One of my colleagues lent me the book Work Rules! from Laszlo Bock. Laszlo Bock is Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google. People Operations is a fancy name used in several Silicon Valley companies for Human Resources, but the idea is that People Operations includes much more than a "normal" Human Resources department.

The book has some counterintuitive views that I consider interesting to evaluate:

One of them is chapter 10, Pay Unfairly (although even the author says should be called Pay Unequally). The idea behind that chapter is that in a misguided attempt to be "fair", most companies design compensation systems that encourage the best performers and those with the most potential to quit.

Most companies manage pay like this to control costs and because they think the range of performance in a single job is somewhat narrow. But they are wrong.

Fairness is when pay is commensurate with contribution.

The way most companies pay people confuses the notions of equality and fairness. Equality matters tremendously when you're talking about personal rights or justice, but paying everyone equally - or close to equally - results in overpaying your worst people and underpaying your best. HR professionals even have a phrase for this. They say that "internal equity" requires them to constrain the pay of top performers: It wouldn't be "equitable" for some people to make way more money than others. They are technically correct that it wouldn't be equitable, but it would be fair.

The author also makes a point which is interesting because it's something I usually stumble upon at the news, which is the difficulty of the general public to make the difference between the average and the median (especially in power-law distributions).

[...] our intuition leads us to make the same mistake [...]. We equate the average with the median, assuming that the middle performer is also the average performer. In fact, most performers are below average.

Another counterintuitive view is "do not let managers make hiring decisions for their own teams". In chapter 3, the author explains his views that the return on investment of hiring the best is much higher than the return of investment of training. In order to make his point transparently simple, he asks which of the following situations would you rather be in?

A. We hire 90th percentile performers, who start doing great work rigth away.

B. We hire average performers, and through our training programs hope eventually to turn them into 90th percentile performers.

What executives will tell you is that they recruit the best people and then groom, train, and coach them into champions. There are three reasons to be skeptical of these claims.

First, if they were really doing this, wouldn't more organizations have champion-level performance?

Second, if they were really better at recruiting, shouldn't there be something special about how they recruit?

Third, most people simple aren't very good at interviewing.

The author then tell us that to build great teams, managers need to give up power when it comes to hiring.

Managers want to pick their own teams. But even the best-intentioned managers compromise their standards as searches drag on. In most companies, for example, they set very high bars for the quality of the administrative assistants they want on the first day of a search, but by day ninety most managers will take anyone who will answer a phone. Even worse, individual managers can be biased: They want to hire a friend or take on a intern as a favor to an executive or a big client. Finally, letting managers make hiring decisions gives them too much power over the people on their teams.

Refocusing your resources on hiring better will have a higher return than almost any training program you can develop.