The Performance Improvement Blog

Experimentation

“What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?” This is the question that Steven Pinker asked 164 scientists and intellectuals who are part of the Edge Foundation network. The resulting virtual forum is rich with scientific, linguistic, and social concepts that offer a fascinating and thought-provoking array of very useful ideas.

One of these concepts is “experimentation”. This answer is offered by Roger Schank, CEO of Socratic Arts and Distinguished Career Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and Chief Educational Officer of Carnegie Mellon West. He explains that we are exposed to the notion of experimentation in boring high school science classes which turns us off from using experimentation in everyday life. He writes:

Every aspect of life is an experiment that can be better understood if it is perceived in that way. But because we don't recognize this we fail to understand that we need to reason logically from evidence we gather, and that we need to carefully consider the conditions under which our experiments have been conducted, and that we need to decide when and how we might run the experiment again with better results.

In other words, the scientific activity that surrounds experimentation is about thinking clearly in the face of evidence obtained as the result of an experiment. But people who don't see their actions as experiments, and those who don't know how to reason carefully from data, will continue to learn less well from their own experiences than those who do.

To me, experimentation is an essential aspect of organizational learning. It’s action learning. Instead of thinking about new programs and initiatives in terms of success and failure, we would learn more if we considered them experiments. Then we would systematically gather data about these interventions and use that information to help the organization become more effective. For example, let’s say a company installs a database of best-practices, as well as books, articles and other learning resources for use by managers to improve their performance. One approach the company might take is to be hands-off; that is, to assume that some people will use the database and some won’t but not doing anything more than make the database available. On the other hand, if the database is thought of as an experiment, the response would be quite different. The company would collect data about who is using the database and who isn’t and it would find out from the users what impact it is having on their performance and what could be done to enhance the usefulness of the database. With the first approach there is no organizational learning. With the second approach the organizational learning could be substantial and point the way for enhancing the impact of future programs.

 

Hospital Culture Trumps Equipment and Techniques

If you hire the top people in their professions and have state-of-the-art technology, will that ensure organizational success? A study reported in the March issue of Annals of Internal Medicine provides evidence that hospital culture has more influence on improving patient outcomes than elements such as reputation of physicians, electronic records systems, state-of-the-art equipment, or evidence-based protocols.The investigators looked at mortality rates for patients with AMI (acute myocardial infarction)and then followed up with site visits and in-depth interviews of hospital staff. Apparently, in complex organizations like hospitals, “how” is more important than “what”. In a post on Tara Parker-Pope’s health blog titled “What Makes a Hospital Great,” Pauline W. Chen describes the findings from this Yale University research:

…it was the approach to challenging patient care issues that seemed to set institutions apart. A hospital might discover, for example, that a heart attack patient who returned to the hospital with severe edema, or swelling, might have been discharged without her prescribed diuretic…At a low-performing hospital, such an error might result in doctors, nurses and pharmacists on the front lines blaming one another and hospital leaders taking care to remain uninvolved. But clinicians and leaders at a high-performing hospital would be eager to address the error, acknowledging it without disparaging one another and working together to re-examine and, if necessary, reconfigure the hospital’s discharge process.

Consistent with these findings is Stanford medical professor Abraham Verghese’s contention that the bed-side, doctor-patient relationship is critical to achieving successful patient outcomes. He argues that doctors today are over-reliant on technology to diagnose and treat patients and do not know how to physically examine and “listen to” patients. This results in misdiagnosis, unnecessary lab tests, and a lack of mutual trust that is vital to patient care. Verghese believes that physicians can’t learn bedside skills any other way than by treating patients and receiving feedback from senior physicians who can teach the hands-on skills. However, this kind of learning is dependent on a hospital culture that values and supports the bedside, doctor-patient relationship.

Culture, with all of its values, assumptions, beliefs, expected behaviors, and norms, is a powerful force within organizations. Culture shapes how things are done. In hospitals, culture has life and death implications. Evidence suggests that health care outcomes are improved when the culture of a hospital encourages trust and honesty among staff and with patients and when people act consistently in accordance with these values.

 

College Completion Matters

If companies care about having high performing managers, they should become involved in supporting high quality K-12 and post-secondary institutions. They should care deeply about government policies and legislation that affect education for all students. Success in the workplace is related directly to success in college and success in college is related directly to success in K-12 schools. Managers who cannot read and write at college level  or don’t understand the math needed in automated, computer-driven, 21^st century companies will not be successful and, worse, will be a detriment to their organizations. Managers today need the kind of critical thinking and creative problem solving that one can learn in good educational institutions. Businesses need schools and colleges to help more people complete a post-secondary education with the basic knowledge and skills for the modern workplace.

The research supports this emphasis on completion. Lou Glazer, President of Michigan Future, Inc., reports a high correlation between the percentage of college graduates in a region and the vitality of the economy in that region. Speaking of Michigan, he writes:

Human capital is the asset that matters most to knowledge-based enterprises. Michigan’s fundamental economic challenge is that we rank 34th in the proportion of adults with a four-year degree. States without concentrations of talent will have great difficulty retaining or attracting knowledge-based enterprises and are unlikely to be the place where new knowledge-based enterprises are created. 

In a more recent blog post, Glazer writes:

…all the evidence is that the premium for college attainment is increasing. The gap in pay between college educated adults and those without has been growing for decades. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that life time earnings of those with a four year degree is a million dollars more than for those with a high school degree.

And job growth is coming in those industries where college educated workers are most concentrated. From 1990 to 2007 job growth in what we call high education sectors (predominantly health care; education; finance and insurance; information; and professional and technical services) was twice that in the rest of the economy (primarily manufacturing, hospitality, transportation, construction, retail and temporary services). And during the Great Recession those trends accelerated. Of the 8 million lost jobs, 7.6 million came in the low education attainment sectors.

President Obama has made college graduation a high priority of his administration because of the evidence that connects education to jobs. This week Vice President Biden announced an initiative to reward states and schools that are doing something significant to increase their graduation rates. The administration has set a goal of 8 million additional college graduates by 2020.

The College Board has set a goal of 55 % of the 25 to 34 age group achieving a post-secondary degree by 2025. They write:

The United States ranks fourth out of 36 nations in terms of postsecondary attainment for citizens

ages 55 to 64 years old. The United States is fourth behind the Russian Federation, Israel and Canada in the percentage of citizens with postsecondary degrees.  However, among 25- to 34-year-olds, the United States falls to 12th in degree attainment. For this key demographic group, Canada, Korea, the Russian Federation, Japan, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, Israel, France, Belgium and Australia have managed to leap ahead of the United States, while Denmark and Sweden are close to parity with the United States.

One can quibble with the notion of a causal relationship between a post-secondary education (one-year certificate, two-year associates degree, or four-year bachelors degree) and an increase in jobs and income. It is clear, however, that there is a significant relationship and, given this, it seems to be in the best interests of all of our institutions (business, nonprofits, government) to encourage and support post-secondary education for all students.

 

Google's Search for Good Managers

Managers have a critical role to play in the learning and development of the people who report to them. In fact, that relationship is more critical than anything the HR or Training departments can do to improve performance. This is born out in Google's internal study of good management.

In this self-study, Google identified eight things that “good” managers should do. These imperatives are listed here in order of importance:

1. Be a good coach
2. Empower your team and don’t micromanage
3. Express interest in team member’s success and personal well-being
4. Don’t be a sissy [I don’t know what this means.]; Be productive and results-oriented
5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team
6. Help your employees with career development
7. Have a clear vision and strategy for the team
8. Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team

Adam Bryant, in an article he wrote about this study for the New York Times, points out that while there is nothing new in this list, Google managers pay attention to these behaviors because they are based on Google data. Another important aspect of this internal research is that having technical skills, while important, is at the bottom of the list which might be surprising to some given the technical nature of the business. Bryant writes:

technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.

Apparently, managers are successful in Google, not because of their technical expertise, although that’s important, but because of what they do to help team members learn and develop and achieve success. In the 5As Framework, we call this relationship: “alliance”. The alliance of manager with team member is a critical factor in employee learning and performance improvement.

 

Temporary or Full-Time? Is That the Right Question?

Companies need a flexible workforce, more than ever. They need to add workers quickly to meet unanticipated changes in marketplace demands, they need to grow without spending too much on labor, and they need to respond to normal, cyclical staffing fluctuations. One response to all of these challenges is to bring in temporary workers and another response is to find more flexibility in regular, full-time employees. Ed Frauenheim presents the case for the latter in an article he wrote for Workforce.com. He writes:

Turning to temporary workers is typical during economic recoveries, but some workplace experts are raising questions about the move to a “just-in-time” labor model. Among the concerns are: lack of commitment to the employer, steep wage markups for some temporary jobs, uncertain qualifications of contingent workers and the risk of misclassifying workers as independent contractors, a problem the Obama administration has been targeting.

However, companies need both full-time and temporary workers. Many companies, as they dig out of the recession or manage second and third stage growth or try to manage the vagaries of markets, need the flexibility provided by a combination of full-time and temporary employees.

To use temporary workers effectively, companies need to integrated them into the worklife of the business. Temporary employees can be committed and engaged in their short-term placements if they are hired with that in mind.

The 5As Framework is a useful lens through which to examine the inclusion of temporary employees in a company. According to the Framework, company leaders should ask themselves these five questions:

1. Do temporary employees understand the alignment between the jobs they are being asked to do and the strategic goals of the company?
2. Are expectations for performance clear to temporary employees and is everyone anticipating that they will be successful?
3. Are managers having regular and frequent conversations with their temporary employees about performance goals and progress toward those goals?
4. Are temporary employees being given the same training that any full-time person in the same job would have and are they given the opportunity to immediately apply those newly learned skills on the job?
5. Are measures of progress and performance being used to give temporary employees useful feedback for the purpose of improving performance?

If a company can answer “yes” to each of these questions, then it is very likely that their temporary employees will be committed and engaged and will contribute substantially to the success of the business. 

 

How's It Going, America?

Can we measure happiness? Gallup, in collaboration with Healthways, developed a well-being index and, based on this index, they surveyed at least 1000 people every day for two years to chart the change in happiness across the United States over time. The survey includes questions in the following domains:

1. Life Evaluation  (overall view of life in the present and future)
2. Emotional Health (happiness, stress, and depression)
3. Physical Health (pain and sick days in the past month)
4. Healthy Behavior (smoking, a healthy diet, and exercise)
5. Work Environment (job satisfaction, using strengths at work, and a culture of trust and partnership)
6. Basic Access  (safety, healthcare, food, and shelter)

The only one of these domain measures that went down between 2009 and 2010 was “work environment”. This is not surprising given the state of the economy. However, even with widespread home financing problems and high unemployment, the overall index of well-being went up.

In response to a request by the New York Times, Gallup used the survey to come up with a composite of the happiest person in America: he’s a tall, Asian-American, observant Jew who is at least 65 and married, has children, lives in Hawaii, runs his own business and has a household income of more than $120,000 a year. What’s astounding to me is that they found a person who fits this description living and quite happy in Honolulu!

I have my doubts about the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index data. Survey respondents are asked to remember their behavior from the previous day. While that might seem like a simple task, human beings are notoriously unreliable when it comes to self-report of emotional and physical health, especially to a stranger on the phone. And surveying different people each time is different from surveying the same people each time. On the other hand, the survey probably does provide a useful look at America's general sense of well-being over time. It's a barometer of life in America that should stimulate many interesting questions. 

 

How Entrepreneurs Can Stop Spinning Their Business Wheels

I have written about the power of visioning in recent blog posts. Gino Wickman, in his book, Traction:  
Get a Grip on Your Business, explains in a very practical way, how entrepreneurs can turn a vision into reality in their businesses. Wickman’s book is like a manual for doing very useful strategic planning; not the kind that is handed down from on high or is one more document collecting dust on the shelf.  Rather, this is about involving employees in the visioning, planning, and implementation process. Not only for the entrepreneurial founder of a new business, this book is also good advice for any leader trying to take a department, unit, or team to the next level of performance.  

The book is intended to address five common frustrations of entrepreneurs:

1. Lack of control over time, markets, and the company
2. Employees, customers, vendors, and partners not following through on what needs to be done
3. Not enough profit
4. Inability to grow the company past a certain point
5. New strategies and remedies not working

Wickman argues that entrepreneurs have these frustrations because they lack vision and a plan that is shared by everyone in the company. I have my doubts that Wickman’s approach will resolve the control issues of many entrepreneurs. After all, that’s why they are entrepreneurs. However, it might allow some entrepreneurs to feel a greater sense of control in the short term. 

What Wickman calls a vision, I call a strategic plan. But I’ve never been hung up on terminology. People use vision, mission, core values, and objectives differently. What matters is knowing where you are going, how you will get there, and bringing everyone else along with you. Often, entrepreneurs fail to clearly communicate their vision to others which results in a lack of employee engagement. Wickman emphasizes creating a strategic plan with the leadership team and sharing this plan with all employees. A company needs everyone rowing in unison. He writes:

… you must communicate it to everyone in the organization, and every person must understand it and share it. When everyone’s energy is going in the same direction, their accumulated drive will kick in and create an exponential force.

Wickman relates his approach to Jim Collin's notion of "getting the right people in the right seats." In Traction, we get some guidance on how to do that. It provides some harsh but valuable advice:

1. Be careful what you wish for because you'll get it. if you want to grow, you have to understand that not eveyone is going to be able to keep up and remain in the same seat forever.
2. Keeping people around just because you like them is destructive. You're doing a disservice to the company, to everyone in it, and to the person. People must add value. I realize this may sound cold, but to the degree people are in the right seats, everyone is happier, especially them.

More than anything, this is a book about alignment. After clarifying values and setting goals, Wickman asks entrepreneurs to develop a short and long-range plan, consistent with those goals, that puts the company on the road to achieving those goals. He offers tools for doing this, but I think the message is more important than the tools. That is, take the time to step back and clarify, in very specific terms, what you and your employees want the company to become and then identify the steps to getting there. Focus all of your company’s energy and attention on where you are going, not where you have been.