WHILE talking to Paulo, one of our major stakeholders, we drifted into a discussion of how my team members were doing in terms of how they dealt with him. He was the new guy and I wanted to ask for his impressions of my team so I could confirm what they had been telling me, and also to adjust whatever was needed so we could work smoothly.
He was particularly impressed with one of my team members, Richard, saying that of all of my team members, he was the best one. I was silent. Because he was wrong. While Richard is one of my best, he is not the best. Paulo probably thought Richard was the best because he spoke and articulated himself well and also interacted with him frequently on breaks, which made him conclude—wrongly—that Richard was the best. Paulo fell into a cognitive bias called “The Halo Effect.”
An American psychologist by the name of Edward Thorndike coined this term in 1920, in an article he wrote, titled “A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings.” This was the result of an experiment he conducted among military officers who evaluated their soldiers according to leadership, physical appearance and intelligence. Thorndike discovered they were highly correlated. This means a military officer’s perception of a soldier’s physical appearance is highly correlated to a soldier’s leadership or intelligence. When a military perceives a soldier as having desirable physical traits, they also perceive the soldier as having good leadership and intelligence.
This spurred other studies which showed physical attractiveness can actually affect people’s perception of your other qualities. Hence, someone who is perceived as physically attractive is also perceived as being kind, warm and friendly. Hence, the proliferation of attractive people promoting different products, sometimes in awkward poses, like the one I saw in our vet’s clinic over the weekend where a beautiful woman held a bag of “natural dog food” over her shoulder with one hand while looking dreamily at whoever stared at her.
As a leader, you have to be very careful in appraising your members because your evaluation might be tainted with The Halo Effect. Just like Paulo, who perceived Richard as the best in my team by virtue of his excellent communication skills which is only one facet of the work my team does. Add to that is the frequency by which they interacted, which reinforced Paulo’s belief. But given this cognitive bias, how do you protect yourself from giving subjective evaluations and ensuring you provide a fair and just performance evaluation of your team?
The first thing you need to do is to be aware of your own biases. I was a teacher for a long time and it took some time for me to realize I played favorites without meaning to. While I try to be as objective as I can, I recognized those biases especially when I would check essays and I catch myself favoring the answer of one over the other when they were actually saying the same thing. One thing I did to overcome this bias was to put off grading the essay questions until the end so that when I checked, I would not know who wrote what. This made it easier for me to check objectively and grade the essays as they were. But I needed to be aware first of my own biases before being able to do something about it. The same is true when we evaluate our team. There are those you work well with and others who just rub you the wrong way. Be aware of these biases and then create an objective measure of appraising your team’s performance.
What I learned as a teacher, I carry at work but now in a corporate setting. This objective measure is my team’s scorecard which is an important tool in evaluating someone equally and fairly. As a leader, you have to make sure your team’s scorecard measures the actual output of your team. This helps you curtail your bias because you are measuring their output and not their personalities. Numbers do not lie, and however charming or sanguine a person is, you can still objectively evaluate a person’s performance based on their work. This helps take away your subjectivity and provides security to your team that they are being evaluated equitably.
To further reinforce an objective measure through the scorecard and work results, it would be good to document key work events throughout the year which will help you evaluate the performance of your team members. Some may fall into the bias that because they performed well in the last quarter of the year, they will be evaluated on that event alone. On the contrary, a failed project at the last quarter does not necessarily mean a failed year. To prevent evaluating a member by their recent success or failure, you need to document their key milestones throughout the year. This will help you keep in perspective what they have done for the year and give them a fair evaluation based on objective data. This will prevent your team from comparing themselves to each other and raising questions when one is promoted over the other.
Another important aspect to review your bias is other people’s feedback. Paulo’s commendation actually alerted me that while I look at Richard’s overall performance compared to others in the team, Paulo’s observation helped me pinpoint Richard’s strength and made him the point of contact for projects involving Paulo. This made it easier for the team to negotiate and work with Paulo on future projects.
The Halo Effect can work for you or against you.
By being aware of it and putting up mechanisms to help you avoid falling into its trap, you promote a fair and equitable workplace. Your team needs to understand they can rely on you to be consistent, reasonable and just. Otherwise, they will look for someone who is.