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PREOCCUPATIONS *Trust the Evidence, Not Your Instincts* By JEFFREY PFEFFER

AND ROBERT SUTTON Published: September 3, 2011

CONSIDER this hypothetical situation: You have a serious illness. Your

doctor prescribes an intrusive, painful and costly treatment. What she

doesn’t say — because she hasn’t consulted the research — is that most

studies find the treatment ineffective and fraught with negative side

effects.

You go through the procedure, which doesn’t work. You later find the

research your doctor failed to consult. When you ask why, she answers: “Who

pays attention to studies? I have years of clinical experience. Besides, the

protocol seemed as if it ought to work.”

Does that sound like malpractice? It does to us. Fortunately, pressures to

practice evidence-based medicine are reducing preventable errors.

That isn’t the case, however, in most workplaces, where failure to consider

sound evidence repeatedly inflicts unnecessary damage on employee well-being

and group performance. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Consider the issue of incentive pay. Many people believe that paying for

performance will work in virtually any organization, so it is used again and

again to solve problems — even where evidence shows it is ineffective.

Recently, New York City decided to end a teacher bonus program after three

years and $56 million. As The New York Times reported in

July<http://nyti.ms/rfEYWM>

, a

study<http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2011/RAND_MG1114.pdf>

found that the effort to link incentive pay to student performance “had no

positive effect on either student performance or teachers’ attitudes.”

But that bad news could have been predicted long before spending all that

time and money. After all, the failure of similar efforts to improve school

performance has been documented <http://www.hepg.org/her/abstract/478> for

decades.

Here is another example: Research has shown that stable membership is a

hallmark of effective work teams. People with more experience, working

together, typically communicate and coordinate more effectively.

Although this effect is seen in studies of everything from product

development

teams<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0923474802000218>

to airplane cockpit crews, managers often can’t resist the temptation to

rotate people in and out to minimize costs and make scheduling easier.

For example, the National Transportation Safety Board once

found<http://libraryonline.erau.edu/online-full-text/ntsb/safety-studies/SS94-01\

..pdf>

that 73 percent of the safety incidents reported on commercial aircraft

occur on the first day a new crew flies together.

Hiring is another crucial workplace decision. Many studies show that

unstructured, face-to-face interviews are biased; interviewers prefer

candidates who are likeable, similar to them, and physically attractive —

even if these qualities are irrelevant to performance.

Many other selection methods are superior. Among the best is simply to

determine whether the candidate can perform the work. Still, interviews

remain the primary route to hiring.

Another workplace danger is excessive self-confidence, which can help people

rise to positions of power but can also render them less effective leaders.

Overconfident decision-makers may acknowledge that they use a practice that

is ineffective for most others — but they believe they are so talented that

the usual findings don’t apply to them.

Fortunately, some organizations are moving toward evidence-based management.

A recent study at Google <http://nyti.ms/eQvSW2> shows the power of

accepting and acting on evidence, even when it clashes with ingrained

beliefs. For most of its history, Google’s leaders believed that deep

technical expertise was the most important quality in a manager. They

thought that the best bosses pretty much left their people alone, and that

their main role was to help with technical problems when people got stuck.

Yet when Google examined what employees valued most in a manager, technical

expertise ranked last among eight qualities. Deemed more crucial were

attributes like staying even-keeled, asking good questions, taking time to

meet with people and caring about employees’ careers and lives.

Google found that managers who did these things led top-performing teams and

had the happiest employees and least turnover. So Google is making many

changes in how it selects and coaches managers, devoting particular effort

to improving its worst managers.

We applaud Google’s leaders for overcoming their biases. But note that the

attributes of great managers were evident in hundreds of previous studies,

so such improvement efforts might have started years earlier.

IN medicine, the evidence-based movement arose in response to thousands of

deaths and billions of wasted dollars that could have been averted by

applying proven practices.

Similarly, in other fields, the growing pile of studies on the human and

financial costs of employee disengagement, management distrust, poor group

dynamics, faulty incentive schemes and other preventable damage suggests a

need for an evidence-based management movement. Some organizations are

leading the way. It’s time for many more to follow suit.

Pfeffer and Sutton are professors at Stanford and authors of

“Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from

Evidence-Based Management.” E-mail: preoccupations@....

A version of this article appeared in print on September 4, 2011, on

page BU8 of the New York edition with the headline: Trust The Evidence, Not

Your Instincts.

A version of this article appeared in print on September 4, 2011, on page

BU8 of the New York edition with the headline: Trust The Evidence, Not Your

Instincts.

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