The Performance Improvement Blog

By the Numbers

It’s not how big your number is; it’s what you do with that number that counts. Alina Tugend writes in the New York Times about our society’s preoccupation with counting things as if assigning a number to something makes it valuable.  She describes her own tendency to pay attention to the number of blog hits, Twitter followers, Facebook friends, and book sales, as if these numbers are a measure of her selfworth.  I do the same. I check the number of people who looked at my blog and I diligently check the statements from my book publishers, as if these numbers are an indication of my worthiness as a professional and as a writer. I know they are not but I check them anyway.

Managers do this with measures of employee performance. In evaluating the effectiveness of financial management training, managers might look at expense-revenue ratios. In evaluating leadership training managers might look at the results of employee engagement surveys. However, neither of these measures tells us whether those training programs were truly effective. Reducing costs and increasing revenue are affected by many organizational and environmental factors beyond improved accounting practices. Employee engagement is affected by many organizational and environmental factors beyond leadership practices. We count the things that can be counted, but numbers don’t give us the whole picture.

Octavius Black, CEO of The Mind Gym, talks about the many companies that regularly measure employee engagement but find that their numbers go down year after year (see video). He identifies five organizational reasons for this:

1. Doing a survey and analyzing the data becomes the goal rather than the goal being to increase employee engagement.
2. A fruitless parent-child kind of debate occurs between management and employees: managers ask employees what they want and employees can’t answer the question.  
3. Management does one big visible thing for employees (e.g., a destination event) and then assumes that the problem is solved.
4. Leaders have a sense of momentary urgency, demand action from everyone, and then eventually lose interest.
5. HR is given the problem to solve when this is a problem that the entire organization needs to address.

 

As with measures of employee engagement, we need to go beyond counting and find out what each number represents. This can be done in several ways. One way is to use numbers as a stimulus for conversations among stakeholders. Why do they think the high counts are high and the low counts are low? What are the implications for the organization? What should be changed and what should be kept the same? This conversation is much more valuable to the organization than the number alone.

Another way to use counts for performance improvement is to find out the story behind the number. Talk to employees about their experiences. What did they learn from the financial management program and how did they apply that learning? What did they learn from the leadership training and how did they apply that learning? Numbers are convenient indicators of behavior and results but unless we dig into the meaning of those numbers, they have little usefulness.

 

What to See in a CEO

How do you hire a great leader? Adam Bryant provides some insightful answers to this question in an article adapted from his new book titled, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed.

Wally Bock writes this about Bryant's book:

Adam Bryant's Corner Office interviews are must-reads for me, so I'm excited about his new book. I'm also excited about this article because it distills Bryant's key learning from those interviews. What I like about the interviews and the lessons Bryant draws from them is that they come from CEOs who are not celebrated media darlings which gives them a freshness that you won't find in the standard business book or your typical hagiographic CEO biography. 

After interviewing over 70 CEOs, from Alan Mulally of Ford Motor to Steve Hannah of The Onion to Judith Jamison of the Alvin Ailey dance company, for his New York Times column, Bryant distills the overarching lessons from what they said about the qualities they look for when hiring leaders for their organizations. He describes these traits in this way…

The good news: these traits are not genetic. It’s not as if you have to be tall or left-handed. These qualities are developed through attitude, habit and discipline — factors that are within your control. They will make you stand out. They will make you a better employee, manager and leader. They will lift the trajectory of your career and speed your progress.

The five traits are:

Passionate curiosity - always asking questions that get people to think reflectively about what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how they can do it better

Battle-hardened confidence - using the experience of failure and perseverance to achieve success and to learn from both failure and success

Team smarts – knowing how to build teams and help them be effective; being aware of group dynamics and facilitating productive interaction among group members

A simple mind-set – making complex ideas simple so that everyone can quickly understand the main points and how the ideas affect what they are doing

Fearlessness – willingness to take reasonable risks and learn from those experiences

Any search for exceptional leaders should consider these traits. Do candidates exhibit these traits in their behavior? Can they describe how these traits are a part of who they are as leaders? Can they explain to what extent they are strong or weak in each of these areas? What I like most about these traits, other than that they were generated from the practical experience of successful leaders, is that they are not about how much someone knows. Rather, they are about the ability to listen and communicate with the people around them in a way that makes everyone successful.

 

Complete to Compete: Community College Student Success (Part Two)

This post continues my comments and observations from attending the 2011 Annual Convention of the American Association of Community Colleges.

Critics of Student Success Agenda

The completion agenda is not without its critics. Several college presidents reminded me that the stigma of community college as being grades 13 and 14 still exists in some quarters. Also, some transfer students who are focused on community college being a vehicle to a Bachelor’s Degree, don’t see the value of earning an Associate’s Degree before transferring. And many employers don’t recognize the value of certain community college certificates. All of these factors are barriers to motivating students to do what is necessary to receive a credential of completion.

One presenter asked, “Why isn’t jobbing-out an acceptable outcome?” Another presenter made us aware that although average completion data might be improving across the country, segments of the population, such as low-income minorities, are completing at a much lower rate. For example, Pima College (Arizona) spends $22 million each year providing developmental courses and has only a 4% success rate.

Other observations from presentors:

• Faculty (full-time and part-time)are at the “fulcrum” for change. They must be part of the solution.
• The message we are sending to High School students is that they don’t have to do anything and they will still be able to go to college. Is this the message we want to be sending?
• We are also sending the message that community colleges are the economic engines of the community and that we will train everyone at very low cost. Can we continue to keep doing this?
• Pell grants are not performance based. In effect, Pell is a reward for not graduating.

Job Supply Side of Success

Several presenters encouraged us to think about community college education from the job supply side of the equation. Roberts T. Jones had this to say about the job market:

• Percent of workforce eligible people is declining
• Today’s jobs require more skill and more knowledge
• 85% of new jobs require a post-secondary education
• One third of the workforce doesn’t have a post-secondary education
• Jobs for many of the unemployed are gone forever
• Employees need the ability to learn new jobs quickly
• People in the current workforce are not prepared for new jobs
• Need to align workforce training with college credit and workplace demands
• Need a performance-based and performance-driven system

Folks from ACT are promoting a national system of assessing (of course) and credentialing workers, especially mid-level employees. In Breaking New Ground: Building a National Credentialing System, they argue for identifying a core set of skills and then measuring where all workers are on each of those skills. I have my doubts about the value of such a system, although I can see why ACT would want it.

Peggy Taylor, VP of Global Talent Acquisition, Hilton Worldwide, made an important observation about community colleges partnering with companies. She gave the example of Hilton needing to hire 50 accountants in the next 30 days. She wants to go to community colleges for help but they need to recognize that she, too, is trying to do more with less; they shouldn’t expect her to spend a lot in this collaboration.

Solutions

Community College League of California has done a lot of work on issues of access and success. They published 2020 Vision, which has many suggestions on how to improve access and success in community colleges. The contributors to this report encourage inviting legislators to meetings to discuss how to increase student success in the face of budget cuts. They also talk about “stackable certificates” that mark progress and accumulate to a degree. And they talk about requiring students to take courses that are essential to progress and completion. One person said, “Students don’t do optional.”

One of the treats of the conference was hearing from Geoffrey Canada, founder of Harlem Children’s Zone. He said that when he tells people that he spends $5,000 per child in addition to school aid money, they say, “But Geoffrey, you can’t bring that to scale,” and then he says in response, “We brought $37,500 per prisoner to scale; why can’t we spend $5,000 now to prevent spending $37,500 later?” For many students, college success depends on investing more in them before they get to college.

 

Complete to Compete: Community College Student Success (Part One)

I’ve written previously about reasons why organization leaders, whether business, nonprofit, or
government, should be concerned about college completion. The talent that these 21rst century organizations need in order to thrive and succeed will come from college graduates who earn a certificate, license, or degree that signifies their readiness to work in a profession.

Full disclosure: I have a special interest in community college completion because I am on the Board of Trustees of Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan and that institution, like all other colleges, is coming under scrutiny regarding the retention and graduation of their students. To learn more about these issues, I recently attended the annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges where concern for increasing student completion rates dominated conference sessions and the exhibit hall.  

I hope the following comments and observations from the conference will stimulate discussion among college trustees, administrators, faculty, staff, and students.

Student Success Surveys

The opening session honored Byron and Kay McClenney for their work in the Community College Leadership Program at the University of Texas. Kay McClenney directs the Center for Community College Student Engagement which does an annual Survey of Entering Student Engagement. This survey is interesting to me not so much because of the data but rather because of the survey items and what they say about a definition of student engagement.

In a session on The College Completion Agenda, presenters offered these key points:

• Access doesn’t necessarily mean success; many other factors determine success.
• We have to re-imagine what it means to be an educated person today and what should be the new “architecture” of education.
• Community colleges have to partner with high schools if they want to make sure that students come to them ready to do college-level learning.
• Parents need to be involved in achieving success; this is especially true in Hispanic families.
• A big challenge is scaling –up; being able to address needs of all students.
• Another big challenge is increasing the number of completers while, at the same time, improving quality.
• Boards of Trustees need to decide how they want to support their college’s student success agenda.

Since 2004, approximately 350 community colleges have participated in the National Community College Benchmark Project. This project collects data from participating institutions on a set of performance indicators that is made up of measures of student outcomes, institutional effectiveness, and community and workforce development.

Similar to the Benchmark Project, the Voluntary Framework of Accountability is AACC’s effort to identify a common set of measures of student success. So far, they have identified metrics in three areas: 1) Student Progress and Outcomes; 2) Workforce, Economic, and Community Development; and 3) Student Learning Outcomes.

Student Success Indicators

The Michigan Community College Association has considered these Benchmark indicators in its proposal to the State of Michigan (in response to a request from the Governor) for how the State can judge the performance of community colleges. MCCA proposed five indicators:

1. Developmental Student Success in First College Level Course: Percent of students that were successful in the immediate prerequisite in developmental Math or English prior to the college-­‐level course in Math or English, then enrolled in and successfully completed the first college-­‐level course in Math or English.
2. Fall to Next Term Persistence Rate: Percent of students that were enrolled in the first, fall term and are still enrolled in the next full academic term.
3. College-­‐Level Course Completion: Percent of students that successfully complete college-­‐level courses.
4. Successful Completion or Transfer: Percent of students successfully completing a degree, certificate, or licensure; or transferring to a baccalaureate-­‐granting institution after six years.
5. Student Performance at Transfer Institutions: Cumulative first year Grade Point Average (GPA) for all transfer students at a state university.

The Study of How Community Colleges Organize for Student Success , a project of Achieving the Dream, is asking these questions:

• What organizational structures and policies can be shown to improve student persistence, transfer and completion?
• How do community colleges organize to support student success? What structures and policies do community colleges currently use?

Based on President Obama’s challenge to graduate five million more community college students by 2020, Harper College in Illinois has set a campus goal of 10,604. They calculated that this number is their share of the five million. That goal is known throughout the institution and administrators, faculty, staff, and students are asking themselves, “What do we have to do to reach 10,604?” It has become a way of focusing campus attention on student success.

More to come about community college student success in my next post.

Learn From Success or Learn From Failure: You Decide

We learn more from studying successes than we do from studying failure. I have become convinced of this from my experience evaluating many change interventions in many different types of organizations. However, a case can be made for both. We can see this in the contrast between the approach of columnists Dan and Chip Heath and that of Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson.

The Heaths, in their book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, make the case for keeping the focus on success. They show how a focus on success, what they call “bright spots”, resulted in improving the nutrition of rural villagers in Vietnam, improving the behavior of a troubled ninth-grader, and improving sales of an effective drug for treating asthma. Humans have a strong tendency to gravitate to things-gone-wrong when the best course of action often is to learn from things-gone-right. The Heaths write:

Our focus, in times of change, goes instinctively to the problems at hand. What's broken and how do we fix it? This troubleshooting mind-set serves us well -- most of the time. If you run a nuclear power plant and your diagnostics turn up a disturbing signal once per month, you should most certainly obsess about it and fix the problem. And if your child brings home a report card with five As and one F, it makes sense to freak out about the F.

But in times of change, this mind-set will backfire. If we need to make major changes, then (by definition) we don't have a near-spotless report card. A lot of things are probably wrong. The "report card" for our diet, or our marriage, or our business, is full of Cs and Ds and Fs. So if you ask yourself, What's broken and how do I fix it?, you'll simply spin your wheels. You'll spend a lot of time agonizing over issues that are TBU [true but useless].

When it's time to change, we must look for bright spots -- the first signs that things are working, the first precious As and Bs on our report card. We need to ask ourselves a question that sounds simple but is, in fact, deeply unnatural: What's working and how can we do more of it?

However, there is a time to learn from failure. Amy Edmondson makes this case in a recent article in Harvard Business Review and in a podcast interview. She argues that most managers don’t know how to learn from failure. She cites the Columbia Shuttle disaster as an example. She says that in order to learn from failure, leaders must create an environment that makes it safe for people to speak up when they notice problems. She writes that managers have misguided beliefs about failure:

First, failure is not always bad. In organizational life it is sometimes bad, sometimes inevitable, and sometimes even good. Second, learning from organizational failures is anything but straightforward. The attitudes and activities required to effectively detect and analyze failures are in short supply in most companies, and the need for context-specific learning strategies is underappreciated. Organizations need new and better ways to go beyond lessons that are superficial (“Procedures weren’t followed”) or self-serving (“The market just wasn’t ready for our great new product”). That means jettisoning old cultural beliefs and stereotypical notions of success and embracing failure’s lessons.

This focus on failure might be necessary when reviewing disasters and developing products. However, when evaluating behavior change in individuals, teams, and organizations, usually much more can be gained from a focus on success. People can explain why they changed their behavior much more readily than why they didn’t change. And they’re much more willing to talk and much more honest about successes than failures given the human propensity to negatively judge people who are not successful.