Jerry's Blog

For more than two decades now, my colleagues and I have worked with companies to help them improve their execution at the frontline - i.e. on the floor, in the cubical, or wherever work is accomplished. We profess no particular expertise in any industry and yet, without fail, we have been able to achieve significant gains in productivity, efficiency, yields, safety, quality, or whatever metric our clients say is the most important to their bottom line.  20% - 30% gains are minimal. 40% to 50% are common and 50% to 60% improvements happen regularly.  We have worked in steel mills, engineering firms, chemical plants, utilities, call centers, high tech, low tech, highly automated, and very labor intensive. No matter what the industry, we get the results.  The thing is... we do not consider ourselves special. We do not have a magic wand. We do not have particularly spectacular resumes and we do not necessarily come from the best schools. What we do have though, is a basic understanding that a breakdown in the accountability cycle of the organization is the most significant barrier to achieving spectacular results in most organizations. By helping organizations repair this breakdown in accountability, we help them execute their processes more effectively which in turn leads to breakthrough performance. 

We also know that if we can do it for large organizations with thousands of employees, you can do it yourself within your own workgroup.  There is no reason why any competent manager at any level of the organization has to wait until told by someone else to tackle this opportunity. Anyone can do it at any level. Do get me wrong and think that it will be easy because it's not. This is "Culture Change 101" and few things could be harder.  However, by following the few simple steps outlined in the pages that follow you can fix the broken or missing links in your group's accountability cycle and achieve break through levels of performance improvement.

A post by Guy Kawasaki reminded me of another unintended consequence of using the wrong measures (see the Unintended Consequences post from 5/15). Actually, Guy was commenting on a video of Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point) discussing the pits falls of today's hiring practices.   Using the wrong criteria in your selection process could lead to disastrous results.  With today's technology, we are in data overload. For many, many things, we can have so much data available to us that we cannot possibly digest it all. What's more, much of the data conflicts with other data, which then leads to analysis paralysis. 

So what is the solution? There is no one solution, but taking careful time to think through all the different roads that a certain type of data could lead you to, before you start collecting the data, could head off potential problems down the road.

In this article, we will be focusing on the initial steps to begin changing the behaviors that lead to a higher level of accountability. For this article, we will assume that you are the official leader of this group; i.e. you are the boss. Being the boss makes it much easier to drive behavior changes but that does not mean that you cannot do it if you are not the boss. It just takes longer and you must think more strategically. We will cover tips for the non-boss later on in this series. We will also assume that you have read Tips 1 & 2 and have begun implementing the suggestions from those articles. This piece builds squarely on those two steps so if you have not read those tips then I suggest you do so now.

At this point you should be personally demonstrating a higher level of accountability yourself and have built a consensus among your staff and employees that change is needed in their behavior. Now you need to take positive steps to create the beginnings of group wide change. First, tell them as a group what you are going to do and ask for their help in accomplishing it. What you are going to do is to do a better job of developing SMART Goals, setting clear expectations around those goals and following up on a regular, timely and proactive basis. What you need their help in is developing and agreeing to those SMART Goals, asking questions to ensure that expectations are clear, and be ready with real answers when you follow-up. You will need to explain in detail what each of those steps entails and how it will affect them personally. We will come back to each one of these items and address them separately so that you understand them yourself. As I have stated several times in the other tips, this is a lifestyle change. You and every member of your group will have to do things differently.

Next, you want to schedule a one-on-one meeting with each individual on your team. During this meeting, you will need to confirm their support. They will need to understand that you are going to be asking more of them and that you will be following up on a more frequent basis. This does not mean that you have lost faith in them or that they are doing anything wrong. What it means is that you are interested in their being successful in accomplishing their goals, that the only way you can help them is to ask questions, and for them to be forthcoming about their progress and the problems they are encountering in accomplishing those tasks. Once agreement and support has been achieved, then delve into the goals development and the setting of expectations. The individual meetings require planning. The more time spent on planning the meeting, the shorter and more productive the meeting will be. As a rule of thumb, meetings of this type should take an equal amount of time to plan as to execute. In other words planning for a half hour meeting should take about a half hour. A little longer for the first couple and a little less as you develop your theme and rhythm. While planning the meeting consider the individual and their strengths and weaknesses, how they are performing currently and what you want the outcome of the meeting to be. You should define in writing what goals do you want them to agree to, and how are you going to position them to reach those goals. Putting it in writing will help you clarify it in your mind and increase your resolve to get that outcome. You should also list out your expectations in writing so that you don't forget to cover a critical point. You cannot hold someone accountable to an expectation you never set. At the end of the meeting, you should summarize the goals and expectations and get verbal agreement as to what was agreed upon. Immediately following the meeting, those items should be documented in writing and a copy given to the employee for their records.

In Tip #4, we will take a step back and review how to set SMART goals and clear expectations.

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