Performance Management - Some Round Wheel Thinking

Misconceptions abound about performance and behavior and many organizations persist in trying to "reinvent the wheel" when in fact there are other wheels in the wagon. And the demotivating aspects of a typical "Square Wheel Operation" make a variety of alternatives available.

Envision, if you will, our organization rolling forward with a leader pulling and support people at the back of the wagon pushing things along. But the wagon is rolling on Square Wheels, which work but have a tendency to not work really well on level ground. Now, envision the wagon with a cargo of round rubber tires; the ideas are already in the wagon. But we're pretty busy trying to meet the performance goals -- too busy to stop and look for opportunities for improvement.

Now, envision trying to manage this team.

It is quite difficult to motivate people, other than yourself, and even motivating yourself is hard! We get into issues of team and peer pressure, competition (internal and external), individual history of work and teamwork, leadership impacts, trust, clarity of organizational missions and visions and all sorts of other factors (sometimes even including psychopathology!).

What motivates some people is often quite different than what motivates others. But, oftentimes, it is the people who move up to senior positions in management who are in a position to "apply consequences" in the form of rewards and punishments to others. They do what they think works, only frameworks and realities differ.

Many of us come from the "downhill slope of the curve" when it comes to levels of competence and performance -- we tend to be above average performers. Supervisors, for example, are generally selected from the top 10% of the performance pool. And most managers are promoted from the top 10% of the supervisor pool. Statistically, this makes them WAY above average. Go up a couple of levels and you begin to get into 4 Sigma territory.

Consider this:

Half the people in your organization are at or below average!

This is a statistical reality. And while your organization's average may be above another organization, the managers and leaders of any organization will still be a bit "abnormal" when compared to average folks. Thus, when these leaders consider "how to motivate other people," they tend to think in an abnormal way! Paradoxically, most also consider themselves "average."

 

There is also a very large body of writings, from well-known authors like Deming, Peters and Drucker and an expanding body of academic work on the issues surrounding motivation and performance management.

From what I can tell, virtually all the recent research supports the position that individual pay for performance systems are ineffective in general or even generate negative overall impacts on quality and productivity. Most do not work well in team-based organizations, either.

Dr. Jeffrey Pfeffer, for example, in "Six Dangerous Myths About Pay" (May - -June, 1998 issue of Harvard Business Review) said this:

"Myth #5 - Individual incentive pay improves performance. Reality -Individual incentive pay, in reality, undermines performance - of both the individual and the organization. Many studies strongly suggest that this form of reward undermines teamwork, encourages a short-term focus, and leads people to believe t hat pay is not related to performance at all but to having the 'right' relationships and an ingratiating personality."

This EXTRINSIC or externally-applied reward causes a variety of problems. If it is too little, it is demotivational. If it is too much, people will do most anything to get it and this often generates very dysfunctional behavior among "team mates." If it is just right, then one must be quite cautious that we are rewarding those behaviors that have impact and that the other key behaviors necessary for success also get accomplished.

The key, in my experience, is generating INTRINSIC or internally-based rewards. We can address this in a variety of ways.

My consulting experience in behavioral management goes back 22 years, when I was working with Ed Feeney (who based his work on the efforts of Tom Gilbert and others). We were training on the B.E.S.T. System (Behavioral Engineering Systems Training). Fancy, and basically built on behavioral psychology. What made the approach most successful was the active involvement of the participants to define opportunities for improvement and then to implement programs to have measurable impacts. Most things were done in teams and what made the programs successful was NOT the consequences but the process and the feedback! We did do the reward stuff, but the day-to-day behaviors were most certainly not driven by these rewards.

 

A long time ago, we developed a performance management checklist focused on issues of feedback. These include items like:

Often, organizations scored 3 or 4 of the 10 items and people could immediately see how they might make improvements. This is also a form of self-correcting feedback, relating to positive aspects of a performance improvement process (wheels within wheels). Simply reading the list is often sufficient to generate the intrinsic motivation needed to make changes occur in the workplace!

Feedback related to performance appraisal is also impacted by these same factors. Like Deming, I think that most performance appraisal systems are ineffective at best and damaging at worst. Most do not provide for positive effective feedback or performance coaching and, like the Dilbert cartoons, only provide management with the excuses they need to justify not giving raises.

What is needed are not expensive measurement systems designed to capture very accurate performance data that might be used against an individual but informal and inexpensive ways for people to monitor their own progress in doing what is organizationally necessary. The feedback should be, more or less, self-coaching in nature and done "with" the involvement of individuals and teams and not done "to them" from their perspective.

Let me illustrate with one of the cartoons, the one called Intrinsic Motivation. Envision a person who has just implemented a round wheel where the square one used to be. They feel the pride of success and may even notice an effect on pushing the wagon forward. There is an accomplishment that might even be noticed by the other wagon pushers (very powerful in most cases and sometimes duplicated) and by the manager, who should comment positively.

If management has designed an effective feedback system for the team and its journey, the improvement and the impact on the organization may serve to sustain higher levels of performance for the rest of the journey. The reward for implementation is built around the person's feeling of success and accomplishment.

From a coaching standpoint, consider a simple discussion of observed Square Wheels and a discussion of the individual's potential round wheel ideas. There is a lot to be said for a discussion that is not perceived to be aggressively attacking one's values and goals and that is simply focused on the behaviors that might be improved. Getting the person to identify and suggest their own potential improvements generates a sense of accomplishment and often a commitment to improve.

Note that few people really desire to be told what to do, directed and corrected, and controlled by others. Most people simply want to know the standards expected and the current level of performance toward those standards.

Feedback is the breakfast of Champions.

And nobody ever washes a rental car!

Make your goals theirs and offer the positive support for incremental improvements,

--

For the FUN of It!

Scott J. Simmerman, Ph.D.

Performance Management Company - 800-659-1466

mailto:Scott@SquareWheels.com

 

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