The Performance Improvement Blog

Coaching: A Learning Tool in Transition

Surveys suggest that employee coaching is becoming a mainstream development activity, much like mentoring, self-directed learning, special assignments, etc. A recent study by the United Kingdom’s Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) found that 71% of British employers now use coaching. A recent survey conducted by the Minneapolis-based CO2 Partners found that half of middle to senior-level executives had experience being coached. The overall conclusion has to be that the use of coaching is increasing and it is no longer limited to C-level managers.

And the meaning of coaching varies widely. A CIPD “guide” to coaching states:

The term ‘coaching’ has come to refer to many different activities…Its early use in the business world often carried a remedial connotation – people were coached because they were underperforming or their behaviour was unsatisfactory. These days, coaching is more usually seen as a means of developing people within an organisation in order that they perform more effectively and reach their potential.

Also, the delivery of coaching varies greatly from one-on-one, scheduled sessions with an external coaching expert, to internal designated coaches working with managers as needed, to supervisors coaching their direct-reports as part of a performance improvement process. More and more, leadership and management development programs are incorporating coaching as a way to sustain learning after a leadership workshop. And some coaching, much like the directive approach of a sports coach, is teaching and motivating people to do a task more effectively. Achieving a narrow definition of coaching is unlikely and probably not helpful. As the term continues to be applied broadly in organizations it will be imperative to identify the method and learning intention of coaching in each situation.

Bullied Workers

Bullying, learned in the school yard and practiced in the workplace, is an epidemic for which organizations pay a high price in terms of absenteeism, turnover, and mental and physical illness. In a survey done by the Workplace Bullying Institute and Zogby International, over a third of respondents reported that they had been bullied on the job. These are findings reported in the March 25, 2008 Science Times section of the New York Times and in the blog “Well” written by Tara Parker-Pope. Her March 11th post offered this definition of bullying: “persistent criticism, yelling, spreading gossip, insults and ignoring or excluding workers from office activities.” That post has received 334 comments to date, many of them describing personal experiences with bullying. For example, Amy wrote:

I worked for an organization for several years & I was shocked at the behavior of a co-worker. She bullied, ignored requests, was aggressive, petty & simply rude to anyone she felt she could get by with this behavior. And, she still works there & no one says anything about it. Two employees wanted to quit because of her behavior but they were told to basically keep their chin up & try to stay away from her. This solution came from the Executive Director of our organization and an HR employee.

I know from my own experience being bullied and observing bullying of others in my, dare I say it, many years working in different kinds of organizations, that bullying is a serious problem. However, the trend toward trying to deal with the problem through anti-bullying legislation misses the point. Bullying is the result of an organizational culture that tolerates and encourages this destructive behavior by managers and co-workers. It's the culture that must change. And as hard as it is for employment law to protect employees from discrimination due to race, age, or gender, it will be much more difficult to separate people who are simply rude and insensitive from people who are truly bullies. I think the problem of destructive relationships needs to be dealt with through professional education, management training, employee recruitment and selection, and by organizations creating a culture that is supportive of the development of all employees. Making CEOs aware of the high cost of bullying is a start.

I remember as a consultant attending meetings in auto manufacturing plants in which the norm was for managers to be loud, accusatory, abusive, and insulting. This wasn’t just one manager in the room; this was the tone of everyone around the table. And it wasn’t just one plant; it was nearly every plant. It is no wonder management has had an antagonistic relationship with the UAW and that these companies have had trouble building high quality cars that could compete in the world marketplace.

Companies That Care

The Center for Companies That Care recently announced its “Honor Roll” for 2008. The companies that made this list have to adhere to the following characteristics and, in general, be exemplary in terms of improving the lives of their employees and their communities.

1. Sustain a work environment founded on dignity and respect for all employees

2. Make employees feel their jobs are important

3. Cultivate the full potential of all employees

4. Encourage individual pursuit of work/life balance

5. Enable the well-being of individuals and their families through compensation, benefits, policies and practices

6. Develop great leaders, at all levels, who excel at managing people as well as results

7. Appreciate and recognize the contributions of people who work there

8. Establish and communicate standards for ethical behavior and integrity

9. Get involved in community endeavors and/or public policy

10. Consider the human toll when making business decisions

This is a wonderful but challenging set of behaviors. While most companies would say they value these characteristics, a much smaller number actually live this way on a day-to-day basis. Those are the companies that are continually learning how to develop and maintain this high level of performance.

This is not just another award that friends give to friends. I know from my own experience as a reviewer, the Center for Companies That Care staff and volunteers take the selection process very seriously and thoroughly review every application. Applicants must provide detailed answers to questions that are based on the ten characteristics, as well as provide evidence that they truly care about their employees and their communities. To make the list is truly an honor.

Customer Service In Decline

Two illuminating studies of customer satisfaction are pointing to a general decline in customer service in America. The March 3rd issue of BusinessWeek presents its annual ranking of companies in an article titled, “The Customer Service Champs.” Using 2008 J.D. Power and Associates surveys, the magazine reported that most of the top 25 companies on their list scored lower than last year and a few benchmark companies that had been on the top of the list for a long time, moved lower in the ranking. In addition, the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) which is a measure of customer satisfaction with goods and services, fell in the fourth quarter of 2007. Taken together, these studies indicate that even with the increased attention to the importance of customer service in corporate America, actual service to customers is getting worse rather than better.

What’s the explanation? The conclusions from these two studies suggest that the culprit is the economy and the accompanying financial pressures that are addressed by job and service cuts resulting in fewer people with fewer resources trying to address growing consumer demands. I agree that this is part of the problem. However, my experience interviewing managers of call centers is that the management and training of customer service representatives is inadequate. Many call centers still reward reps for number of calls handled and time on each call rather than for solving the customer’s problem. Many managers treat reps like an expendable resource that can easily be replaced. This is an expensive and short-sighted way to think about customer service.

John Baldoni writes in HR.com that people must have passion and compassion to be effective employees and managers must cultivate these attitudes in their employees. Baldoni suggests that sometimes the only competitive advantage some companies have is passionate and compassionate workers. I think this is especially true for customer service. Any company can set up a call center in-house or in Bangalore and any company can set up an automated phone tree or online Web support. It’s the companies that hire people who have passion for the work and compassion for others and then continually support these employees in learning and relearning new knowledge and skills that will make customer service a competitive advantage over the long run.

Show Me That You Care

The research is convincing: employees who are satisfied with their jobs and engaged in their work are more productive and stay longer than employees who are not satisfied and not engaged. But I’ve wondered about what factors contribute to satisfaction and engagement and if there are global cultural differences. Pay is a factor, of course, but it’s not the only factor, and having a best friend at work is nice, but I know plenty of people who don’t have a best friend at work and are still quite satisfied with their situations. So what is it? An annual web-based survey of approximately 15,000 full-time employees in a wide-range of small and large, service and manufacturing companies in the United States, Brazil, China, Germany, India, and the U.K., conducted by WorkTrends™ in 2007, sheds some light on this question. Using this data Kenexa Research Institute (KRI) found that companies that have strong talent management, including “…career path programs, goal development and monitoring, regular feedback sessions with managers [who are] tracking progress…”, are more likely to have employees who are engaged in their work and satisfied with their jobs, with management, with training, and with their companies. KRI found similar results in all six countries. Jack Wiley, Executive Director of KRI, described the findings this way:

“People have a fundamental need to know how they are doing and what the future holds for them. It’s simply part of who we are. Organizations that understand this and have the process in place to make it happen have an advantage over their competitors. Not only are they going to outperform their competitors, but they are building a more engaged and committed workforce.”

I was a bit skeptical of these findings at first, not because I doubted their plausibility, but because I doubt the generalizability of the results of any survey until I know how it was conducted. I mean, are we talking about a questionnaire handed out to friends at a bar one Saturday night in Kalamazoo, or is this a rigorously conducted survey employing the best survey techniques for getting highly valid and reliable results? I was pleased to find out from KRI that the WorkTrends survey is the latter. All surveys have a certain amount of error and weakness, but I think this is one that furthers our understanding of global employee engagement and its relationship to talent management.

Hospitals Learn the Error of Their Ways

In the wake of news about legal cases involving drug-dispensing mistakes in hospitals, a number of health systems are instituting a variety of actions to help prevent errors in dispensing “high-alert medications.” (See The Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2008.) These are medications that, when administered incorrectly, are likely to be harmful to a patient. To reduce the number of these incidences, hospitals are using a combination of process improvement and training. They are redesigning drug packaging, separating doses of drugs to prevent confusion, bar coding containers and providing personnel with equipment for checking bar codes before giving drugs to patients, creating systems of accountability among staff, using smart pumps that provide an alert if the dose is wrong, and retraining doctors, nurses, and other staff to use these new protocols.

Duke University Hospital is an example of an institution that has taken a comprehensive approach that combines “mistake-proofing” with computerized systems to help doctors and nurses monitor medications (See www.healthcarenews.com/story.cms?id=8793). Duke is using “Six Sigma” methods to control quality and reduce errors. Six Sigma, originally developed in manufacturing companies, is being adapted to health care and offers tools and a way of thinking that is effective for improving repeatable processes, such as drug dispensing.

This is all well and good, but not sufficient over the long term. These hospitals and health care systems should not assume that doctors, nurses, technicians, and other health care professionals will continue to use these tools and procedures consistently and effectively after one-time training. These institutions must commit to a culture that supports learning and change over time. Performance improvement needs continual monitoring, feedback, and reinforcement, which, after all, is the spirit of “Six Sigma”. The impact of these interventions on performance should be tracked and evaluated, this information should be brought to the attention of people involved in dispensing drugs, and the tools and procedures continually enhanced to reduce errors, with the ultimate goal of eliminating drug-dispensing mistakes in hospitals.

Wherefore Art Thou, Learning Organization?

As I wrote in my November 28, 2007 blog post, it’s one thing for people to claim that they are a “learning organization”, it’s quite another thing to actually have an organizational culture that supports continuous learning. Every organization that values training, development, and education calls itself a “learning organization”. After Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline, was published in 1990, no self-respecting business, nonprofit, or government agency would admit that it was not a learning organization. David Garvin, who was studying organizational learning even before Senge started receiving notoriety for the concept, recognized the need for a tool to determine how close an organization is to truly having a culture of learning and what that organization needs to do to move closer to that goal.

To this end, Garvin and his co-authors have developed a very practical tool (including a survey, benchmarks, and feedback process) to assess an organization’s capacity for learning. I am impressed that they have used an article in the March 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review to make the tool available to a very wide audience. The tool is built around three factors. The authors write:

Organizational research over the past two decades has revealed three broad factors that are essential for organizational learning and adaptability: a supportive learning environment, concrete learning processes and practices, and leadership behavior that provides reinforcement. We refer to these as the building blocks of the learning organization.

We could debate the validity of the categories and the items of the survey instrument, but that would miss the point. As the authors say, the tool should be used for learning, not to judge the quality of an organization. The survey provides feedback for organizational reflection. By collecting the data and then discussing the findings, people must confront critical questions: Does our culture support learning? Do we have everyday processes and procedures in place to ensure that learning and change are embedded in the way we work together? Do our top leaders make continuous learning a priority and communicate this throughout the organization? And then, hopefully, leaders will use the answers to these questions to motivate further learning and performance improvement and contribute to developing a learning culture in the process.

Nothing Can Be Better Than Something

People have “a preference for action over inaction” according to a study by economists that looked at the behavior of professional football (soccer in the U.S.) goalies when faced with penalty kicks. These goalies are much more likely to leap to one side of the goal or the other in anticipation of the direction of the kick, rather than stay in the center of the goal where their chances of a save are better. This study was published in the October 2007 issue of The Journal of Economic Psychology and then reported by the business section of the New York Times. After interviewing the goalies about how they felt about what they did, the researchers concluded that, for many, the reason they have this tendency to act rather than stay put is because if they act and fail, they don’t feel as bad as when they don’t act and fail.

It’s a leap (please excuse the pun) in logic to assume that a preference for action drives every decision, but this research does raise questions about how that preference might affect behavior of people in organizations. Are managers more likely to interfere in delegated tasks? Are team leaders more likely to move ahead on initiatives? Are executives more likely to agree to mergers and acquisitions? Do these things happen because managers cannot refrain from taking action even when doing nothing might be better? In my work, I am always looking for ways to improve performance interventions. The study of goalkeepers reminds me that sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing.