Nine Lies About Work

A contrarian book that is right about one thing so important it justifies the whole purchase, and enjoys being contrarian a little too much elsewhere.

The important thing is the critique of rated feedback. The idiosyncratic rater effect — the finding that when I rate you, the variance in my rating is driven substantially by me rather than by you — is real, it is well established, and it quietly undermines a great deal of what HR functions do with their time. Performance ratings, calibrated distributions, most 360 instruments as they are commonly used: all of them assume humans are reliable measuring devices for other humans' attributes, and we are not. Anyone about to commission a 360 programme should be made to read that chapter first.

They are also right that people's day-to-day experience is overwhelmingly local — the team, the manager, the work in front of them — rather than organisational. That has direct consequences for how you design listening, and it is why company-level engagement scores are so often useless.

Elsewhere the framing strains. Setting up received wisdom as "lies" makes for a good title and a slightly dishonest argument, and some of the nine are more like oversimplifications the authors have chosen to attack in their strongest form.

Take the measurement critique seriously. Treat the rest as useful provocation.