10
Pinpointing
If you don’t know where you are going,
any road will take you there.
If It’s Working, Find Out Why
The president of a manufacturing company, aware of my experience as a clinical psychologist, asked me to explain why a really top performer (plant manager) would “become almost useless overnight.” “Could it be drugs, alcohol, stress, family problems, or something like that?” he asked. I said it was possible, but I needed to know more.
He then described a performance problem in a plant in Louisiana and continued, “We decided the plant manager had failed to take any action, so we let him go and promoted the assistant plant manager to take his place. The new plant manger did a great job, and things turned around almost immediately. Not too long after that, we began having trouble with a larger plant in Virginia, so we moved him there. Shortly after his arrival, the plant was doing much better. Now we’ve brought him to our home base, where we have our largest plant, and his performance is a disaster. I can’t believe how unorganized he is. He doesn’t plan well; he doesn’t follow through; he changes priorities from day to day. He seems confused. What would cause such a change?”
“What did he do to turn the plant around in Louisiana?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied.
“What did he do to turn the plant around in Virginia?”
“I don’t know,” he repeated.
“Then what makes you think he is doing anything different now?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
I don’t think the plant manager was doing anything different in his third assignment than he had done in the first two plants. Circumstances, rather than his behavior, probably accounted for the difference in results.
This company was managed solely by results. As long as the results were there, little attention was paid to how the results were attained. In many organizations in this country, if you are getting results, management leaves you alone, and managers spend their time with those who are not getting results. This is an ineffective and very risky management practice.
As a lieutenant in the Army, I heard many times, “I don’t care how you get it—just get it!” In the 1950s and 1960s, organizations using this same strategy seemed unconcerned with how results were achieved. Business was booming and getting results at almost any personnel or production cost. The increased costs were simply passed on to the consumer. Today, with even tougher competition and significantly heightened social awareness, organizations must be vigilant about how results are attained or face serious economic, social, and legal consequences.
Today, it is not enough to know that something is working. We need to know why it works. This point is very clear. If you don’t know why something works, how will you know how to fix it when things go wrong or circumstances change?
You cannot truly manage by results alone. Getting results is critical to an organization’s survival and success. No organization can survive without them. However, short-term results can be achieved by using totally inappropriate behavior. The sales representative who cuts a deal that is impossible for the company to honor and the manager who fudges on the numbers to make production figures look good are just a couple of examples in which the ends are not justified by the means. Short-term results can be achieved in ways that will drive up costs and damage quality and safety later. We must always be interested in and very knowledgeable about how results are attained.
Unfortunately, we sometimes pay attention to behaviors only when the results turn sour. The cause of the Exxon Valdez oil spill was inappropriate behavior that had been tolerated or ignored for some time. The crew and the captain engaged in behaviors other than those that would safely guide the oil tanker through the waters. The press reported that the captain had an alcohol problem, but his past results were sufficient, and Exxon officials had ignored the behaviors related to this problem until it was too late.
Other disastrous examples of results-only management include the savings and loan and insider-trading scandals that signaled the end of the winner-takes-all mentality of the 1980s. In every one of these cases, inappropriate behaviors produced positive short-term results—and long-lasting negative ones. This kind of management might more appropriately be called “management by autopsy” because it is only after some problem that an investigation is launched. From a behavioral perspective, because there are no behaviors to be seen at the time of the investigation, it can only be assumed that behavioral causes and assumptions are erroneous.
Sustaining results requires precise management. Managers need to know precisely which outcomes are required and precisely what behaviors produce them. The procedure for specifying results and behaviors is pinpointing. Pinpointing means being specific about a result you want and then being very specific about the behaviors required to achieve that result.
Beware of the Activity Trap: Pinpoint Results First
At the annual governor’s conference in August 1993, President Clinton commented that when he was governor of Arkansas, he was excited about going to work every day because he knew that he would be able to accomplish some things that day. He observed that when he went to Washington, people seemed to be more concerned with the process of getting something done than they were with the product. He commented, “It’s the darndest [sic] thing I’ve ever seen.”
Although the element most often missing in the pinpointing process is the behavior pinpoint, it is still very important to pinpoint results first. You need both, but you should always pinpoint results before you pinpoint behaviors. While this sounds obvious, it’s commonplace today for organizations to start programs that require people to change the way they work, with only a general idea of the results they want to achieve.
This is particularly true in the human relations area, where certain behaviors are assumed to have value. Teams, participative management, and employee engagement initiatives, for example, are often “sacred cows,” whose real value to the organization is seldom questioned. Frequently, these programs are initiated without any direct ties to specific results. Many organizations have found themselves spending a lot of time and money with little or no return.
For example, the 1992 Initial Quality Study showed that cross-functional teams that include the customer did not always result in improved performance. An unpublished study conducted at Auburn University in 1991 by Dr. Bill Hopkins also found no evidence that self-directed teams are an effective means of achieving important organizational objectives. Hopkins further reported that “[w]e have not found one published paper that reports clear increases in areas such as productivity, quality of production, or sales or clear declines in areas such as absenteeism, scrap, or maintenance costs.”
General statements such as “improved morale,” “better decisions,” and “personal pride” make great slogans, but they don’t represent tangible pinpointed results. Programs are rarely measured and evaluated against such nonspecific outcomes.
Pinpoint the specific results you want first. Then identify the behaviors necessary to produce those results. If you know precisely which result you want, you can then test the relationship between the behaviors you think will get it and the actual accomplishment. You should never assume that you already know the behaviors that will produce the results. Always evaluate changes in behavior against changes in results.
One of our clients, an electrical connector manufacturer, made the error of thinking it knew the critical selling behaviors for its product. Sales management directed the sales force to call on architects to persuade them to specify the company’s product in their architectural designs. Sales management assumed that this behavior was the best way to sell more of the company’s product. But it was difficult to get appointments with the architects, and the sales managers had to constantly prod their salespeople to keep after the architects and chide salespeople for not obtaining appointments with the architects more often.
As a part of our work on improving the effectiveness of the company’s sales management, we audited the sales reps’ performance. One of the things we did was follow the best salespeople to observe what they did to make sales. The audit results shocked management because the data showed that their best salespeople spent almost no time with architects. They spent most of their time with distributors.
The behavior that produced the best sales results was calling on the distributors and convincing them to use the company’s product regardless of what had been specified by the architect. The assumption of which behaviors would result in sales was based on someone’s intuition rather than on actual observation and solid evidence.
Pinpoints Are Not Inside the Person
To use pinpointing effectively, it is necessary to remember one very important rule: pinpoints are real. They are tangible, observable results and behaviors, not beliefs, attitudes, or anything else internal, subjective, or abstract, but something you can see. Terms such as motivation, personality, communication, and rapport are useful when we are communicating informally, but when we need to change performance, they are not useful because they create prejudice and build obstacles to progress. Correcting or improving some performance or outcome requires precise pinpointing.
Labels such as “lazy,” “lacks drive,” and “bad attitude” imply that the problem—and therefore the solution to the problem—is within the person. Using labels to describe performance not only can’t help change the performance, but it also produces blame. We blame the performer for being unmotivated, having a bad attitude, needing too much attention, or not having enough drive. When you approach a problem this way, the only solution is to tell the person to “shape up or ship out.”
Another problem with these performer stereotypes is that even if, as a manager, you accept the responsibility to “change someone,” if you don’t have a pinpointed behavior, you don’t know which behavior to change. The reason most people think that you can’t change a person’s attitude or personality is that what is generally referred to as personality is actually a collection of many behaviors. To change someone’s attitude requires that you pinpoint the behaviors that make up the attitude. If you can pinpoint the behaviors, you can, at least, change them one at a time. If over time you change some or all of the behaviors, you certainly will change an individual’s personality. The process of pinpointing gives you a realistic place to start the change process.
In the Eye of the Beholder. What do we mean when we say a person has a positive attitude? We could be referring to the fact that the individual is always on time, or seldom complains, or keeps the work area exceptionally clean, or volunteers to help others, or smiles and jokes, or maintains high productivity and quality. In other words, we could characterize a person as having a positive attitude if he did any one or a few of those things or all of them.
The same is also true for performers with a bad attitude. They, too, demonstrate a pattern of behaviors that results in a negative label. Once you realize that a bad attitude is composed of many behaviors, it’s easy to understand why attitude is so difficult to change or remedy. Flushing out and pinpointing the specific and observable behaviors that make up the bad attitude or cause you to label the person as negative or uncooperative are essential if you are to effectively change the performer’s attitude.
Labels Don’t Provide Answers. Using vague phrases or labels to describe problem performance does nothing to change or improve performance. Calling someone lazy or worthless fails to provide the necessary information needed to change behavior. The productive question to ask is, “Which specific behaviors cause me to label this person lazy?” Turning in projects late? Turning in messy work? Failing to follow through with customers and coworkers on important assignments? These are specific questions that can lead to specific answers.
What to Do … For some managers, pinpointing is the most difficult and time-consuming part of managing performance. We always seem to know more about what we don’t want people to do than what we want them to do. We issue directives such as, Don’t make errors, Don’t have accidents, and Don’t be late. What we must keep in mind is that people are hired to do things. Active behavior gets things done.
If, for example, someone is making mistakes in data entry on an assembly procedure, telling the person to stop making errors will not solve your problem because one way of not making errors is to do nothing. Errors are always a measure of something other than the behavior of interest, so you will not necessarily get what you want by stopping what you don’t want. If you tell people to stop using their cell phones while working, for example, they may stop the calls but talk to coworkers instead. Pinpointing behavior requires finding what people need to do, not what they don’t do.
The importance of pinpointing active behaviors was made clear by Dr. Ogden Lindsley. In 1965 he developed the dead-man’s test, which is “If a dead man can do it, it isn’t behavior, and you shouldn’t waste your time trying to produce it.”
Yet much of what we typically track in quality and safety violates the dead-man’s test. “Zero defects” and “days without a lost-time accident” are prime examples of popular goals that violate the dead-man’s test. Dead men never have accidents, and they never produce defective parts.
If you examine a typical business, you’ll see numerous examples of management focusing on inactive behavior or behavior that leads to no accomplishment. Some people think that this active versus inactive dimension of pinpointing is really two sides of the same coin—that it’s more a problem of semantics than a real problem. Not so.
One day I looked out the window of my office and saw two young carpenters just as they finished paneling the roof of a new building in our office park before putting on the shingles.
As crazy as it may sound, one of them proceeded to do a handstand on the crown of the roof. He then walked on his hands from one end of the building to the other, a distance of about 60 feet. Not to be outdone, his coworker followed close behind. Obviously, this was something the two athletic young men had done many times before. It was certainly not safe behavior, but neither fell, and they ended the job with “no lost-time accidents.” Using the criteria of the usual safety program, these two could easily qualify as participants at their employer’s safety celebration commemorating a million hours without a lost-time accident. As you can see, no “lost-time accidents” doesn’t necessarily reflect the level of safe behaviors on the job; it just reflects a fortunate result. In the same way, zero defects do not equal careful quality-oriented behavior. Even though the day of the explosion on the Horizon deep-water oil platform in 2010 there was a celebration of seven years of operation without a lost-time accident, the safety report showed many failures to perform correct monitoring and repair of items that posed potential risks. It is quite possible that many unsafe behaviors occurred every day of the seven years without a lost-time accident. Monitoring results without observing the behaviors that produce them may cause disastrous results.
If It Doesn’t Move, It’s a Result
Like behaviors, results also can be more precisely pinpointed. Gilbert (1978) developed a test for determining whether you have an accomplishment. He called his test the leave-it test. The leave-it test works this way: if you can leave it behind when you walk out of the office or plant, it is a result. If it’s something you take with you, it is not. For example, “safety awareness” cannot be left behind at the end of the day and therefore would not meet Gilbert’s definition of a result.
Safety awareness, better communication, and increased teamwork are not pinpointed results, and effort spent trying to produce them may consume considerable financial and personnel resources, generating little value to the organization. These phrases are descriptions of a problem and, as such, represent only a beginning to solving it. You must pinpoint the desired result more precisely if you are to solve problems reliably and efficiently.
Behaviors and results define performance, and you need both to run an efficient and effective organization. So how do you pinpoint?
Precision Pinpointing
Pinpointing means being specific about results and behaviors. It requires precise descriptions of results and behaviors that are can be reliably observed and measured.
Observability
Seeing is believing. In the final analysis, business has to be interested in results and behaviors that can be seen. Pinpointing observable results is relatively easy. This is why we have focused on them for so long. The problem of observability comes up when we try to pinpoint behavior. Factors that affect behavior but are not observable, such as thoughts and emotions, are not the province of management. We can’t expect line managers, or anyone for that matter, to delve into the inner feelings of others. The good news is we don’t have to. You can manage yourself and others very successfully by limiting yourself to pinpointing behaviors that you can see and hear.
Measurability
Many people, when faced with these characteristics of good pinpoints, immediately complain that these criteria (especially measurement) will limit the pinpoints they can identify. This is not the case. The fact is that if something is happening, it can be measured. Every behavior can be measured in terms of frequency or duration or both. Even when something is not happening, it is being measured. The measure is zero. Some things may not be worth measuring, but if it is important, it can be measured. (Measurement will be explained in detail in Chapter 11.)
Reliability
The third characteristic of a valid pinpoint is reliability. When two or more people can observe a behavior or result and come up with the same count or measure, you have a true pinpoint.
Have you ever heard someone described as “friendly” by one coworker and then described as “aloof” by someone else? They are either observing or measuring different things or their measures are not reliable. This example from the American Journalism Review will show you what I mean:
From the Washington Post, January 15:
“Donna E. Shalala … at her confirmation hearing … faced little in the way of tough questioning….”
From the New York Times, same day:
“… Shalala encountered tough questioning today….”
From the Washington Post, January 16:
“Diary Says Bush Knew ‘Details’ of Iran Arms Deal”
From the New York Times, same day:
“Entries Suggest [Bush] Did Not Know Details …”
Refining observations to the point of reliability is an important skill in pinpointing. We may often start with a pinpoint that is not totally reliable, but as we use it, measure it, and discuss our observations, we can refine it until it becomes more and more reliable. Even journalists could be trained to do this.
Counts of Behaviors Versus Results
As I pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, behavior is what a person does, and a result is what is produced by the behaviors. Differentiating the two is sometimes difficult when you first begin pinpointing.
A count of behavior is sometimes confused with important organizational results. Behavior counts (e.g., number of times one of your staff gets reports in on time, number of times one of your peers disrupts a staff meeting with jokes, or number of days an employee arrives on time) are important measures of behavior if your goal is to reduce or increase that behavior, but they are not results.
Some organizations require employees to attend a fixed number of hours of training each year. Is this a valuable result or a count of behaviors? I consider attendance at training as merely a count of behaviors. The valuable result should be measured in terms of on-the-job performance.
Results are usually defined as some outcome that is valuable to the organization: number of defect-free items produced, increased revenue per sale, or reduction of cycle time. Of course, it is important to measure both behaviors and results, but you should avoid confusing the two.
Figure 10-1, from Performance Management: Improving Quality Productivity Through Positive Reinforcement, will help you to differentiate behaviors from results.
Figure 10–1 Points for distinguishing behaviors from results.
Control of the Pinpoint
One of the important considerations in pinpointing a behavior or result you would like to change is to make sure that the behaviors and/or results are under the performer’s control. Care must be given to identifying pinpoints that are within the influence of the performer.
Two examples come to mind. On the production floor, frontline employees do not typically control cost. Someone in purchasing does that. Employees control use of materials and supplies that have an impact on cost.
Frontline employees don’t usually control units produced per day either. Production control may cut the production schedule or increase it. In these situations, the performer controls only the number of units produced per hour when material is available.
When developing pinpoints, it’s important to specify the results performers control. A rule of thumb is to describe the results that are as close as possible to the behaviors that produce them.
Although few people in business today have total control over results, the control requirement is usually satisfied if a person or group has more control over the pinpoint than anyone else. One test for control is to ask, “If the performer did nothing, would the result change dramatically?”
Another way to determine whether a performer has control over results is to look at the data. If there are wild swings in the data from day to day, the performer probably doesn’t have control. Also, if the data never vary, the performer probably doesn’t have control either. If there are minor variations from shift to shift or performer to performer, then the performer likely is in control of much of the result. The only way you can know whether the performer is really in control is to correlate change in behavior with change in results.
In summary, when you can pinpoint results and behaviors that are active, measurable, observable, reliable, and under the control of the performers, you will have taken the first step toward being able to bring out the best in people.