Tag: Employee Engagement

How Useless Are “Performance Standards” In The Workplace Today?

Posted on by Maya Mehta

There is a common belief that for change to occur in an organization you must set high-performance standards and develop clear measures against that standard. These performance standards, we’re told, must be consistent across the culture and approved by top management, otherwise, they will not be effective. This belief is so ingrained that it has become the standard operating procedure, and questioning it might seem hopelessly idealistic.

But have you noticed that some of the things the world values most RESIST STRICT MEASUREMENT OF PERFORMANCE STANDARDS?

Consider the “softer” values such as trust, integrity, and creativity. You’ve likely noticed they’re often the ones with the most power to shape the world around us, yet these seem to stubbornly resist being subjected to a standard of measurement.

So, how can you reframe the conversation around needing measurable performance standards as a pre-requisite for producing the kind of results and the type of workplace that promotes the common good?

What’s wrong with Performance Standards

If you’re operating on the assumption that change is driven by measures and standards, you’ll set new performance standards and create universal measures against those standards. Perhaps you would establish an oversight committee to measure performance standards and adherence to those new standards.

In the case of unsatisfactory performance, you might conclude that efforts failed because the standards were not high enough and the measures were not sufficiently accurate.

This happens time and time again until a change effort is made, creating a new set of standards and measures to drive-up performance. You’ve likely seen this cycle play out in the proliferation of high-stakes standardized testing in public education.

Let’s reframe Performance Standards

To be honest, we need measurable performance standards. We all want to know what is required of us and how we are doing. We’re not proposing getting rid of measurable standards altogether. Instead, we propose a shift to focus on who sets the standards and measures and how they are used.

Too often measurable performance standards are used as a control device, not a mechanism for learning. This flows from a particular mode of thinking grounded in problem-solving. It is the engineering mind that elevates standards and measures to the level of dogma and ideology. This is fine for engineering projects.

But the idea that we can engineer human development is more mythology than fact.

Standards-setting has become part of the class struggle in society, where one class of people is setting standards for another. Legislators set them for teachers, management set them for workers, professional guilds set them for their members. They may start with sincere intent, but they soon become exclusionary and punitive. They become a way to limit access to membership, force compliance, and keep those who were first through the door in their positions of power.

What Performance Standards matter to YOU?

The solution to over-surveillance, isolation, and protecting the status quo is to have people close to the learning and development, the work, or the service struggle with installing proper performance standards for their local environment.

Ask people to define the performance that will have meaning for them. Then have them talk about how they want to hold themselves accountable. This reduces the possibility that measurable performance standards will become punitive. Once measures become punitive, people will work to outsmart them to survive; learning decreases, and energy that should be going toward achieving the work is replaced by subversive efforts to “beat the system.”

How does this work?

Instead of a centralized mandate that is rolled out across the culture of the organization, have the performance standards designed by those who are being measured.

Then a few guiding principles should follow.

Firstly, it is essential to be realistic about predictability. Secondly, value longer-term, qualitative measures. Remember: even if you cannot measure it, it might still be worth doing. Most often what is measured are people’s methods and behavioral style. But what if you were to stop measuring people’s behavioral styles and start measuring business results and real outcomes?

Do you risk Quality Control?

Wait! How can management maintain quality when each unit, each workgroup, each team decides its own measures and performance standards? Don’t worry, there is still quality control. The difference is that is it maintained by team members and peer-to-peer agreements.

Rather than typical carrot-and-stick tactics, what if performance standards were negotiated between peers and then with bosses as the means of ensuring that commitments get fulfilled? These contracts would be between partners, so the expectations and commitments go both ways, with equal demands placed on each side.

The intent here is to eliminate coercion as the basis for getting results. These performance contracts are not tied to pay or punishment, though they may be tied to termination in extreme cases. We can fire people if they do not deliver on their promise. What is different is that we stop trying to improve employee performance by threatening sanctions, manipulating privilege, or withholding pay.

Do what matters most:

  1. Rather than create a central mandate, have the people closest to the work decide the standards appropriate for their local environment.
  2. Ask members of the peer group or team to define the measures that have meaning for them.
  3. Have peer groups decide how to keep themselves accountable, with bosses and employees serving to ensure commitments are fulfilled.

Where Else Is This Working? Reframing the “Guaranteed Success” Problem

Posted on by Maya Mehta

Business is risky. There is no way around it. You need to try new things to advance and yet you also somehow want a “guaranteed success.” Thus two major impulses are constantly in conflict: wanting to innovate and at the same time wanting the reassurance that what you are contemplating has been tried before. This is the paradox of success and safety.

How do you convince your stakeholders, and yourself, that the risks of the new venture are worthwhile?

The most attractive proof, of course, is an example of somewhere else the idea has worked well. This provides tangible evidence that this new opportunity will give you all-but-guaranteed success. But this is a false promise based on a faulty expectation. The answer is to reframe the problem.

If You Acted On This Definition

Based on the desire for a “guaranteed success” you would research examples of where what you propose is working. You would look for organizations in the same business as your client. You might arrange site visits, references, and a feasibility study.

Reframing “Guaranteed Success”

“Where else is it working?” seems like it’s a valid and compelling inquiry. Who would argue against learning from others? The problem is that the question perpetuates the belief that others know and we don’t. This does not mean that we cannot learn from others. It is just that asking “how” is a poor method of learning.

We learn by bearing witness to how others live their lives. We learn from the questions others have the courage to ask. We are more likely to be transformed from dialogue about what is real and what is illusion.

These conversations are qualitatively different from seeking methods and answers.

“Where else has this worked?” is a reasonable question, within limits. It is dangerous when it becomes an unspoken statement: If this has not worked well elsewhere, perhaps we should not do it.

The wish to attempt only what has been proven creates a life of imitation. We may declare we want to be leaders, but we want to be leaders without taking the risk of invention. The question can lead us down a spiraling trap: If what is being recommended or contemplated is, in fact, working elsewhere, then the next question is whether someone else’s experience is relevant to our situation—which, upon closer scrutiny, it is not.

The value of another’s experience is to give us hope, not to tell us how or whether to proceed.

While it is prudent to try to mitigate risk and do your homework, guaranteed success does not truly exist. Even if it is working somewhere else, there is no assurance that it will work here. Every new idea has to be customized locally. Although it is tempting, you risk making a false promise if you support the idea that a change can be imported with little risk into your client’s workplace. Although there may be much overlap in some details, there are always hidden factors that may have allowed success in one setting, but which would prevent it in another.

The Root: Doubt and Anxiety

So what can be done? The role of the consultant, in this case, is to help the client understand that behind their question of where it is working are doubt and anxiety. They have a wish for a guarantee that this “risky thing” will be successful. It would be strange if this were not present. Yet as a consultant working in partnership, you cannot make this promise because so much depends on the energy and investment of the client. Part of the work, therefore, is to help the client see that while wanting reassurance is natural, the expectation of a guarantee is driven by fear and is not realistic.

On the other side of the table, consultants can also face the tension between selling and consulting. You are really doing both but lean toward the consulting. Selling means your goal is to make the sale; consulting means the goal is to help the client make a good decision. Because there is a tension here, beware of any tendency to “oversell” a course of action, especially one that you have successfully pursued before. This inadvertently reinforces the false hope for “guaranteed success.”

Clients will make a better decision if they understand all that is required to make a change, especially at the local level. The field of consulting carries the shame of promising too much too soon. The search for what is working elsewhere might be useful, but can’t be a substitute for a willingness to try something new, with little more than your own faith as proof you are making a good decision.

To act in this new frame:

  1. Don’t assume that success elsewhere guarantees success here.
  2. Help the client and yourself by recognizing the place of doubt and anxiety in any new venture.
  3. Bring as much local knowledge to bear as possible. The more the idea is locally customized, the better chance it will succeed.

[Adapted from Peter Block, ‘Twelve Questions to the Most Frequently Asked Answers,’ The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion: A Guide to Understanding Your Expertise, 2001, pp. 401]

Taking It To Scale: Reframing the “Scalability” Problem

Posted on by Maya Mehta

Whenever a pilot project is successful, the question you can inevitably expect is “scalability.” How do you take this to scale and make the same thing happen across departments, or locations, or teams? It worked in one place, so let’s make it work in every place.

And let’s do it in a hurry.

For businesses under constant pressure to adapt and produce results, what could give a greater sense of safety than replicating “proven” methods?

But very often what worked in one place fails dismally in another.

This doesn’t mean the wish for scalability is wrong. But how can you reframe this classic problem in order to deliver the desired outcomes? Let’s explore.

If You Acted on This Definition

With the stated goal of taking the project “to scale,” your most likely course of action would be to standardize the elements of the pilot. Figure out the basic structure of the successful project and codify it into workable structures and procedures.

You would then obtain support from the top. Next, you would turn it into a program, hold a bunch of meetings, conduct training programs, set system-wide standards, and all the rest that has become stock in trade in change management.

Reframe “Scalability”

There is an underlying reason why this approach so often fails. Pilot projects work largely because people in one local site are engaged in creating them. Because they are locally engaged, they are able to act within the full scope of their own needs, circumstances, and knowledge. It is this act of engagement and creation that leads to high performance.

When you take something to scale and do it fast, the imaginative life is drained out of it. What you end up doing is to attempt to extract what is “universal” from what has worked locally. And usually, this means figuring out how to replicate certain outcomes rather than the creative processes that led to them. Therefore, when applied elsewhere, what once was a choice becomes coercion.

Nothing can be taken to scale. The success record of proliferation is poor.

The way to think about it is that, like politics, all change is local. You can’t easily copy and paste results from one locality to another. But what you can proliferate is the possibility of local invention following some loose guidelines and statements of purpose.

Don’t fall for the trap of thinking that top management is simply to blame for problems in “scalability.” Support from the top is not necessary to shape an organization of your choosing. Let top management set the mission. But every unit should be able to express its own vision of how best to organize and train itself in order to achieve that mission. This is the only way that the mission can be instantiated at the local level. Otherwise, the top’s inherent distance from the local circumstances will sabotage the ability to replicate the intended results.

Lastly, be prepared for this to take time. The wish to do something quickly is really a defense against local choice. It is the argument that we do not have time to engage a lot of people.

Don’t buy speed as an argument. Speed is a defense against depth and meaning. Nothing important happens quickly. Choose quality of experience over speed. The world changes from depth of commitment and capacity to learn.

To act within this frame:

  1. Don’t assume what worked “there” will work “here.”
  2. Engage local workers in the creative process of creating a vision for their unit.
  3. Go in for the long haul. Although engaging more people takes more time, it will produce more meaningful and resilient change.

[Adapted from Peter Block, ‘Twelve Questions to the Most Frequently Asked Answers,’ The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion: A Guide to Understanding Your Expertise, 2001, pp. 398-399]

When we offer a service primarily because clients want it, we have chosen commerce over care.

Fix Those People: Reframing the “Behavior Modification” Problem

Posted on by Maya Mehta

Behavior modification (or behavior change) is a classic human predicament that is reflected in the question: How do I get those people to change their behavior?

You might be a parent dealing with a toddler. Or a government official looking for compliance with a new policy. Or a business consultant trying to implement change in an organization. Whatever the relationship and mission, you will have wondered how exactly to get other people to act in the way you want. Let’s call these behavior modification schemes. Sometimes they are manipulative. But most often they are grounded in a good desire for the behavior you feel is in the group’s best interest.

In the workplace, this problem often takes forms such as:

  • How do you get them to adopt the new mission, the new business, or institutional reality?
  • How do you give them the skills they need for the new world?

Most likely, such questions are being asked by top management with regards to local groups and how they operate on the ground. But given that such behavior modification is notoriously difficult, how can the issue be reframed to create a better possibility?

If You Acted on This Definition

If the goal is taken as behavior modification, then it makes sense to start the modification by communicating and offering training in a big way. You would spend time defining the desirable behaviors, then design or purchase programs to meet those competencies. You would then train managers to conduct the programs and get the top leaders to endorse them. The end result, you should hope, would be the new behaviors being acted out across the organization. Problem solved. Right? Well…maybe not.

Reframing “Behavior Modification”

The thing is that “those people” are very unlikely to be the real problem. To add injury to the insult, wide-scale training will cost a lot and redirect resources away from the real problem. Plus, focusing on people’s deficiencies only reinforces them.

Change is more likely to happen when we capitalize on, and bring to bear people’s capacities, and gifts, and strengths.

Despite the claims of consultants and their intimate organizational champions, large-scale training has had a poor record of changing organizations. There is an uncomfortable truth here. As the economic beneficiaries of the training movement, consultants are reluctant to be accountable for the fact that most large change efforts have led to little change.

Consultants often hold on to the belief that if they had more top management support, things would have been different. But there is a false assumption beneath this belief.

The reality is that effective behavior modification throughout an organization is rarely dictated by a central mandate. It is much more likely to arise in response to circumstances on the ground.

Resist the “Fix” Mentality

This is why you must resist the “fix” mentality, where centralized control becomes the catch-all solution. Rather, local groups deciding what change and learning they need–with an emphasis on their underutilized capacities–is a faster and cheaper path to learning.

Here is the change in mentality you’ll need:

As a consultant, you are not in the behavior modification business but in the community-organizing business: Bringing local groups together, engaging them in questions of purpose, allowing for local variation wherever possible. These practices create relational equity. You can make the bet that this engagement effort will lead to a level of accountability that will make up for any “fixing” benefits that might accrue from the traditional strategy.

In summary, to act in this new frame:

  1. Focus NOT on people’s deficiencies but on their gifts and strengths.
  2. Challenge the assumption that top management is what ultimately drives organizational behavior.
  3. Resist the urge to “fix” things centrally. Instead, let local groups decide what they need to learn to face their reality.

[Adapted from Peter Block, ‘Twelve Questions to the Most Frequently Asked Answers,’ The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion: A Guide to Understanding Your Expertise, 2001, pp. 399-400]

The Inmates Run the Prison: Reframing “The Bad Boss” Problem

Posted on by Maya Mehta

Whether in the workplace, politics, or sports, the barrier to success is often defined as a “bad boss” behavior problem. In fact, the “Bad Boss” problem can manifest in almost any environment you find yourself in. But is this ubiquitous gripe the heart of the issue? Perhaps not.

What the “Boss” complaint reveals is that the most common consulting problems deal with the human system. No matter how technical the assignment, issues are often thought of as “presenting problems”…what seems obvious, the “low hanging fruit.”

Beware: this may be a trap.

When there are no good answers, the problem is likely with the question.

In other words, the root problem is often with the way the problem is defined or the way the question is framed. This is where the client gets stuck and where you might get stuck as well.

Once a better question is asked, it can reshape their entire understanding of the issue and open a path to an alternate future.

So how can this classic problem be reframed? Here are some thoughts on how to deal with the human system rather than just the presenting problem.

The Presenting Problem: The Boss is Bad

The team feels helpless and distressed and identifies the problem as a tyrannical boss. The boss is too controlling, plays favorites, doesn’t communicate enough, controls too much–you name it. This issue is known to surface at every level of an organization–even executives complain of being controlled by others.

If You Acted On This Definition

By focussing on the problem as described above, you might be inclined to find the boss a coach (or gently suggest they take advantage of employee assistance program benefit and speak to a therapist), submit them to the rigors of a 360-degree assessment, and pray that the boss changes their bad habits.

Reframing The “Bad Boss” Problem

As long as the presenting problem is narrowly framed around dealing with the boss, then the team unit essentially has no agency and is rendered useless in creating better working relationships.

But remember: the inmates run the prison. The deeper problem is that the members of the team do not support each other.

Human beings can’t change other human beings, but they can work together to co-create an environment where individual choices are respected and where the impact of their decisions on the team is taken into account.

If members of a team support each other in public, they can handle any boss.

Here’s what team support looks like: if one member confronts the boss in a meeting, the others have to affirm their support verbally–no staying silent or giving support after the conversation has ended. This reframes the problem by acknowledging the innate freedom of the team, and accepting the power to act is in their hands.

bad boss cannot succeed against a supportive team
Public Team Support

If the boss isn’t bossing well, then the team isn’t teaming well.

To act within a frame of ownership [powerful agency] the team has to:

  1. Overcome its sense of caution as employees. This is choosing to act within the freedom that the team possesses to frame a better social contract for the good of the unit as a whole, including the boss.
  2. Meet independently. You must decide what is required to get the work done. Consider these questions: What alternate future does the team desire to build? What commitments is the team willing to make to bring this into reality?
  3. Bring it up to the boss with the whole team present. This is essential to creating a supportive team structure. Be sure that everyone is at the table to avoid a perception that “not everyone is on board,” giving way for the possibility of blame to start all over again.

This may feel like mutiny and knowledge workers may hesitate at this idea. So help them get over it. The payoff is that creating a supportive team will go a long way to dealing with the underlying issues that perpetuate the “Bad Boss” scenario.

[Adapted from Peter Block, ‘Twelve Questions to the Most Frequently Asked Answers,’ The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion: A Guide to Understanding Your Expertise, 2001, pp. 393-394]