Guess the Procedure, Win a Prize

A job site requested some crucial items from head office but wasn't getting a timely response. Repeated phone and email inquiries got no action, and work at the site ground to a halt waiting for these items. It turned out that the coordinator at head office was waiting for her superior to tell her it was OK before releasing the items to the site. She "couldn't send that without authorization, the site manager should know that."

Digging further, there was no procedure at this company for how the site was supposed to request this kind of item from head office. A previous supervisor had yelled at the coordinator when she had sent items to site that he hadn't approved of. So, to protect herself, the coordinator had, within her own mind, made up a procedure that required her direct supervisor to tell her, in person, to go ahead with such shipments.

Creating a spontaneous procedure is a great initiative, it helps get the job done more easily the next time. But people have to know about a procedure in order to follow it. And, since fear had made the coordinator more concerned with protecting herself than with serving her (internal) customer, she never bothered to tell the site what she was waiting for.

So, lot's of learning points:

1. People will make up procedures, where the company has none. They have to in order to survive. We need to tap into this initiative and have some way to capture, document, and spread the use of these procedures.
2. Procedures need to be known to all parties invovled.
3. People should work for their customers, not for their boss. The coordinator was focused on how to stay on the boss's good side, rather than on how to help the site move the job forward. This is management's responsibility to drive fear out of the workplace.
4. Communication helps, lack of communication hurts. The coordinator didn't tell the site what the next step in "her procedure" was, she just put things on hold until she heard from her boss.

Procedures can be beautiful. But they have to be documented, understood by all involved, and focused on adding value to the customer.

How's Your Work-Life Balance?

With a fabulous Canada Day come and gone, the real start of summer is finally here. And, the short Saskatchewan season of Non-Winter poses a simple question that tests work life balance - "How much time are you spending with your family this summer? At the beach? On the lake? In the back yard?"

If the answer is "not enough," then you might need to rethink your approach to management.

Do you need to create sustainable systems that can function without your daily attention? Do you need to engage and trust your employees? Do you need to invite initiative and allow your employees to truly take on responsibility, which is what they want anyway?

If your family is truly precious to you, this is really the time to show it - with focused together time, relaxed recreation, and without constant interruptions from your work. Turn off your phone, don't answer emails, and really spend time with your family.

Enjoy the summer. See you in September.

Many Employees Don't Want Goals

Point #1 - About 5% of people regularly make goals for themselves. About 10% of people think about making goals but generally don't. And, the other 85% just don't tend to make goals.

Point #2 - When people set goals for themselves, their motivation and their results increase. This is well-proven and well-supported both in the lab and in practical reality.

Point #3 - When goals are imposed on people, the effect on motivation and results is negligible. In fact, motivation often decreases, and the tendency to cheat and misreport results increases significantly.

Point #4 - When we do performance management at work, we generally insist that 100% of our employees make goals and strive to achieve them.

So, if only 5% to 15% of our employees like to set their own goals, yet we insist that all employees set goals, we are obviously imposing goals on the other 85%. Even if we wrap it up in nice encouraging words, we are still imposing goals on them, and this just doesn't drive performance.

Maybe You Don't Need a Plan

Working on business development for a company selling industrial LED lighting into the Saskatchewan market, their sales manager felt there was no need for a plan. "It's simple. Show a sample of the product. Do an energy audit. Ask for a pilot project. Then it'll sell itself. We don't need marketing. We don't need a plan. We just need someone to get out there, roll up our sleeves, and get to work."

That does make good sense and there is truth to the idea that you don't need a plan to succeed. Clearly, if you don't get out there to sell, the chances of success are very small. So, if you do get out there to sell, the chances of success are much better. But, if you do get out there to sell, and you also have the support of good marketing materials, and you know what your competitors are offering, and your prospects already have a warm feeling about you because of your local advertising and communications and sponsorships, and your sales people are approaching the most lucrative markets because you've identified them in your plan, then your chances of success are MUCH better.

So, maybe you don't need a plan. You can just roll up your sleeves and get to work. But if you come up against a competitor who's rolled up their sleeves AND also has a plan, they'll likely whup your pasty white tush. And, in business, that's not as fun as you might imagine.

So, yes, roll up your sleeves and get to work. But do it with the direction and support of a great plan. It's more efficient. It's more effective.

Enough With the Standing Ovations!

At an investment company's recent Client Appreciation Night at TCU Place in Saskatoon, the entertainment was good, but not great.

The warm up act was Jimmie Walker, who played Kid Dynomite (J.J. Evans) on the seventies comedy show Good Times. For some reason, Jimmie kept mentioning Moose Jaw as Saskatoon's main rival (it's Regina), went on for a while about the imminent post office strike (it's a teachers' strike, dude), talked about the lousy economy (while Saskatchewan has been booming). A little out of touch with the local scene! There were a few chuckles and smatterings of applause, but noone seemed to really get into it.

The main act was Michael Winslow, the cool sound-effects guy from the Police Academy movies. He made some pretty remarkable noises with just his mouth and a few effects pedals (the Jimi Hendrix solo was great), but also spent a whole lot of time on lowbrow "man walking out of theatre footsteps" and "man taking a leak" bits. Again, a few chuckles, a few impressive moments, but mostly mediocre filler.

Yet, at the end, the crowd of a couple thousand feet was up on it's feet for a standing ovation! Why? Why is it, that no matter how average the event, we feel obligated to honor the performers with what used to be reserved for only the best? Why pretend it was excellent when it wasn't? Don't we value excellence anymore? Have we lost our ability to identify excellence?Are we trying to be so darned nice that we never criticize mediocrity?

I've been noticing this in the world of business awards lately. Now some award recipients are truly deserving, and I mean no disrespect to those individuals and companies who are honored for their accomplishments over the years. Just staying in business for 25 years is actually a pretty amazing accomplishment.

I'm more concerned with all of the awards competitions that are mostly about "Ain't We Great". Three companies apply, or are nominated, and one gets the award as the "best this or that" in the city, or the province, or even the ENTIRE COUNTRY! One Saskatoon technology company proudly displayed an Excellence in Quality Management Award in their lobby, yet the company was a chaotic mess, with inconsistent products, huge turnover and terrible morale. They looked good on paper, and had a great award application, so with this public award as the supporting evidence, management was vocal and proud of their track record.


Not all management approaches are equal, either, nor are they all excellent. Bullying isn't good management. Winging it isn't good management. Loudership is not good leadership. And chaos is not really a business strategy.

So, don't give an ovation unless the show was truly excellent. And don't pretend that your management team is excellent, if it ain't.

The Commitment Problem

Do you eat the chocolate, or do you stay on your diet?

Do you take a drink, or do you stay sober?

Do you have an affair, or do you stay faithful to your spouse?

Do you choose immediate, pleasure-seeking self-interest, or do you stay commited to your ideals and relationships?

That's the Commitment Problem. It's a big part of life. It's a big part of business as well.

• When you hire a new employee, will they be committed to the success of your company? Or will they dip into the till, steal office supplies, and embezzle millions at the first opportunity?
• When you promote someone into management, will they work for the betterment of the group or get seduced by their position, abuse their underlings, and embezzle millions at the first opportunity?
• When you try to collaborate with someone, will they share with you in good faith, or abuse your trust, steal your ideas, and make millions in the marketplace that should have been yours?!

Thomas Schelling identified the Commitment Problem in the The Strategy of Conflict back in 1963. Dacher Keltner revisited it in his recent book, Born to be Good. Now, these books are not easy reads, and they don't result in simple three-step formulas for business success, but they do get one thinking.

How do we figure out who is committed to us, who is inclined to value long-term bonds with us, who is likely to be faithful and caring towards us, towards our cause? How do we figure out who is likely to lie, cheat, or sacrifice us for their own benefit? How do we avoid being exploited, to avoid being fooled?

No easy answers, to be sure, but important enough to try to figure it out.

Swimming Upstream

Do you ever despair about the effort it takes to make changes in your organization? To get results? Whether you're an economic development agency trying to attract businesses to your city, or a business owner trying to motivate your staff, do you sometimes get the feeling that there is some greater force that's trying to prevent your success? Are you swimming as hard as you can, but not getting anywhere?

We all work within systems, and our systems are part of larger systems. While our focus is usually on what we ourselves are responsible for on a daily basis, sometimes we need to expand our attention to the larger systems of which we are a part. Two examples...

In Northern Ontario, economic development agencies have struggled to attract and keep major industrial customers that are heavy users of electricity. The energy policy of Ontario sets electricity rates higher than neighbouring Quebec and other jurisdictions, so major industries like Cliffs Natural Resources ferro-chrome refinery are finding it hard to justify locating in Ontario. Even though other technical reasons might make Ontario an ideal location, the larger system of provincial energy policy makes it unattractive because of the electrical costs. So, while particular communities might have excellent economic development initiatives, they're swimming upstream against the province's power rate policies.

Similarly, the owners of an otherwise vibrant 25-person Saskatchewan company have been continually frustrated by employees who won't give that little bit extra to get jobs out on time. Their company, their payroll policies and their management approach operate within the larger system of Saskatchewan's labour standards where any work beyond eight hours per day is overtime, to be paid at time-and-a-half.

Applying this diligently, the company has required all overtime, no matter how small, to be approved in advance. The hassles of getting management micro-approvals for every little extra effort has evolved into a culture of clock watching, with everyone leaving when the official day is done. The managers are trying to foster teamwork and cooperation, but their staff have been swimming upstream against this inflexible administration of overtime, agains inflexible administration of Saskatchewan's labour standards.

When local economic development agencies identify provincial policies that affect their ability to attract companies, they need to work with that larger system to address those issues - in Ontario, the hydro energy policies. In the Saskatchewan example, when the small company's strict application of the eight-hour work day damages their entrepreneurial culture, they need to give some attention to the larger system of Sasktchewan's labour standards. They need to identify alternatives, either informally adding flexibility to the work day, or formally applying for a permit to average hours. They need to work on the larger system that's making it all but impossible for employees to willingly give that little bit extra.

In any case, recognize that all of your work takes place within some larger systems, and those systems can have large effects on your results. If you find yourself swimming as hard as you can and not getting anywhere, look outside your day-to-day operations to the larger system that you're working within. It's easier to make progress if you're not trying to swim against  a strong current.

Ten Improvement Models for Leaders Who Don't Know How To Improve

If you want better results from your company, but you really don't know how to systematically make things better, here are ten models you can use to flail away at improvement:

1. Get people to work harder. Generally done through some combination of begging, bullying, and bribing.
2. Work longer hours. Crank up the number of hours that you and your people work.
3. Hire more people. Throw more bodies at the problem.
4. Downsize some people. Growth and profits through emaciation.
5. Add some technology (the mythical silver bullet). This gizmo ought to fix things.
6. Set targets and hold people accountable. I don't know how to improve things; maybe they'll figure something out.
7. Set big bold stretch goals. And then hope some magic happens.
8. Work smarter, not harder. Which isn't insulting at all to those who've been experts at their jobs for fifteen years.
9. Fire anyone who makes a mistake. Only for perfect managers or hypocrites, of whom I've met several.
10. Hire only the best. We need a hero, because we don't know how to succeed without heroes.
11. Reorganize. Changing who people report to will somehow fix what we do.
12. Counting. Make decisions based only on the numbers you can measure.

I realize that was twelve, not ten, but there are so many of these desperate-feeling improvement models that it's hard to stop. These models all seem powerless, relying on hope and wishful thinking, relying on "something" happening; something magical, or lucky, or wished for. Yet these models are all used. Commonly. Ineffectively.

When the temperature outside goes above zero again (it's -40 today with wind chill), we'll look at ten improvment models used by leaders who DO know how to improve.

When The Boss Isn't a Very Good Worker

The owner of a 30-person company would often pitch in, taking on some jobs within the organization to help out. With a desire to stay involved in the day-to-day operations, this owner would take on administrative and sales tasks, similar to what other employees in the organization had to do.

Unfortunately, the boss would hold himself to a different standard than employees doing the same job. So, if a reporting task needed to be done every day by 2 pm, employees would be expected to meet this goal. But the boss, doing the same task, would often miss the deadline "because he was busy on more important tasks," sometimes getting weeks behind on these daily activities. The resulting frustration and rippling consequences were having a significant effect on productivity and morale throughout the company.

As an owner, or manager, or team leader, or [insert other boss-like title here], if you take on some jobs to "help out," realize that you are no longer wearing your "boss" hat. When you pitch in to help out, you are wearing a "worker" hat, and need to hold yourself to the same standards as you would hold an employee doing the same job.

Sure, as an owner or manager or team lead, you need more freedom and flexibility in your day, and have more widely ranging responsibilities than your employees. But, if you take on the job of entering job status data by 2 p.m. every day, you bloody well better enter your job status data by 2 p.m. every day. If you can't do that reliably, fire yourself and hire someone that's more competent and reliable for the job.

Then, you can focus on leading, instead of mucking up the works by "helping out."

Intimidating Supervisors Get Better Results. But...

Do intimidating supervisors produce better results? Do nasty bosses who agressively hold their people accountable for mistakes get better performance than more enlightened, respectful leaders? Yes. But...

A health-care study by Amy Edmonson (one of many she's led on fear and silence in the workplace), examined the error rate in eight different nursing units, and looked for a correlation between the number of errors and the style of leadership. The hypothesis was that units with aggressive, intimidating leaders would produce more mistakes, while the units with enlightened, supportive leaders would make less.

The researchers were shocked to find that the units with the best leadership (enlightened and supportive) reported TEN TIMES as many errors as in the more fear-based units. The bullying worked - aggressively holding people accountable for their errors resulted in one-tenth the number of errors! Hooray!

Unfortunately, if you'd like to use this evidence to justify your evil-boss philosophy, you're out of luck. The research also showed that, in the units with more aggressive leaders, people were scared to report any errors because they knew they'd be criticized, belittled, and humiliated. So, they only reported errors if they absolutely couldn't avoid it. In the supportive units, nurses felt free to report mistakes, with a common focus on finding root causes and improving patient safety. So, they reported all errors, without filtering them to protect themselves.

So, the numbers were dramatically better in the units with nasty, intimidating supervisors. But the numbers did not reflect reality. The numbers in the units ruled by fear, were distorted by that fear, distorted to minimize the exposure to the supervisor's wrath.

There is ample evidence to show that supportive, positive leadership produces better results. That a more civilized workplace produced better results. But if you don't care so much about results, and just want better measurements, you might try being an aggressive, bullying, fear-based, nasty, intimidating boss.

For more on this, check out The No Asshole Rule by Robert Sutton, a quick read that led me to this interesting and revealing research.

Apologize, Forgive Yourself and Move On

What do you do when you screw up? Do you beat yourself up when you make a mistake? Do you expect perfection from yourself?

A consultant colleague was hosting her first half-day workshop, and did an excellent job of preparing, planning, rehearsing, and making checklists to make sure she had all her ducks in a row for the 8:30am start. On the morning of the Big Day, she got up early, got everything ready, then started to putter on some odd jobs around her home office. Then, before she knew it, it was already after 8:00am and she still had to get across town to the hotel. Needless to say, despite all the preparation, she was not there on time, walking in to a room full of registrants who'd made themself comfortable and were wondering where the facilitator was! Awkward, embarassing, but she handled it with grace, apologizing, moving on, and facilitating a good workshop.

Another experienced speaker was introducing two female speakers at a business meeting. And, in an unfortunate slip, accidentally combined “She'll take it from here” with “She'll start it off”. The resulting “She'll take it off” had a rather different and unfortunate connotation. Awkward, embarassing, and not my proudest moment. Oops, I mean, not the afore-mentioned anonymous speaker's proudest moment. So, all there is to do is apologize, accept and share the humour of the situation (if any), and move on.

We all make mistakes. We can practice and prepare to try to minimize them. We can create systems that help minimize them. We can use Root Cause Analysis, and Six Sigma, and Statistical Process Control, and Human Error Prevention, and Behavioural-Based Safety and [name your preferred brand of magic here], but errors will still, inevitably, occasionally happen.

When they do, accept your humanity, embrace your good intentions and apologize. Make restitution if any real damage was done, and then move on. Nobody's perfect.

This is Not Good Enough

Sometimes you grow too fast, or you lose focus, or you lose some good people, or [insert your crisis here], and all of your talk about Customer Service and Quality goes out the window. For whatever reason, your customers end up getting it in the shorts, even though you swore you'd never let that happen.

Sometimes you have to get tough and tell your people that "This is Not Good Enough!" It may be a supplier, it may be an employee, it may be a manager, or it may be your whole company that needs to hear this message. If your company is facing a harsh reality, your people need to understand that, so they can do what needs to be done.

Speaking at an NSBA dinner meeting, Wally Mah of Northridge Development Corporation candidly spoke of the problems they faced during the intense Saskatoon housing boom in 2008. Paraphrasing his comments, "We failed our customers. We let the busy trades dictate our schedule and decide on the quality of the homes we were building. It came to a crisis. So we gave one of the owner's wives the final word in quality control. She would go to the trades and say 'This is not good enough; you have to come back and fix it.' That way it wasn't just an employee talking, it was an Owner. We had to do this to regain control, to regain the trust of our customers."

W. Edwards Deming told leaders to Drive Out Fear and Eliminate Numerical Goals from our management toolkit. Yet he also made it quite clear that communicating the facts about harsh realities that might be facing a company was totally justified. In words he might have used - "Unless our quality improves by 20% in the next six months, we will be out of business."

Yes, work on your systems. Yes, engage everyone in continuous improvement. And, yes, tell your people when your company faces a harsh reality, so they can pull together to do what's necessary.

However, if you find yourself repeatedly in crisis, and repeatedly telling people that "This is Not Good Enough," you need to read Deming's Out of the Crisis. If your people are always "Not Good Enough", it's likely your management approach that is "Not Good Enough". There are better ways.

I Just Made a Mistake

If a worker knows how to do a job, wants to do a good job, and is capable of doing a good job, why do they screw up sometimes? When somebody tells us "It's not my fault, I just made a mistake!", do we let them off the hook? Do we take them to task and hold them accountable? Do we throw our hands up in despair? Is there anything we can do to prevent these kinds of screw ups, or do we just have to powerlessly resign ourselves to the "fact" that there will always be human error?

John Evans (UK) of http://www.human-error.com/ talks about Risk Influencing Factors (RIF's), all kinds of little things that contribute to the risk of an error occuring. So, if a person is entering data from a paper form into a computer, there's a risk that they will enter some data wrong. Even if the person can do the job, wants to do the job well, and knows how to do the job (aptitude, attitude, training) a bunch of little RIF's added together still might conspire to produce errors. And if you ask someone why they made those mistakes, they will honestly be baffled. Holding them accountable would be damaging and ineffective.

For this example, some contributing factors might be ambient noise, a confusing form layout, a screen form that doesn't match the paper form, distraction and interruptions, poor ergonomics, fatigue or illness, stress or worry, poor handwriting, poor lighting, screen glare. Imagine that if four or five of these factors are active, the person can still do the job completely error free. But then, if the situation changes and a few more factors suddenly apply, we cross some threshhold and an error occurs.

Deciding whether and when to hold people accountable seems to be the same as deciding whether to search for the cause of variation in statistical process control. If you search for the "cause" of every random-dance common-cause variation, you are wasting your time and money. Instead, you need to study and modify the system, the tasks, the tools, the procedures to reduce the build in variation and risks. On the other hand, if you don't search for the "cause" of special-cause something-important-just-happened variation, your system is out of control and you're missing a golden opportunity for process improvement.

In the same way, if you hold someone accountable for a problem that is actually produced by the random dance of lots of little risk influencing factors, it will do nothing to reduce the risk of error the next time a bunch of contributing factors all occur at once.

In the absence of strong evidence of incompetence, maliciousness, ignorance or maybe even intoxication, we may still be tempted to hold the person accountable. But we're more powerful if we take this as a cue to look for factors that we can control, rather than fall back on the ineffective blame game.

Ten Years to Fix a Gate - Why We Should Procrastinate

In a few short minutes, you can easily create a To Do list that will take forever to complete. "Invent an anti-gravity machine" would be one example. "We should renovate the kitchen," would be another. Whether in business or personal life, you can easily take on more projects than you can possibly complete within the available time and money. So, we make our To Do lists, and some things stay on the lists forever.

One anonymous do-it-yourselfer had "rebuild the gate" on his To Do list for about ten years. When he finally got around to it, the job only took about three hours, start-to-finish. Think of the mental energy consumed by this as - four or five times a day for ten years - this poor sap would go through the gate and think "I've got to fix this."

Yet, despite what his wife and her mother may have thought, our do-it-yourselfer was probably not a "lazy good-for-nothing bastard who's ruining my life!" In fact, he was actively working on many other projects throughout that time, although he did take the occasional nap on the couch. Day-after-day, month-after-month, something else on the list was always a higher priority than fixing the gate. And so it was continually put off, until one day, it finally made the cut.

There's lots of advice out there on how to avoid procrastination, and if you have a chronic problem with that, certainly explore your options for becoming more decisive and action-oriented. But there are definitely situations where procrastination is exactly the right thing to do.

1. The options just don't feel right. Sometimes, especially with difficult or unusual problems, the options we've come up with just don't seem adequate. We may arrive at this conclusion as a result of rigorous analysis or as a result of intuition. Either way, the problem sometimes needs to simmer a little longer for a more complete solution to emerge. Creative problem solving is a process, and part of the process is being exposed to an adequate supply of new ideas and stimulus to work with. Sometimes that simply requires you to wait.
2. We're not convinced it's important. Again, whether from analysis or intuition, we just don't have enough evidence to convince us that the task is necessary. While we routinely make decisions despite incomplete information, sometimes there just doesn't seem to be a compelling case for action. One technology company had planned a major re-write of some embedded software, but tabled the project for a few months due to significant debate about the necessity. In those few months, a new hardware innovation made the re-write unecessary and eliminated the need for hundreds of hours of engineering and development.
3. We're not convinced of the value. Even if we're quite sure the project is important and we have a clear path forward, we worry that the solution will cost more than the problem we're solving. While this can just be fear talking, often it's a signal that we need to collect more data or do an experiment. A mid-size manufacturer was planning a major marketing campaign that would cost more than they'd ever considered in the past. Rather than not making a decision out of fear, rather than diving in despite the concerns, and rather than simply waiting for enlightenment, they did some carefully measured tests of the concept. Within a few months of this intentional procrastination, their testing providing convincing data that the approach would be effective. Waiting, and using the waiting to study and learn, proved to be just the ticket for success.
4. You don't have a plan. Project management is all about breaking the work down into manageable, achievable chunks; little steps that, when added together over time, get the whole project done. If you've been putting something off that is valuable, important and right, perhaps you are not yet ready to tackle the project. Perhaps you need to step back from "starting the project" and invest some time in "planning the project" - creating a sensible work breakdown structure, and a plan for success. Perhaps that's why you've justifiably been delaying the start.

So, if you've been putting things off, and putting things off, and putting things off, you may just be a lazy good-for-nothing bastard. Or perhaps you've been doing exactly the right thing.

For 80,000 people to support you on your journey, consider joining the Procrastination Facebook group tomorrow, or maybe sometime next week, or maybe next year.

Nobody Took Responsibility

"There was a most important job that needed to be done, And no reason not to do it, there was absolutely none.
But in vital matters such as this, the thing you have to ask
Is who exactly will it be who'll carry out the task?

Anybody could have told you that everybody knew
That this was something somebody would surely have to do.
Nobody was unwilling; anybody had the ability.
But nobody believed that it was their responsibility.

It seemed to be a job that anybody could have done,
If anybody thought he was supposed to be the one.
But since everybody recognised that anybody could,
Everybody took for granted that somebody would.

But nobody told anybody that we are aware of,
That he would be in charge of seeing it was taken care of.
And nobody took it on himself to follow through,
And do what everybody thought that somebody would do.

When what everybody needed so did not get done at all,
Everybody was complaining that somebody dropped the ball.
Anybody then could see it was an awful crying shame,
And everybody looked around for somebody to blame.

Somebody should have done the job
And Everybody could have,
But in the end Nobody did
What Anybody could have."

Presumably written by Charles Osgood, an American news anchorman and writer, but the origin is somewhat cloudy.

I See You Shiver, With Antici...pation

You're faced with a choice between some sizzling bacon and some raw brocolli . Do you choose the brocolli with its anti-oxidants and nutritional goodness, or do you choose the bacon, with its mouth-wateringly delicious fatty yummy-ness? You won't really know the health impact for years, and even then you won't be sure what effect this choice really had on your long term health.

The immediate feedback is about flavour and pleasure, and the bacon wins easily (be honest!). The long-term feedback is about health, but this has little effect on our immediate motivation. When we expect to receive feedback on our choices has a big effect on the kind of choices we make.

In the workplace, it turns out that when we expect to get feedback also has a big effect on how well we perform. Keri Kettle at the University of Alberta School of Business published some interesting findings in his paper Motivation by Anticipation: Expecting Rapid Feedback Enhances Performance. University students performed objectively better (22% better) when they anticipated immediate feedback on their speaking presentations, compared to when they were told to expect feedback in a couple of weeks. The effect was strong and linear, meaning that an anticipated delay of eight days for feedback reduced performance by about twice as much as an expected delay of four days.

This suggests that our traditional best-practices in performance management are crap ... or, to be polite, marginally effective. The annual performance review is so far in the future that it provides little motivation and no feedback day-to-day. Moving to quarterly performance reviews is little better (remember that a two-week delay in Kettle's study resulted in twenty percent poorer performance). So, annual and quarterly performance reviews are useless, monthly reviews are still weak, and weekly performance reviews not much better, but this starts getting ridiculous - we can't have daily performance reviews, can we? That's crazy talk!

In the traditional world of performance management, daily performance reviews would be crazy. But we can find effective ways to provide immediate feedback, and leverage this principle of Motivation by Anticipation to improve our desire to perform well and avoid dissappoinment.

Consider the daily, tiered accountability meetings of Leader Standard Work from the world of Lean, or the daily Scrum meetings from the world of Agile Software Development. When done well, these approaches shift the feedback towards short, structured meetings about immediate daily progress. Visual displays of status also constribute to making progress understandable at a glance. In Lean, the feedback time frame is further shortened to match the takt time, the heartbeat of the process, which may be as short as a few minutes depending on the facility. Imagine getting non-judgemental feedback about your performance every few minutes. This aligns perfectly with Kettle's work, and suggests why working in a well-run Lean or Agile organization can be such a pleasure, and produce such good results.

When we choose bacon over brocolli, we're choosing immediate feedback over future feedback. If there were a way to make feedback on the health benefits immediately concrete and real, we would likely choose the healthy alternative more often, and our personal health performance would improve dramatically.

Kettle shows that expecting rapid feedback enhances performance. If our corporate Performance Management efforts are truly intended to improve performance, we need to shift away from the disconnected, long-term evaluation inherent in our current review processes. We need to shift towards providing immediate, concrete feedback - daily, hourly. We need to foster an expectation of immediate, concrete feedback amongst our people. And this means that management needs to change. Management needs to do standard daily work. Immediate feedback one day and no feedback the next is not enough. Management needs to step up its consistency.

By building the expectation of rapid feedback, we can get better performance, better intrinsic motivation, and better results. It's like getting the health benefits of broccoli with the flavor goodness of bacon. Yum.

Fudging the Numbers

If you want to encourage your people to cheat
Set them a goal, a challenging feat.
Make them report on their progress to you,
And watch them distort by a number or two.

Now goals are quite useful as management tools

But if you impose them, you're acting the fool
Goals from within drive hard work and persistence
But goals from above demand nagging insistence

Also, from goals, do some problems arise

As the worker reports and, in ways, justifies.
He tries to do well, but when late or overdue
The ethics will suffer, and reports won't be true.

Research by Schweitzer, Ordonez and Douma
Suggests that goal setting causes us gloom. A
problem occurs when the task isn't complete,
unethical behaviour emerges, they cheat.

Especially when people are close, but not quite
Their target eludes them, try as they might
The closer they get, the more likely they are
To toss out their ethics, and report that they're stars.

What does the research suggest that we do,
To set goals but not bid our ethics adieu?
A prescription, it seems, that can be quite effective
Is to ask, please, that reports just not be defective.

For more information, read "Goal Setting as a Motivator of Unethical Behaviour", by Maurice Schweitzer, Lisa Ordonez and Bambi Douma, Academy of Management Journal 2004.

For even more information, read A Theory of Goal Setting & Task Performance by Locke and Latham.

You Don't Act the Way You Say You Do

Do you do what you say? Do you practice what you preach? If people watched your behaviour, would they say it was consistent with how you typically describe yourself? Probably not, especially if the situation is potentially challenging, threatening, stressful or embarassing. Like, oh let's say, almost all management and business activities.

Each of us has what Chris Argyris calls an espoused theory of action; what we believe we'd do when faced with a situation; it's how we describe ourselves to others; how we think we normally behave. Our espoused theory of action closely fits our values and beliefs, and supports our self image in a way that's comfortable and consistent with our ideas about right and wrong. Unfortunately, what we think we'd do is usually incorrect, and is quite different from our theory-in-use, the actual behaviours we resort to when the going gets tough.

This disconnect between what we say we do (our espoused theory of action) and what we actually do (our theory-in-use) is obvious to those around us. Yet very few of us are aware of how inconsistent we are; of how much contradication there is between the two.

We say that we value family over work, yet we routinely work late every night, go in on weekends and keep our BlackBerry's on when we're on holidays, neglecting our spouses and short-changing family time with our kids. We say that we treat people fairly, yet we regularly point the finger of blame at our employees whenever something goes wrong. We say that we value input and want engaged employees, yet we impose decisions and change on our people, and discount their comments as whining and complaining.

According to Argyis, when faced with challenge we tend to take actions that allow us to:

• stay in control,
• maximize winning and minimize losing,
• suppress negative feelings, and
• be as rational as possible.

If a problem happens on a customer order, it is so much easier on our ego to blame an employee than to accept that our system of production is out of control; it's so much easier on our self-image to have people think Joe was the culprit, rather than risk them thinking poorly of us; it's so much easier to bury our fears and doubts about our leadership ability and point a finger at someone else; it's so comforting to rationalize that "if only they'd do their job right, we wouldn't have these problems."

We're very inconsistent, and we're blind to our own inconsistencies. To protect our fragile self-image, we believe we act in ways that are good and right, however we define those terms. Yet, also to protect our fragile self-image, we actually act in quite different ways, with actions that are unconsciously designed to keep us in control and minimize our personal exposure to loss and negative emotions. Because of this, we fail to learn more effective behaviours, to actually behave consistently with our values. After all, why should we change if it wasn't our fault?

When crises happen, take the risk to examine your own behaviours, rather than the behaviours of others. Turn off your rationalization programs, and look for the disconnects between how you think you behave, and how you actually behave. Allow yourself to see that they are quite different, and take true responsibility for yourself, your management, your company.

Change Won't Stick Without Changing What Managers Do

We add some new shelving to help get organized. We move several workstations together to improve flow. We create a place for everything, with everything in its place. We change a procedure; write a new policy. We change something, anything, about the nature of the work, and we'd like the change to stick. But it doesn't.

So we set up training courses, write thick manuals, post signs to remind people, create an intranet, and send out memos. We plead for discipline, for attention to detail, for people to do what they're supposed to do, but within a very short time, the new shelving is disorganized, flow has stopped, everything is not in its place, and the signs, procedures and memos go unread, and unused.

When we set out to make an improvement, we usually think of a specific change, of an event, of something to cross off our list. "Organize the storage area ... check. Change the warranty claim procedure ... check." We like to accomplish things and it's comforting to believe that we've improved things, we're done, things will be better now. But that's not the way it works.

Everything we create is impermanent. Nothing stays the way we'd like it. Everything changes, deteriorates, requires maintenance. We hate to acknowledge this, because it's uncomfortable, but it's a truth that permeates both philosophical writings like Pema Chodron's Comfortable with Uncertainty and practical business guides like David Mann's Creating a Lean Culture.

For every change we want to make, we need to look beyond the change itself, and look to how we will sustain it; how we will make it a part of "how we do things around here". In the workplace, each technical or structural change also requires complementary changes in what management does, not just in what the workers do. This piece is almost always ignored when we change the design of our work - the leader thinks "This is a change for the workers, not for me," and soon everything reverts back to the way it was before.

Most leaders do not understand or embrace the concept of Standard Work, of having some specific clearly-defined tasks that leaders need to do each day, or even each hour. "That's for front line staff, not me." Yet what the leaders do - what the leaders care about, ask about, talk about - directly affects what everyone else does. What the leader shows to be important, is what actually is important.

So, when we organize a shelf, it's not enough to stop there. We might go farther and ask questions like - Who will keep the shelf organized? How can we tell at a glance that the shelf is properly organized? How do we know what is supposed to be on the shelf, and what is not supposed to be on the shelf? How do we know what to do when something is missing? How often should the shelf be checked? What do we do when we get new stuff for the shelf?

So, we answer these valid questions, and use them to set up some standard work for Paul, the new Shelf Organizing Guy. But Paul gets busy, Paul gets pulled onto other important tasks, and no one asks Paul about the shelf until three weeks later when something that's supposed to be there is not. Then we have a crisis, with finger pointing, blame, and misguided accountability - "Paul was responsible for this - why didn't he do his job?"

Instead of this dysfunctional and ineffective change strategy, management needs to become part of the daily accountability process. Paul's team leader Steve needs to change some of his own standard work to support the change and help it stick. Steve's standard work might include a daily check of Paul's standard work list, a periodic spot check of the shelf itself, and immediate support to resolve problems that have prevented Paul from doing his standard work. And the facility manager's standard work might include a daily check of Steve's standard work, and immediate support to resolve problems that have prevented Steve from helping Paul. Eventually, maintaining the new shelf becomes a part of "how we do things around here", but that change is not an event, it's a process.

If any of this sounds like effort, it is. Remember that everything is impermanent, everything requires maintenance, and maintenance requires effort. But the minimal daily effort of standard work is nothing compared to the chaos and frustration of the alternative. The next time you plan an improvement, don't just plan a change event. Plan how management's daily standard work will change to support the improvement. That's how to make it stick.

We Treat Our People Like Family

Is there fear in your organization? Are your people scared to speak up, to be open, to volunteer information, to risk? Are your people off-balance, concerned about their performance, and scared that they might be replaced, or let go?

A phrase I heard from five different managers this week is "We treat our people like family", accompanied by lists of all the good things they do, like their companies' open door policies, fun work environment, 360 reviews, training programs, performance management process, benefits, bonuses and incentives. I can only think of one manager in my experience who readily, publicly admitted that he wanted his people to be constantly scared, to realize that unless they performed, they would be replaced. He was a mean man, who I believe enjoyed the fear in his underlings. He is the exception. Most of the leaders and managers I've worked with feel a little offended at any suggestion that their people might be scared - leaders want to be liked, managers want to believe that their people can speak freely and trust them.

In Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming spoke repeatedly about the need to "drive out fear, so everyone can work effectively for the company." Ryan and Oestreich speak of building high-trust organizations instead of high-fear organizations in Driving Fear Out of the Workplace. And, though twice as long as it needed to be, Steven Covey's The Speed of Trust makes a compelling case for how trust, and lack of fear, contributes to the bottom-line.

Now all of the five managers I heard from this week are very nice, very accomplished people. They work hard to blend a clear vision with compassion and polite kindness. But still, from discussions with people in their organizations, it is clear that their employees feel fear. The fear isn't about whether the manager is nice or mean; it generally isn't a personal fear at all; it is fear that's built into the structure of their companies.

I don't know about your family, but mine seems very different from the way these companies are run. It doesn't seem to go over very well when I give my wife a performance review. She doesn't seem to appreciate it when I let her know how she compares to other women I see on TV. Similarly, when I make my kids compete for parental affection, and promise to withhold love from the one that gets the poorest marks in school, it doesn't seem to promote the free exchange of mutual support and encouragement that I'm hoping for.

We don't (or shouldn't) do this stuff in our families. We shouldn't do it at work.

At work, we rank our people and compare them to each other. We hold people accountable for the randomness and results of our systems. We use carrots and sticks that trivialize their efforts and take away the inherent joy that comes from doing good work. We set targets that are outside the capacity of our systems, and blame people when they don't achieve it. We believe that someone who is totally dependent on us for reward and promotion will be able to give us open, honest feedback. We set up competitions between our people, then wonder why they don't work together.

We don't do any of this because we are mean people, and most of us try to very nice and respectful when we do these things. That's not the point. It is not that we are mean people who are trying to induce disabling fear in our people, it is that we are nice people using management tools that inherently produce disabling fear.

There are better ways.