In 2011, Michael Norton (Harvard Business School) and his colleagues, identified the Ikea Effect. This cognitive bias refers to our tendency to attach a higher value to things we help create (Visual Capitalist)
Often in conversations with stakeholders, especially when we lead change in HR I've seen Ikea Effect taking over. HR as a function is often seen as a business partner and is given an attentive ear especially when the going gets tough. A termination, lay off, investigation, performance issue , etc., are moments when you get stakeholders listening to you and take your counsel.
This significantly changes when you do a SME role like Recruitment, Talent Management or Compensation and implement large scale changes. The amount of opinions that come your way is humongous. Perspectives and opinions are great as long as they are grounded in data but unfortunately most of these are grounded in emotions and experiences which are rooted in how one things the world should work rather than reality.
Very rarely do we question the CFO on the balance sheet and ask them to show the ledger entries, or an engineer to show a code or the math behind a model, but it only seems natural to question a recruiter when they suggest an offer or a recruitment technology or a compensation specialist when they suggest the market data. This comp data is wrong, I want to see the details of how you arrived at this median.
I get the fact that we need to collaborate and bring people along and explain the why, but the core basic script needs to be 'I trust you as a professional and I need to understand the why' and have an informed opinion. Good things can happen even when we have not helped creating it.
The above podcast covers several aspects of recruitment transformation, partnering with vendors and implementing Recruitment tech.
