A new book, “Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep it From Happening to You,” attempts to explain the whole thing — and the financial collapse — by using neuroscience and psychological analysis.

To try to boil a few hundred pages of a book into a few hundred words is perhaps another bad decision, but here goes:

• People tend to think if something worked once, it’s guaranteed to work again. This is the reverse of “Experience is the best teacher” — especially when the experience is misapplied. We saw it happen on Wall Street when experienced money managers thought they could ride to the rescue simply because they’d done it before. What they, and everyday supervisors, fail to recognize is that rules and circumstances change, so a solution that worked 10 years ago might be useless today.
• Self-interest can be a poor guide. Let’s go back to Wall Street and Alan Greenspan’s observation that he failed to realize that big banks wouldn’t operate in their best self-interests. Actually, companies don’t control self-interest; people do. And people tend to see only what’s best for themselves in the short term. Likewise, many good supervisors — maybe because of business pressures — can’t see past the next 30 days. So they take the quick fix for themselves and hope for the best — and often get the worst.
• Data gets filtered based on prejudgments. Here’s the way this works: Let’s say a  supervisor is convinced someone’s a star employee and gets four reports on that employee — three bad ones and one good one. The supervisor will tend to focus on the good report because of the prejudgment that the person is a good employee.
• Buy-in can be bad. You know the old technique of giving people responsibility for their own ideas by making them responsible for the sucess of the idea? What happens is that they become so married to the idea that they’ll ride it — and everyone else — into the ground in a vain attempt to prove the idea is brilliant.
• Everyone has a bias. And everyone needs someone else to point out when that bias is a road to ruin. “Yes men” need not apply for the job. The someone who points out the destructive bias has to be strong, honest and smart.  We hope the folks on Wall Street are reading this book.

Her story:

When we recruit people, we sell them on the idea that our company believes in continual learning and improvement – meaning we support training as a way to reach career goals.

The problem with that: Our supervisors and HR were always
challenged to come up with new and different training employees could attend offsite and onsite.

Plus, of course, the training had to be relevant to the goals of the employee and the company. Keeping on top of that was almost a full-time job in itself, and we couldn’t
afford a training coordinator to do it.

Our solution: Make employees their own training coordinators – but it took some work.

Two stipulations
The cornerstone of the solution was to have employees find and choose their own training. No one really knew for certain whether employees would like the idea – many were skeptical or didn’t want the responsibility – or whether it would work.

• So we tried it for about a year on an experimental basis with a few employees. We told them they could choose their own training, but approval would be based on two major stipulations:
• The employee had to show the connection between the proposed training and their jobs and careers.

Cost would be a factor in approval. The more expensive the training, the greater the benefit the employee
would have to show – to the company and the job.

We rolled out the program and held our breath, waiting to see what would happen.

Early results
One of our first successes was a customer service employee – let’s call her “Jane” – who told her boss she was interested in the quality-control end of our business, and asked for training in that area.

Jane picked out her training, got the OK, and ended up moving into quality control and being a top performer.
We used that success story as a template to show others how the program might work for them. And an interesting thing happened.

Not all employees embraced the idea – some still wanted the
supervisor to pick the training. But we found that the ones who did take control of their training often also happened to be our most motivated, top performers.

In other words, the top people used the program to get better or to help themselves advance with the company. That assured us the program was working.

(Norma Anthony, Medford, NJ)

Her story:

Squeezing in affordable management training was always a challenge for us.

Our operation runs pretty lean, so it’s hard for supervisors to head off to some remote site for several days for management training. And then, of course, there’s the cost involved.

We did try to do some onsite training, but you usually have to have a large group for that to be cost-effective — not practical in our small outfit — and you have to schedule a block of time that may not always convenient for everyone.

We had to figure out a way to address our management-education problem.

As a start toward that goal, I decided to call some education experts – the business department at our local community college.

Late-day classes
I explained our goals to the department head, and we worked out a solution. He’d send us a list of management courses that ran only from 3 to 5 p.m.

That way, our supervisors could attend at the end of the day for an hour or two without breaking up a whole day or going to some far-away site. The school even helped us work on getting a state training grant to help pay for some of the classes.

So we ended up with management training that’s effective, convenient and affordable.

(Lynette Kautz, HR director, Denison, TX)

Question:
Our performance-appraisal system is based on “doesn’t meet,”  ”meets” or “exceeds” expectations criteria. We’re thinking of switching to a 1-10 scale that supervisors can use to rate employees.

Any thoughts on whether one system is better than the other?

Answer:
From the standpoint of being able to legally defend an appraisal, the doesn’t meet/meets/exceeds system is generally better. So says James Loots, a labor-relations attorney. But of course you have to have specific criteria on which to base the rating, meaning you have to define what productivity or quality criteria are used for each term.

The problem with a 1-10 scale is that one supervisor may give an employee a “5,” for instance, and another a “6″ but be unable to explain why or may be using shades of difference that depend on “feel” rather than measurable markers.

In that case, you could have a legal problem if the person with the lower score is a minority or pregnant or falls into some other bias-prone category.

Supervisory trainer Lynne Curry often hears the three reasons managers give for overlooking harassment that seemingly goes on right under their noses:

1. “No one ever asked her for sex.” That defense is common because too many supervisors think sexual harassment is only about sex. Of course, it’s not, nor is it about “romance.” Supervisors need to be aware that the category includes comments, innuendo, insults and so-called “harmless” physical contact.
2. “She never complained.” Victims do have some responsibility for ringing the alarm, but in many court cases, judges and juries have warned that supervisors have responsibility, too. The reason: The law recognizes that victims often are intimidated and reluctant to make waves for fear of losing their jobs or just being branded as troublemakers. That means the supervisor has a responsibility to be proactive about suspicions, and not wait until the victim pleads for help.
3. “He’s a great employee who’d never do something like that.” Good people do dumb things all the time. And sometimes a supervisor may be reluctant to take action against a high-performing or well-liked employee, for fear of losing the employee’s services or having to find a good replacement. Here’s how that looks to a court: You let someone victimize another employee because of business convenience. Then things start to get really expensive for the employer.

The facts: 

The upper-level manager of a male supervisor got complaints that the supervisor was showing favoritism toward a subordinate he was dating. At the time, the company had a policy banning relationships between supervisors and subordinates. The upper-level manager ordered the supervisor to stop dating the employee or be fired, using company policy and the complaints as the reason for the order. The supervisor refused the order and was fired. He sued, saying the company was violating his right to privacy by trying to monitor his relationships.

The employer said:
The company noted that it had a policy against such dating for the very same reason that caused problems in this instance: friction among other employees who perceived that the relationship resulted in favoritism for the subordinate.

Who won the case?

Answer: The company. 

Why: While recognizing the employee’s right to privacy, especially outside the workplace, the court noted the company had a right to set policies and regulate behavior that might affect the efficient operation of business.

Terminating an employee for violating such policies – especially after warnings about the behavior – was a valid action by the company. 

The court agreed with the company that supervisors have a special responsibility to maintain the appearance of fairness. Subordinates have to have trust that no employee has a special “in” with the boss. 

Cite: Barbee v. Household Automotive Finance.

Getting the information needed to revise your organization’s policy manual, or to write a whole new one, involves a little bit of planning and three straightforward steps.

1. Meet with employees. Note that it doesn’t say, “Meet with employees and supervisors.” Your first meeting should be with workers alone, and should not include supervisors. However, be sure to request the meeting through the supervisors. In other words, ask them for permission to meet with their employees. The bosses are going to say “yes,” but it doesn’t hurt to practice a little diplomacy to get things off the ground.

OK, you’ve got all the workers in a room. Now it’s time to ask them the first question: “What policies or practices here do you like?” Everyone likes something, so this gets the meeting off on a positive note. Field and note their responses, and then ask the next question:

“What don’t you like?”

At this point, don’t try to defend anything that’s unpopular. Just note the responses and reasons, and mention that the purpose of the meeting is to gather information designed to build better policies.

2. Meet with supervisors. All you’re going to do in this meeting is ask the same questions you presented in the employee meeting: What do you like? What don’t you like?

You’ll especially want to note when there’s a match in what the bosses and the employees like and dislike. If everyone likes something, that’s a clear case of not fixing something that ain’t broke. If everyone dislikes something – say, for instance, the vacation policy – that may be something you want to look at for revision.

3. Meet with the boss. With your your responses in hand, and without naming names, present to the boss what’s popular and what seems to need changing, and why. If the boss agrees with certain changes, note that and report back to people that they’ve been heard and heeded. Of course, not all wishes can be granted, and some requests will be denied because of solid business reasons. Report back to people on those, too, and explain the reasons the changes can’t be made. They’ll respect that, and you.