:the interesting thing about founders is that they've got lots of obviously fantastic things going for them they've got you know presumably they're entrepreneurial they're likely to be very passionate about what they do. They might have a deep technical knowledge, although that's not always necessarily critical for a leadership role, but of course it will be probably important for the product or service that they're providing. They've got loads going for them. But the big gap probably is in self-awareness around how their behaviour is impacting on other people. Sometimes what founders get challenged by is not understanding when they're being appropriately demanding or overly demanding of other people.

13:22Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:Or, for example, when they are involving them appropriately or not involving them. So people might feel sort of disenfranchised because the founders are making all the decisions. So that's just a couple of examples. In essence, what's really, really critical for an organisation when it moves into further phases of growth is do the leaders, especially the most senior leaders in the organisation, understand the impact they're having on other people? And are they truly bringing them with them rather than just continuing with a single-minded vision of what they want the organisation to be? because, you know, so in answer to your question, I would suggest that they would look at a 360 like the TLQ 360, which measures engaging leadership, because what that will allow the person to do is to get feedback from stakeholders around them.

14:15Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:So they might have, you know, for example, they might be so bold as to invite investors to give them feedback in how they lead. But certainly the most important thing will be to do is to invite people from inside the organisation to give them feedback about how they lead and the influence that they're having, because that will enable them to get, you know, make more of what they have. Basically, the bottom line is, if people, if leaders, you know, carry on doing whatever they're doing, however successful it is at that point, without gathering feedback from other people, then things might not go horribly wrong.

14:50Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:Things might continue to grow exponentially, but they're missing out on a huge amount of potential and, you know, further possibility for innovation, for productivity, for, you know, all those things that comes with effective leadership. So it's about, you know, gathering 360 feedback, learning from it, you know, understanding what it is that you're doing really well, that people love, you know, about your passion and your enthusiasm. And you might be very you might be already you know appropriately caring all those kind of involving all those sorts of things so that you don't stop doing those things as things get bigger and more complex and more demanding and then of course learning from the areas where you um you know might be falling short for people so that you can actually you know address that and therefore continue to maximize all or start to further maximize the potential of your people i founded a couple of companies before and there was one where I had about 30 staff and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

15:54And I know that I expected them to care as much as I did. I'd worked, you know, 17 hours a day and I couldn't believe why they'd want to go home at five o 'clock because there's still cool things to do. So this is, I think what's cool about this is I would learn then what I'm doing well and what I'm doing badly, which a personality test wouldn't tell me. juliette would other other tests is it just me who should do this as a founder should do this um this assessment or are there other assessments that perhaps i could do with some of my other

16:27Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:teams or leaders one of the things you know as you probably gathered from what i've just said in response to the previous question one of the things that is consistently found in research around what is you know correlated with effective leadership is is self-awareness and that is because as human beings, we tend not to be particularly self-aware. When you look at data, large-scale data around how people tend to rate themselves in terms of their leadership approach and how other people rate them, there tends to be pretty much zero correlation between self-perception and that of managers, of peers, of direct reports, of colleagues in direct reports.

17:07Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:But those people tend to agree, actually, about their reflection. So they tend to correlate with each other, which suggests that as human beings we're not very good at being self accurate and self-reflection that said doesn't mean that you know of course you know we naturally think well does that mean that you know i'm worse than i think that other people think i am and the answer is not not always no it tends to be a mix of areas where you underrate yourself and areas where you overrate yourself so all leaders need to be reflecting about how they're having an impact on other people and you know when we talk about leadership at real world group we don't just mean leadership in positional power we also mean that everybody in an organization you know is a leader of some kind because all of us are representing the organization all of us have a role to play and we want ideally everyone to be sufficiently engaged with our organization that they feel responsible for you know supporting the right kind of culture serving our customers or our Service users in the right kind of way.

18:08Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:So we want everybody, ideally, to be taking, to see themselves as a leader of some form or another. So in answer to the question, you know, all leaders and organisations need to be undertaking 360 at some point in their, you know, well, ideally some point in the year. You don't want to overdo 360. So you don't want to do it more than once every, say, 12 to 18 months. But, you know, all organisations should be doing it at all levels. If you take organisations like, you know, the fire service, there are fire services that we're working with. Most people in the UK will probably be familiar with the Wilshire Report, which was looking into, you know, bullying and sexism and racism and all kinds of, you know, inappropriate behaviour in the fire service that was holding back, you know, the mission, which was to save lives and prevent accidents.

18:59Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:So in response to that, the Wilshire report says, you know, that all fire services, you know, must have 360 for leaders in the organisation. Now, some of the most forward-thinking fire services that we work with have gone so far as to not only provide it for all the leaders in their organisation, but also frontline. So we've created 360 tools that are for, and to be fair, we've had these for years, but we've adapted them as well, specifically for fire service, that are not only for people in positional leadership roles. That's what, you know, it should absolutely be rolled out to all leaders so they understand how they impact positively and negatively, but also people in every role.

19:39Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:So it's about getting a 360 perspective, obviously less extensive and less sophisticated as the leaders that are on the strategic roles, but still, you know, everybody ideally needs to get feedback on how are they contributing to the mission? How are they contributing to the positive culture in the team, which is mission critical? Everything we do in organisations is mission critical. And if it isn't, then we shouldn't be doing it. So if we take the point, we take the perspective that what everybody does is mission critical, then everybody should be provided with an opportunity to reflect on their behaviour.

20:14Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:So starting with something like that is key. And then you can look at how teams work and you can sort of extend it further. I want to go into the teams in a second because that's interesting on the lips of most people who lead. But before I do that, what happens if I do this 360 and I don't like the results? Is that likely that I'm not going to like all the results from it? It wouldn't necessarily be a comfortable experience for a lot of people. I think people, what we find, we've been doing this for 25 years in all different countries, all around the world, in all different sectors. we've got tons of experience of this what we find is that the the thought of 360 is much scarier than the reality because people think oh my gosh this is so exposing you know how's it going to how's it going to feel you know if I really want to hear from people about you know about how they feel one of the things that we've put in place as a really important um well I say rule more than even guidance is you know people who are at the center of the 360 a technical term for someone who's having a 360 done to them is called the target manager.

21:24Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:Of course, that term is an old fashioned term. It's kind of been in the parlance, you know, in this sector for years. But of course, it will just be a target person if it's someone who's not in a managerial role. So the target manager must be able to choose their own reviewers. And that might seem counterintuitive to getting honest feedback. But the bottom line is, we've got to work with we're working with human beings here, like everything in organisations, you've got to be aware of, you know, what are the ways that we as human beings respond to, you know, stimulus. And in the case of things like feedback, you know, even just hearing the word feedback, most people's echoes rise, you know, they kind of like, they get to, they start with a little threat response in their brains, rather than, you know, an opportunity response.

22:10Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:We need to be aware that because we're working with human beings, we can lead a horse to water, but we can't make it drink. That sounds a bit weird, isn't it, saying human beings and using a horse analogy? But I hope you get what I mean. We need to accept that we're working with people and we can present with all the data in the world. The way that our brains work is that we will naturally go to ego protection. That's just how we work. That's how our brains work. Now, what that means is that if I was to say, for example, present you with data, Al, that I'd collected from colleagues of yours, that you didn't necessarily, you might not even know who they were.

22:47Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:It might be a random selection. Or it could be you know who they are, but you didn't get a say in who I chose. And I'm going, well, actually, you know, I think Al needs some feedback on how he works with some of the stakeholders. So I'm going to ask the ones that I know he has a more challenging relationship with to give him feedback. There's all kinds of different ways in which people might select, you know, who's going to give you feedback. But all the ways in which I do it and you don't get a say in it gives you more and more excuses to say, well, actually, they don't know me or they don't value me or actually they've got an agenda that is, you know, not actually in the best interests of me or the company.

23:25Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:or they could say, you know, you could say to yourself things like, you know, well, they've got it in for me, we've never got on. There's all kinds of, you know, cognitive resources you can use to actually reject the feedback. And, you know, that's what your brain will do if it doesn't like what it's seeing. So we need to start a 360 process by saying, look, first of all, we will make it a safe process in inverted commas, which means that we won't use the 360 for performance appraisal. We would strongly advise it doesn't get used for things like remuneration committees. Because when you know that it's safe, that it's for development only, which is how 360 should only really be used, when it's for development only, then you will feel much safer inviting people that you need to hear from that aren't necessarily your best pals or the ones that you get on best with.

24:17Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:And that will give you some feedback that might be more challenging than, you know, than you might get if you, for example, were doing it for remuneration or for performance appraisal or something like that. So we create the conditions where it's sort of safe. And we say, look, it's really critical. If you want people to actually take on board the feedback, then you must let them choose their reviewers. So, you know, it's safe. So then you choose your reviewers. And then when the feedback comes back and it's not that favorable, there are some things that, you know, there'll be lots of positives.

24:47Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:because hopefully lots of positive things that you do do as a leader but when there are things that you need to learn from we've created the conditions where you can actually take it on you can actually accept that feedback it might feel a bit unfronting but you might you'll eventually accept it and you'll be able to work with it whereas if you don't put those conditions in place you know hopefully I've explained the reasons why as human beings we will find it really difficult to accept. We'll put it into the too difficult, too fronting box in our brains. And we might go through the motions of, yeah, yeah, no, that's interesting.

25:20Juliette Alban-Metcalfe:Yeah, no, I'll learn from that. Yeah. But secretly we're thinking, you know, what a load of rubbish, you know, or what do they know? Or whatever else we want to use to protect our ego. And it will be pointless. So it's about, if you want to get value from a 360 process, you've got to use it in the right way, you know. And if you do that, you can achieve huge transformational change in organizations we've we've worked with organizations that have really transformed their cultures because they've approached things like 360 and you know that wider support in a way that is not affronting and it's a way that enables people to take it on board any any kind of any kind of forced behavior change does doesn't you know in that kind of way doesn't happen now i'm not saying that people should be allowed to behave how they want to behave but if you want to force behavior change 360 is not a tool to do it with okay so let me just reiterate what we've just heard because i think it's so so important a 360 only works if the person at the center of it genuine believes the feedback is safe development focused and comes from people they trust get any of those conditions wrong and your brain will reject it which is very human, but also means most 360s done badly are basically a waste of everybody's time.

26:35And what I think is really cool about Juliet's approach is that this isn't just theory. She's seen organisations genuinely transformed by doing this properly. So after this short break, we're going to rejoin Juliet, where I ask her to walk us through what that actually looks like in practice, anonymously, of course. Billion Dollar Moves, hosted by Sarah Chen Spellings, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination of business professionals. Join venture capitalist and strategist Sarah Chen Spellings as she asks the hard questions and learns through the triumphs, failures and hard lessons of the creme de la creme.

27:08So you too can make billion dollar moves in venture, in business and in life. Maybe start with episode 124 where you're going to hear how industry giants from Canva to YouTube define leadership. Listen to Billion Dollar Moves wherever you get your podcasts.

27:26you just mentioned there that you've seen some massive changes in organizations after using 360s now i'm pretty sure that you can't name anyone but speaking anonymously can you give us an example of of of a situation where an organization did use a 360 and change dramatically