Jerry's Blog

On a flight Tuesday I was reading the chapter on formal presentations in Ford Harding’s book - Rain Making when I came across the section entitled “How you say it is as important as what you say.” The example that Ford uses is the three words “Oh, it’s you.” He shows how those three words can communicate many very different messages depending on the tone, volume, pitch and other verbal and non-verbal inflections used.

This reminded me of an episode that occurred with a client several years ago. I was working with one of our teams at a call center down in Central America. The department in question handled service calls for a US computer manufacturer. I was listening in on calls with a Quality Control Coach, a local, who was to give feedback to the rep after the calls. The first call went something like this:

Rep: (Thick Latin American accent) “Welcome to ______ … How can I help you today?”

Caller: “Oh great! a foreign call center” (heavy sarcasm in voice).

QC Coach: (writing notes) “Customer happy that the call center is not in US.”

Caller: “I just got this fantastic piece of crap from you last week and the hard drive is already toast.” (not sounding like a very happy customer at all)

QC Coach: (Writing notes) “Customer said the computer was ‘fantastic’, but having trouble with hard drive.

Rep: “Thank you for saying our computers are fantastic, but I am not sure what you mean by ‘toast’. Do you mean that the hard drive is not working?”

Caller: “Boy you’re quick! Yeahhh, that’s what I mean. T H E   H A R D  D R I V E  I S  N O T  W O R R K K K I N G!! (spoken very slowly and emphatically)”

QC Coach: “Customer being very helpful, speaking very clearly and slowly so we can help him better.”

…call went on for a while with both sides struggling to understand what the other was saying. In the end,  a service tech was dispatched to replace the hard drive…

Rep: “Thank you for being a customer and we are sorry you had this problem. Have we resolved your problem at this time?”

Caller: “Yeah, great #$% help you’ve been. I wish all companies used @#$% foreigners. Makes things so much &^*% fun.” (Sarcasm dripping from every syllable).

QC Coach: (Still taking notes) “Customer very satisfied with service. Wished that more US companies used us.”

The point of this story is two fold:

1. Ford is absolutely right in his point that how you say things are just as important as what you say. Especially when setting expectations with your employees. How you say things can convey sense of urgency or a lack there of, as well as many other things.
2. Understand who your audience is. People from a different cultural background may not understand your verbal inflections, such as sarcasm, and non-verbal expressions. So when you use tone and pitch to convey a certain meaning to your words, make sure that the audience will get it.

A few weeks ago I was having a discussion with several clients about accountability, expectations and follow-up. The clients were Rick, the site manager, and his top two department managers, Lucy and Ethel (all fictitious names of course). Both Lucy and Ethel were lamenting on the fact that even though they told people what they wanted done, much of it never seemed to get done without constant follow-up and reminders. They both felt that they should not have to follow-up as often. Ethel made the comment, “When I was a supervisor no one had to hound me to get these things done! Why should I have to constantly stay on them?” At this point Rick interjected a very profound statement:

“Why do you think I promoted you and not them?”

In the Performance Management field we tend to use the words Goals and Expectations somewhat interchangeably. We talk about setting Stretch Goals, SMART Goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable/Agreed to, Realistic, timely), Personal Goals, and on, and on. We tend to shy away from talking about setting expectations. This is due to the more negative perception around the word expectation than that of goals. No one likes to be told what to do. This is what happens when a manager sets an expectation. Therefore, we try to soften the blow by couching the expectation in terms of goals.

To me this is dishonest and we are really only deceiving ourselves. When you “tell” an employee what their goal is, do you really think that they believe that they had any input to their “goal”? It also makes us look weak and indecisive. This is not good for moral. By and large, people like strong, decisive leaders who have a vision. Leaders who set expectations and do so while sharing their vision get much more buy in and respect from their employees than do the ones who hide behind pseudo goals.

Think about these two expectation-setting scenarios:

Okay team, we have not been doing too well so I am going to set our goal for today at 25 sales calls each.

vs.

Okay team, our sales team is sitting idle because we have not generated enough leads for them to stay busy. If they’re not selling, we are not getting bonuses. So I am setting a minimum expectation of 25 calls each and I am challenging you to get 30 good quality calls made. Does anyone think that that is not achievable? …. Good. Don’t forget, if you need help getting past the gate keeper or closing on a meeting, get me involved to help. That’s what they pay me the big bucks for (smile).

My point here is that we need to separate goals from expectations and that both need to be set - What the requirements (expectations) are and what the stretch would be. This gives the employee not only a clear understanding of what has to happen but a goal to shoot for that is challenging yet attainable.

I am sure there are those with dissenting opinions on this and I would love to hear from you.

In the article Peggy makes 3 key points:

1. State your expectations on a regular basis - not once or twice a year.
2. Follow-up and hold people accountable.
3. Realize that holding people accountable is not dictatorship and that not everyone will agree. So sharing a bit of your vision and why it is important may be required from time to time.

She goes on to discuss how to confront certain issues but I don’t want to ruin that for you. Go read it in full. it’s worth your time.

Peggy is the author of “My Tender Soul - A Story of Survival”. She publishes a monthly e-zine, “Perpetual Life Management” and is the President/Minnesota Chapter/Nat’l Speakers Assoc. and Co-Owner/Huntington Learning Center/White Bear Lake, MN 651-438-2656 - Direct 651-438-2694 - Fax 888-269-7771 http://www.peggymcnamara.com. Peggy works with organizations that want to increase overall effectiveness and Generation X Women who want to develop to their fullest potential.

And just so you guys know, I found it by Googling the term “setting expectations” not because I was reading Women Today Magazine, not that there’s anything wrong with that….

In the first post on this issue I ended with the fact that very few of the experts writing about Performance Management or the vendors hawking consulting advice or software talk about accountability in the open. They talk about Goals, and other non-threatening aspects of Performance Management. This also applies to the words associated with accountability - expectations, responsibility, consequences, and confrontation. I think this is a mistake and a missed opportunity for both groups.

For the experts, nothing could be more important for improving organizational performance than addressing the lack of accountability, the unwillingness to set clear expectations, the failure to clearly communicate the consequences of failure (to: the organization, the department, and the individual) , and the importance of accepting responsibility for ones own actions.

For vendors selling services and solutions: having a platform that enables managers to be more effective at doing all those things is a terrific selling point. Most senior managers are not dumb people so don’t sugar coat your product when selling to that level. Let them know that you understand that holding people accountable is hard stuff. Let them know that your products make it easier for their managers to hold people accountable AND that it makes it harder for those managers to avoid holding people accountable.

The more we use these words, the less afraid we become of them.

Why do we measure things? Especially as it relates to the performance of things and people? The first page of the newspaper (I’m showing my age) that most men turn to is the sports page. We want to know how well our favorite teams and players performed. We can recite from memory stats on our favorite players going back years. We review, analyze and discuss the previous day’s game for hours with anyone that will listen. We say things like _______ was off his game. He should have been pulled in the second inning. We are very comfortable with second guessing other peoples decisions based on as set of data that we can get out a newspaper stat page. We do this because we know that even in a season with as many games as baseball, every inning is important. We know that every pitch has an impact because they all add up to a cumulative result. We expect that the manager of the team understands this and makes small corrective actions quickly so that outcome is the desired one.

Yet when we finally do tear ourselves away from the water cooler and attempt to talk about our own stats we tend to shy away from short term stats. We are not comfortable measuring our businesses in the same way. We say things like, well that works fine for a widget factory but we are different. We do sales, and you can’t measure prospecting calls per hour (day). We are an accounting group and you can’t measure transactions. We are a software company and you can’t measure lines of code, or errors, or rework, or …….

What is it that you can’t measure on a short interval (i.e. several times per day) that if you did would allow you to make some small corrective actions quickly that would change the cumulative result? Now just go measure it. And don’t let logistics get in the way. Once you figure out what to measure, figuring out how will come. We have all kinds of communication methods even with the remotest of employees.
B-T-W – Don’t forget Unintended Consequences

As everyone in business knows – if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it. But what happens if you are measuring the wrong thing? Well obviously it can drive the wrong result. Worse still is that it may drive exactly the result you hoped it would, but it drives it way too far or drives other undesirable results along with it that are not seen until something hits the fan. In nearly every one of our consulting engagements we work with our clients to set up a set of metrics that can be measured directly on the floor in very short intervals, typically 1 to 2 hours. We do this to enable front line managers to drive barriers to performance to the surface so that they can be resolved on the fly instead of building up to unrecoverable levels. Often, probably more times than not, we discover after a few days that the measure that the client told us was the one to watch turns out to be the wrong metric. Either its focus is too narrow and other important metrics suffered (the old production vs. quality dilemma for example) or the focus of the metric is way too broad and we never achieve the intended result. I see the same thing on the verge of happening on a grand scale with a trend that is developing in the talent and performance management fields.

As global competition heats up corporate profits will get squeezed tighter and tighter. Furthermore we all know that the competition for top performers is becoming intense. Both of these trends are forcing companies to look for ways to both improve productivity and retain talent. This is driving industry of all types to adopt more and more aggressive pay-for-performance plans. I urge caution here. These plans must be thoroughly thought out from every angle to avoid unintended consequences from choosing the wrong metrics to drive the incentive program. Take for example Arthur Andersen and Enron. As Barbara Toffler points out in her book Final Accounting: Ambition, Greed and the Fall of Arthur Andersen no one in AA ever intentionally set out to take the company in that direction. In the beginning Andersen himself was as diametrically opposed to where AA ended up as possible. He was the great crusader for fiscal responsibility. However, over time the reward system that developed drove both the right and wrong behaviors.

Another example of how a system can go wrong with unintended consequences lies in the very heart of government oversight agencies - the SEC. In September an arbitrator ruled that the pay-for-performance system adopted by the SEC in 2003 was illegal because it discriminated against African-Americans and employees over the age of 40.

We also see these types of consequences with executive pay on a regular basis. Tie compensation strictly to some short term metric like share price and what do you get? Short term results, long term heart ache. How many companies can you name?

One could also make the case that the whole housing market collapse is due to the way loan officers and others in the loan approval process are compensated. If you are paid by the number (or dollars) of originations, then you are incentivized to take more risks.

So as we go about trying to improve our companies’ performance, let’s make sure we are picking the right metrics for the right reasons.

I was recently asked by Kellye Whitney, Managing Editor for Talent Management Magazine, if I thought that Accountability was a Performance Management issue. This was in response to an unabashedly unsolicited pitch for a series of articles in her wonderful magazine. While most of my pitches were dismissed the one about the loss of accountability being American businesses’ greatest threat did intrigue her.

My initial response to this question was “ARE YOU KIDDING ME??” How can accountability not be an essential part of any Performance Management program. Then I got to thinking, Kellye is obviously a very, very bright person to get to the position that she is in, so maybe I am missing the point. That got me to start looking at (and actually reading this time) all the literature and white papers produced by the Performance Management experts and software vendors. What I found astounded me. Nary a mention of the word accountability. Lots of lofty talk about Goals and Metrics and Job Satisfaction but none of the basic blocking and tackling stuff people on the front line have to do – setting expectations, removing barriers and holding folks accountable to getting their daily jobs done.

More on this later…

In the mean time I invite you to go look for yourself. Visit some of the big names such as Success Factors and Halogen Software. They have some really cool tools, but see how many times you can find the word accountability.

Just what the world needs - Another consultant who thinks he has something new to say.

I’m sure that nothing I have to say is new by any means. And I won’t pretend in these posts that I know any more than any other management consultant and the truth is that I probably know a lot less than many. But I also know that the messages that I plan to address need to be said again and again until people get it. Especially people who run our corporations, governments, non-profits, and all other organizations. Organizations exist to accomplish things. Corporations exist to make a profit for its shareholders. Governments exist to serve the needs and to carry out the desires of its constituents. This blog addresses the need for organizations to strive for excellence in the execution of its charter. We will delve into organzational issues such as: organizational culture, fear of change, accountability, performance management, and many other topics… Just as soon as I can figure out where to start!

Until then…lets just go out and execute with excellence.

Jerry