The Performance Improvement Blog

Look At Me Look At You

A principle (often incorrectly attributed to the physicist Heisenberg) in social sciences research is that the observation of something changes the thing being observed. Whether we are conducting a survey, a focus group, a group discussion, individual interviews, or simply participating in an event, the subjects of our studies are affected by the way we interact with them. When investigating the behavior of people (in the workplace or otherwise), there is no such thing as an objective study.

This is also true in the evaluation of performance interventions. That is, the measurement of learning and results in the workplace changes the learner. When I ask a manager who has recently participated in a leadership training program, “What have you applied and how have you applied it?”, she goes through an internal process of recalling the workshop, what she learned while she was there, what she has done with that learning in the weeks and months since the event, what were her successes and what does she still want to accomplish with her new learning. She might even renew her vows to improve something about herself or her team.

If I were doing a controlled experiment for research purposes, I would be concerned about this confounding variable. However, when measuring the impact of performance interventions, particularly leadership and management training, the fact that the person being observed (surveyed, interviewed, or watched) is affected in some way by me, I believe, is a positive by-product of the study. In fact, I assume that when I ask people questions about their training experience, I am stimulating their memory recall and maybe even motivating them to achieve more success with their new knowledge and skills. If inquiry post-training can reinforce learning and stimulate application of this learning, I’m all for it. After all, isn’t that the goal…to improve performance?

Rx for Performance Improvement

Jane Bozarth, in the January 12th post on her blog, Training Day, writes about surgeon Atul Gawande’s article in The New Yorker magazine titled The Checklist. This is the story of how simple procedures instituted in the intensive care units (ICUs) of hospitals to remind nurses and doctors of the “minimum expected steps in complex processes” and providing them with the supplies they need and the authority they need has dramatically reduced the number of infections and deaths and has reduced costs to each hospital by millions of dollars.

Every one of the doctors and nurses in these ICUs had been taught, at some point in their careers, the right procedures for preventing patient infection. However, for a variety of reasons, they had not been following protocol: “not enough time”; “lack of resources”; “this is the way we’ve always done it.” Sound familiar? More training wasn’t going to help. The performance improvement solution was a combination of a job aid (checklist) and changing the role of nurses and administrators on the unit.

Maybe you aren’t making life and death decisions everyday, but the barriers to applying learning and improving performance in most organizations are basically the same as in the ICU. Part of the problem is memory recall and part of the problem is how the organization functions. Training is a waste of time and money if we are not paying attention to these other aspects of the learning and application process.

Doing Good And Doing Well

Can a company become more profitable by investing in corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs? This is the question asked by Margolis and Elfenbein in a study that is reported in the January issue of Harvard Business Review under the headline: “Do Well by Doing Good? Don’t Count on It.” In their meta-analysis of 167 studies that were conducted over 35 years, they found a weak correlation between social performance and profitability, but they also found very few companies in which being socially responsible increased the cost to shareholders. They conclude the article by saying that managers shouldn’t assume that CSR will result in greater profitability.

Karl Weber in The Triple Bottom Line Blog, has a different take on the findings. He argues that because CSR does not threaten profitability, companies should support it. He writes:

If Margolis and Elfenbein are right, the fact that no such conflict exists immediately eliminates most or all of the cited rationale behind resisting calls for social responsibility. It shifts the burden of proof from CSR advocates to their opponents: After all, if CSR is (in effect) cost-free, why not make an effort to do the right thing? What is the upside to behaving ruthlessly if it is not even rewarded in the marketplace?

Of course, correlation does not prove causality. The fact that a company acts socially responsible and, at the same time, is profitable does not mean that CSR caused its financial performance. It only means that companies can be both socially responsible and profitable. One does not preclude the other. Left out of this discussion of CSR is the effect on employees. There is much talk these days about the importance of employee engagement. Many people argue that employee engagement has a positive effect on employee performance. CSR is a way to increase employee engagement because many (not all) employees are motivated by knowing that they work for a company that is socially responsible. Therefore, one could argue that CSR, employee engagement, and profitability are the triple threat of a responsible company.

Nothing Is As Useful As A Good Story

When you want evidence of the impact of performance interventions (training, education, mentoring, special projects, etc.), stories are often the most useful and most compelling. Peter Guber, the filmmaker, writes about the business value of storytelling in Harvard Business Review (December 2007, p.53). He writes:

Here is the challenge for the business storyteller: He must enter the hearts of his listeners, where their emotions live, even as the information he seeks to convey rents space in their brains. Our minds are relatively open, but we guard our hearts with zeal, knowing their power to move us. So although the mind may be part of your target, the heart is the bull’s-eye. To reach it, the visionary manager crafting his story must first display his own open heart.

Surveys and quasi-scientific methods that use pre-training and post-training assessments and so-called control (comparison) groups, speak to the mind. In doing so, they have value. But a good story, that begins with the protagonist attending training and ends with our hero doing something that results in an increase in revenue, decrease in costs, greater market share, or a boost in customer satisfaction, is priceless. Rob Brinkerhoff, in his book “Telling Training’s Story” describes a method for collecting these stories. We know managers want numbers. They need the illusion of scientific credibility. That’s fine; they can have those numbers. But what moves people to action are the stories.

The Truth About Polls and Surveys

As someone who frequently conducts surveys as part of my performance improvement work, I am paying special attention to polling that is being done to determine who will win each U.S. presidential primary. A poll of voters is a special form of a survey, similar to an employee engagement survey or a customer satisfaction survey. The result from any of these different forms of surveys is only an estimate of what a population believes or will do. This estimate, due to a variety of errors inherent in surveys of population samples, always falls within a range of percentages. So when a pollster reports that 39% of New Hampshire democrats surveyed said that they will vote for Obama and 31% will vote for Clinton, what they really mean is that we can be relatively confident that the actual percentage for that population will be within a range (usually plus or minus 3% to 6% depending on how many people were surveyed and the bias in who was selected for the survey). Given this characteristic of survey results, it is not surprising from a purely statistical perspective that Clinton won the New Hampshire primary, regardless of what happens with the re-count of votes.

Surveys are highly useful tools in getting a sense of the thinking of a particular population of people and in stimulating their thinking about important issues. But as with any tool we should respect its usefulness and limitations. When I survey employees about what they learned in a leadership program, how they are applying what they learned, and how the organization can help to maximize the impact of what they learned, I don’t assume that the percentage who indicated business results from the program is the actual percentage that got results. I know that number is in the middle of a range of what is likely to include the true percentage. That level of precision is usually sufficient for my purposes. I just need to remember that if I survey that population again and get another number that is a few percentage points different, it could be that, statistically speaking, there is no change.

Leadership: Nature or Nurture?

It seems like everybody who has ever been a CEO for more than a few years, or has been a long-time coach of winning football or basketball teams, has the answer to what makes an effective leader. Rather than distorted self-perceptions and revisionist history, I prefer evidence-based conclusions. For this I defer to Kouzes and Posner who report on extensive research and analysis in their book, The Leadership Challenge (In its 4th edition!). They have data from over 300,000 managers in more than 60 countries.

In an interview by Management-Issues, Jim Kouzes talks about the essence of effective leadership. He said that there is solid evidence that certain leadership practices are more effective than other practices. He and Posner have concluded that effective leaders have four key qualities:

1) High integrity. People look for leaders who are honest and reliable.
2) Vision. Effective leaders are forward-looking and can communicate that vision to others.
3) Team players. They foster collaboration and build trust over the long term. A command and control form of leadership might work in the short term and might even be needed in a crisis situation but it fails over the long term.
4) Optimistic and enthusiastic. They inspire others to act.

Kouzes and Posner believe that these leadership qualities can be learned. To them it is a matter of training and development and not a result of innate gifts. And, of course, they have books, videos, assessment instruments, and workshops to teach these skills and abilities. I assume their materials are high quality, as are other leadership training providers (for example, see the Advantage Performance Group). But effective leadership doesn’t develop in isolation nor does it develop in the classroom. Training and development classes and workshops are only part of the process. To develop integrity, vision, collaboration, trust, and enthusiastic optimism, leaders need frequent feedback and reflection in addition to training. And it won’t happen by chance. Building a cadre of effective leaders in any organization takes intentionality and planning.

The Power of Diversity

Diversity in organizations is not just some liberal’s notion of what is the right thing to do. Scott E. Page, University of Michigan professor of complex systems, political science, and economics, has published "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies." I’ve always believed, based on my own experience (including my own action research) and the research of others, that diverse work teams make better decisions than homogeneous work teams. Page’s book supports this contention. By citing many examples, his own research, and an economic model, he makes a very compelling argument. In an interview in the New York Times, he is quoted as saying:

The problems we face in the world are very complicated. Any one of us can get stuck. If we’re in an organization where everyone thinks in the same way, everyone will get stuck in the same place.

But if we have people with diverse tools, they’ll get stuck in different places. One person can do their best, and then someone else can come in and improve on it. There’s a lot of empirical data to show that diverse cities are more productive, diverse boards of directors make better decisions, the most innovative companies are diverse.

What this means for the workplace is that we need to stop hiring people who think like ourselves and we need to stop using standard criteria for hiring team members. We need to be open to people from different life experiences including ethnicity, gender, socioeconomics, geography, employment, and education. Page’s work lends credence to the notion that diversity, not only has moral and social value, but also has strategic business value.

We Have to Stop Meeting Like This!

The amount of time, energy, and money wasted in meetings every business day in corporations around the world is astronomical. Bert Decker says that most businesses can eliminate half of their meetings and cut the time of each of the remaining meetings in half. I don’t know if that literally makes sense for companies, but it’s an admirable goal to which many should strive. My experience is that many organizations use meetings, whether face-to-face or virtual, as their main way of communicating. This has become epidemic since the ease of electronic communication. Now with people able to join a teleconference from anywhere in the world at any time, physical presence is no longer used as a factor in the decision to hold a meeting. Not long ago, “meeting” only meant face-to-face; now, when someone says, “Let’s meet,” they very likely mean a conference call.

But let’s be clear about his. A face-to-face meeting is qualitatively different from a virtual (phone, Web, etc.) meeting. The nature of the interactions, information, and participation are different. Ten people around a table can discuss topics, share ideas, and make group decisions. Ten people on the phone together cannot do this; at best, they can hear information and listen in on the conversation of a few. One type is for decision-making and one is for information dissemination. However, managers use both types of meetings interchangeably and then are surprised when they can’t get the same outcomes from a conference call as they get from a face-to-face meeting.

If you want to improve your skills at both types of meetings, check out How To Run An Effective Meeting and Ten Tips to Tune Up Your Teleconferencing. This advice is about what the convener of the meeting can do. Also think about what participants can do to have an effective meeting. They should find out the purpose of the meeting, what their role in the meeting will be, and what they need to bring with them. If the purpose is to update or report out, they should ask, “Is there another way to accomplish this other than a meeting?” If all participants start asking these questions, we’ll start a guerilla conversion of organizations from being meeting centric to being results centric.