In a Vacuum of Information People Will Use Imagination

I love talking to employees about their compensation plans.  It is always easy to see the people who work at companies with effective communication programs.  Whether the staff likes or dislikes the plans they tend to provide similar details. They generally understand the components of the programs. And they have an idea of what it takes to progress within them, earn something from them or otherwise take advantage of them. If I have to be honest, my favorite employees are at the companies that have a terrible (or simply no) communication program.  These are fun because it’s sort of like asking a 6-year how an airplane can fly.

People have incredible imaginations. We have imagined the Internet and then made it real.  We imagined skyscrapers and made them real.  We even imagined flying into space and made it real.  We are the masters of seeing our ideas become real.  We are so good at it; we often assume that our ideas must be real, just because no one has proved that they aren’t. Seriously, I bet you know someone who believes in Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or really healthy chocolate chip cookies.  All are myths, but until you can prove otherwise, they are real to some people. The difficulty is convincing people of the truth after they have already come to a different conclusion.

I find the same is true about professional performance. People who are not given regular feedback have crazy ideas about how they are performing. Poor performers with strong personalities will tell me that they are the best in the their departments.  Hard workers with introverted personalities will often tell me that they are probably in the bottom half of the staff. Imagine how much different the workplace would be if the good people knew they were good and the bad people knew they were bad.

Unfortunately employees’ ideas about compensation are very much like this. When given only their imagination to fill in the blanks, people’s pay is always too low, sales staff always make too much and the executives of the company make more money than is possible.  I once spoke to people at a $100 million company who told me that their CEO made “at least” $400 million annually. They came to this conclusion based on the fact that he….oops there were no facts!

Ask yourself if you have filled the knowledge vacuum at your company. What haven’t you discussed? How is your staff  filling in the details in your absence? If you don’t know the answers to these questions then you have a great project ahead of you for Q2 of this year. First you need to understand what your employees have imagined.  Then you need to provide the documentation to support the facts.  Finally you will need to start the difficult processing debunking the myths and teaching the reality. Or, you can just wait and interview people later and write a fun blog article about it.

Dan Walter is based in San Francisco, CA and is the President and CEO of Performensation an independent compensation consulting firm focused on the needs of companies not in the Fortune 1000. Dan’s unique perspective and expertise includes equity compensation, executive programs, performance-based pay and talent management issues, Dan is on the board of the National Center for Employee Ownership, helps create ShareComp, a virtual conference addressing equity compensation and founded Equity Compensation Experts a free networking group with more than 1,100 members. Dan is also in high demand as dynamic and humorous speaker. Connect with him on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter @performensation.

Comments

[E James (Jim) Brennan]

Ignorance and imagination starts at the top and rolls downhill.

Even more fun was conducting compensation audits of the top officers of major corporations in private confidential sessions in The Day. They invariably had absolutely no idea what the enterprises's compensation philosophies were or the intent behind them; they always had strong opinions about what their philosophy SHOULD be but were terrified to speak up lest they be considered ignorant by their NEO peers. The top HR officer was generally the only one with all the answers but he or she was usually not one of that top cadre.

The real irony came in the fact that virtually all the top officers typically actually shared the exact same conflicted opinions but had always been afraid to admit their ignorance or voice their confusion lest they lose face. As the outsider, I could safely break the ice, disclose their unanimous fears without political cost and launch them into constructive open exchanges about how to rectify the problems they all saw but had been reluctant to discuss.

"The admission of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom." - Socrates.

[Laura Schroeder]

So true, people do imagine the darndest things! I hadn't considered the 'fun' angle of poor communication before but your comparison to 'asking 6 year olds how airplanes fly' may be the definitive description.

[Dan Walter]

Thanks for the comments!

@Jim: great quote

@Laura: The question is one of my favorites to ask kids that age. While having a client meeting and kid meeting on the same day the similarity struck me!

[Rod Johnson]

Reminds me of a great Patrick Moynihan quote, "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, not their own facts."

[Derek Irvine, Globoforce]

Dan, brilliant post. This applies in nearly every aspect of business. For example, when companies fail to communicate what it is they truly expect out of employees, employees will assume. My favorite bandwagon -- company values -- is a case in point. If you have no values, or only have them on the wall, then employees will assume they can "get the job done at all costs" -- even if "Integrity" or "preserving the environment" is important to the company.

[Brad Stewart]

And it's amazing how groupthink gets going when you have the blind leading the blind.