By way of example, let me share with you a situation I observed while I was at secondary school and university.

I grew up in Masterton, New Zealand. The town is known for producing a number of outstanding individuals such as musician Pip Brown (better known by her stage name of Ladyhawke) and Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords. (Little known fact: Jemaine and I went to the same secondary school. Admittedly, I finished my last year there just before he was born).

My parents were rather poor, though I didn’t notice it at the time. Consequently they couldn’t afford to contribute to my university education. So each summer I worked at the local meat processing plant (the Waingawa Freezing Works) for three months, to make enough money to pay my fees and survive for the year. I mostly worked on the lamb and beef processing chains.

Masterton is an inland rural community. Summer temperatures can get pretty high, and the meat processing industry was highly unionised at the time. So inevitably there was a union enforced rule that once the air temperature rose to a certain level on the meat processing floor, everyone would stop work until the temperature dropped again.

None of this made sense to me. As a student I was intent on making as much money as I could in the short space of time I had available. But for the guys who worked in this industrial environment year in and year out, work was a drudgery to be endured. If they could find a way to get a break, they took it. And if they could find an excuse to finish work early for the day, particularly on a gloriously hot summer’s day, they’d take it. High air temperature on the meat processing floor was one of the few legitimate excuses available.

And guess what people would do when they got off early from work. They played. They’d get a few guys together for a round of golf. Some went down to the tennis courts. While others picked up their children after school, got together with other families and raced to the local park for an impromptu game of cricket and a picnic.

Yet sport and work have many similarities. Take a meat processing chain, or any other similar industrial environment. You have a large building in which a number of people are carrying out repetitive tasks. Compare that with the sport of 10-pin bowling, for example. Here you have a large building in which a number of people are carrying out repetitive tasks!

After all, when you break down 10-pin bowling to its basics, here’s what happens. You pick up a heavy object, stride up to a lane and toss the object across the room. You then take a short break before picking up another heavy object, striding up to a lane and tossing the object across the room. You then take a short break before picking up another heavy object… You get the picture.

So how is it that people get excited by games, like 10-pin bowling, but often not about work?

The factors we’ve covered in the last two posts “What Drives Employee Engagement? Part 1” and “What Drives Employee Engagement? Part 2” are the key.

I suggest that often there are more environmental supports available in many sports that provide the motivation to participate. Environmental supports that are often missing in the workplace. Keeping with the 10-pin bowling theme, those supports are:

DATA
A clear description of what is expected of performance (Knock the pins over. The more the better.)

Relevant and frequent feedback about the adequacy of performance (Immediately after each bowl, see the pins get knocked down; track the score on the electronic scoring system; and track the score on your own scorecard if you wish)

TOOLS
Provide the necessary tools, materials or processes to assist people to perform their job (Everything from the shoes and bowling balls, to the alley, pins and scoring system is provided)

INCENTIVES
Make non-monetary incentives (such as praise and recognition) available (Notice how much immediate and spontaneous recognition is provided for a good bowl, or for improvement.  Yells of encouragement, high-5s and well done’s follow nearly every effort)

Actually, at work people often have a clear description of what is expected and they frequently do have the necessary tools to enable them to perform. The factors that are frequently available in games and sports that are generally missing at work are:

1. Immediacy of feedback on performance, enhanced by scoring systems that record and track how people are performing. So people know exactly how they are doing.
2. Because of the scoring and tracking systems, the ability to compare individual and group performance on the fly. Which leads to higher levels of competition.
3. High levels of immediate and spontaneous recognition for good performance. Which significantly enhances motivation.

There are real opportunities in nearly every workplace, not just the meat processing industry, to improve employee motivation and performance by applying what works in the games and sports that people choose to play.

Last week we took a look at the things that frontline managers can do to make behaviour inefficient, and thereby ensure poor performance from their team.

These factors were originally identified by Thomas Gilbert who trained under the founder of behavioural psychology, B.F. Skinner. I suggested that since these factors lead to lower employee productivity (and inevitably lower business unit performance and profit), we can deduce that they are likely to have a significant impact on employee engagement or motivation.

This week we’ll take a look Gilbert’s model for engineering high performance. And we’ll compare the factors in that model with the key drivers of employee engagement identified through global research.

You’ll remember from last week that Gilbert applied the Skinnerian ABC model to the world of work. This suggested that for adequate performance to occur, several conditions needed to be met. Using the example of walking into a dark room and turning on the light we can break down the components of behaviour as follows:

COMPONENTS OF BEHAVIOUR

Adapted from “Human Performance – Engineering Worthy Performance’ by Thomas F. Gilbert. McGraw-Hill 1978.

From this concept Gilbert developed his “behaviour engineering model”. It looks like this:

THE BEHAVIOUR ENGINEERING MODEL

Adapted from “Human Performance – Engineering Worthy Performance’ by Thomas F. Gilbert. McGraw-Hill 1978.

Let’s now compare the factors identified in this model with the key drivers of employee engagement identified through global research.

Perhaps the largest and most comprehensive study of employee engagement ever was completed by Gallup Inc. The results were published in 12. The Elements of Great Managing.

The key drivers of employee engagement that emerged from the Gallup research are as follows:

• I know what is expected of me at work
• I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right
• At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day
• In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work
• My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person
• There is someone at work who encourages my development
• At work, my opinions seem to count
• The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important
• My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work
• I have a best friend at work
• In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress
• This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow

Most, but not all, of these elements appear to be predicted by Gilbert’s behaviour engineering model. It’s not surprising that some are not. Gilbert trained as a behavioural psychologist. The techniques of behavioural psychology refined in the fields of Applied Behavior Analysis and Organizational Behavior Management, are extremely powerful. However, one field of psychology alone cannot explain everything about how people work.

At least one of the elements could be predicted by Albert Bandura’s social learning theory. However, the surprise finding from the Gallup research was the element, “I have a best friend at work.” On reflection though it is perhaps unsurprising. After all, we are social beings.

Let’s take another look at each of the components of behaviour identified by Gilbert and check which of the elements of great managing discovered by Gallup were predicted by his behaviour engineering model.

DATA

I know what is expected of me at work

The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important

In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress

TOOLS

I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right

At work, my opinions seem to count

INCENTIVES

In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work

This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow

KNOWLEDGE

There is someone at work who encourages my development

CAPACITY

At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day

MOTIVES

My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person

That covers most of them. Social learning theory predicts one of the two remaining elements:

SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY

My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work

As I noted previously, the surprise finding was the element, “I have a best friend at work”.

Any piece of research starts with a hypothesis to be tested. Consequently Gallup, and other researchers of employee engagement, set out to prove or disprove existing models of performance and motivation. Their work completely validated Gilbert’s behaviour engineering model and provides specific performance levers that frontline managers can use to maximise their team performance.

Employee engagement, or employee motivation if you prefer that term, is important to you and your organisation. There is now considerable evidence from many sources that low employee engagement generates lower employee productivity, business unit performance and profit; along with generating higher employee theft, accident rates and employee turnover.

Many research and survey companies measure employee engagement. A number position themselves as the company whose research has uncovered the true drivers of employee engagement. The real truth is that the underpinnings of employee engagement were identified more than 30 years ago by Thomas Gilbert. He trained under the behavioural psychologist B.F. Skinner at Harvard University, and his work led to the establishment of the International Society for Performance Improvement.

In 1978, Gilbert published his ideas in the book, ‘Human Competence – Engineering Worthy Performance’. Early in my career I was so taken by Gilbert’s work that for a while I called myself a Performance Technologist. That didn’t last long as no-one had a clue what I was talking about.

The Skinnerian behaviour change model suggests that all behaviour has three components:

• Information comes to a person telling them what to do (Activator)
• The person responds in some way (Behaviour)
• The action of responding has an outcome that increases or decreases the likelihood that the same behaviour will occur again in similar circumstances (Consequence)

For example, you walk into a dark room (Activator) so you flick down the light switch (Behaviour) which results in the light coming on and you can see what you are doing (Consequence). This sequence is generally known at the ABC model.

Gilbert took this concept further. He applied the ABC model to the world of work by observing that performance is a function of the interaction between a person and his or her environment. This suggested that for adequate performance to occur, several conditions needed to be met. Taking the example above, we can construct a table showing the ABC model related to both the work environment and the person:

COMPONENTS OF BEHAVIOUR

Adapted from “Human Performance – Engineering Worthy Performance’ by Thomas F. Gilbert. McGraw-Hill 1978.

Taking this further, we can understand how telecommunications companies, for example, engineer telephone-answering behaviour by manipulating three of these six variables, all of them environmental. They do much research to get the right tone and the right loudness of ring (data), to make the receiver easy to handle (instruments) and to ensure that the caller can be heard (incentives). It looks like this:

CONDITIONS FOR BEHAVIOUR TO OCCUR

Adapted from “Human Performance – Engineering Worthy Performance’ by Thomas F. Gilbert. McGraw-Hill 1978.

Gilbert commented that the two causes of poor performance most commonly suggested are motives (“they don’t care”) and capacity (“they’re too dumb”). Nothing seems to have changed much in the intervening years. But these are usually the last places to look for causes of incompetence. Except for a few strange individuals that your selection process should have weeded out, people generally care about how they perform on the job, and defects in capacity (mental or physical) are the exception, not the rule.

As a result of these observations, Gilbert developed a behaviour model for creating incompetence. This forms the basis of a performance troubleshooting approach for solving problems of poor performance:

A BEHAVIOUR MODEL FOR CREATING INCOMPETENCE

Adapted from “Human Performance – Engineering Worthy Performance’ by Thomas F. Gilbert. McGraw-Hill 1978.

We can see from this table all the things that managers can do to make behaviour inefficient, and thereby ensure poor performance. You may have previously experienced some of these tactics in the past. You may even recognise that some of them are happening in your workplace right now.

Since the factors identified by Gilbert in the table above also lead to lower employee productivity (and inevitably lower business unit performance and profit), we can deduce that they are likely to have a significant impact on employee engagement or motivation.

Next week we’ll take a look at switching this model around to engineer high performance. And we’ll compare the factors in that model with the key drivers of employee engagement identified through global research.

If you are going to be successful as a frontline manager you must recognise three very important basic facts about your role:

Fact #1.  Management is getting things done through others

Fact #2.  You need your team members more than they need you

Fact #3.  You get paid for what your team members do, not for what you do

These facts were proposed by Ferdinand Fournies in his book “Coaching for Improved Work Performance”. Originally published in 1978, the book has become a management classic. Let’s examine why these three facts are true.

Imagine that you’re a manager with eight people reporting to you. For some reason you are off sick today but all of your direct reports have gone to work. If the total production or work output to be completed by you and your team is 100%, what percentage do you think will be completed by your team in your absence?

Generally I find that frontline managers think something in the range of 80% to 95% of the work will be accomplished.

Now let’s take the reverse situation. You’ve gone to work today but for some reason all eight of your direct reports have called in sick. For a variety of reasons you cannot use replacement staff for the day. In this situation, what percentage of the total production or workload will you be able to complete in the absence of all of your staff?

Generally I find that frontline managers think something in the range of 1% to 5% of the work will be accomplished.

This clearly suggests that your ability as a frontline manager is measured by what your team members accomplish, not by what you do. You clearly need your team members more than they need you. And consequently you get paid for what your team members do, not for what you do.

When you do things yourself you are a technician. When you get things done through others you are a people manager, a leader. Our job as a Frontline Leader is to do everything we can to ensure our people are successful. The most simple and useful measures of your success are the level of employee motivation in, and workplace productivity from, your team.

If motivation is low amongst your team and you want to understand who is responsible, take a look in the mirror. If productivity within your team is less than desirable, take another look in the mirror. You’ll find the person responsible right there staring back at you. Unfortunate  but true.

I understand that you may have your role as a frontline manager because you were a outstanding technician. You were really good at doing the work. But now your job is to bring out the best in your people, to do everything in your power to ensure that they are successful. Because your success is totally dependent on the success of your team.

Photo by Denis Collette

The key tool you have to guiding their thinking are the words you choose to use, the questions you choose to ask and the conversations you choose to have. Today we’re going to focus on the questions that you choose to ask.

Last week, I recommended that you do yourself a favour. When you’re correcting behaviour, or seeking behavioural change, I recommended that you ask open-ended questions to get your team member talking; to get the words coming out of their mouth rather than yours.

I’m hoping that you tried this out and received the benefits of taking this approach. But there is one trap you need to side-step when confronting any sort of performance problem or issue with behaviour. And that trap is asking ‘why?’

Let’s put this in context. Let’s imagine a very simple situation to illustrate the problem this causes. Imagine that it’s important for your team members to arrive at work on time, and one of them has just arrived almost 10 minutes late for the second day in a row.

If you ask them why they are late, what will you get? Excuses – yes? I suggest that this approach will create a defensive mind-set rather than a problem-solving mind-set. A defensive mind-set is not the sort of thinking pattern you want to encourage when you’re seeking behaviour change.

So, what do you do? Well, the past is just a memory. It is the person’s future behaviour you want to change, because you sure can’t change their past behaviour.

So, you want to create buy-in for future change from the person involved. To do so, you need to ask questions that encourage them to talk. Asking questions that focus on the consequences of their actions and their future behaviour tends to be much more productive.

Rather than asking ‘why?’ (as in “Why are you late?”), you could ask questions such as:

“How do you think your team mates feel when you arrive late?”

“Why is it important for you to be at work on time?”

“What can you do differently from now on to ensure that you’re at work on time?”

“Tell me about what might prevent you from getting to work on time in the future?”

“When will you make that change?”

Notice the mind-set these sorts of questions encourage. Much more of a reflective and problem-solving thinking pattern. When you’re on the receiving end of this it feels more like you’re being treated fairly and receiving good coaching rather than being reprimanded and told what to do. And you’re being treated much more like an adult who has their own solutions to the problems they face.

The end result is much higher buy-in to change. You get it by using open-ended questions focussed around how the other person could improve their future behaviour.

Remember the old acronym KISS? Most people say it means, “Keep it simple, stupid.” Well, I prefer “Keep it short and simple”.

Short and simple, there are two main types of questions. What are they?

Right – open and closed.

A closed question can be answered by using a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or by providing a simple piece of information. Examples:

Question: “Are you going to the kitchen?”  Answer: “No”
Question: “What’s your name?”  Answer: “James”

An open question gives the person answering it much more opportunity to provide information they feel is relevant. It can, to some extent, force a person to provide more information then they would have otherwise. Examples:

Question : “What’s the book you are reading about?
Question: “What did you do on your holiday last week?

There’s a bit of a common theme to open questions with which you’re no doubt already familiar. Mostly the first word begins with ‘w’. ‘What’, ‘why’, and ‘where’. The other word is ‘how’.

In addition, a statement starting with, “Tell me about….” can also be used in place of an open-ended question. Examples:

Statement: “Tell me about the book that you’re reading.”
Statement: “Tell me about your holiday last week.”

Last week I suggested there were a number of beneficial reasons why you would kick butt by asking questions. The key to achieving those sorts of benefits is to get the other person talking. To get the words out of their mouth.

I’ve discovered that if your coaching (or corrective feedback) conversation seems just like a two-way conversation, it is likely to be productive. If it seems more like a one-way monologue, with you doing all the talking, you’re not likely to get the level of buy-in and commitment to change for which you’re hoping.

So what type of questioning is likely to be the most productive way of getting the person whose behaviour you are correcting to talk? Open or closed? Exactly, open questions create much more space, opportunity and incentive for people to talk.

But what do most frontline managers do when they are seeking behaviour change from a team member? They kick butt and take names. They tell people what to do and ask closed questions. As a result they get the opposite of what they are seeking – low motivation, no buy-in and little improvement.

Next time you need to kick butt, do yourself a favour. Ask open ended questions and get your team member talking. See where it leads.

Next week you’ll discover the final secret to using questions to get behaviour change from your team members. And you’ll get examples of the sorts of open questions you can ask.

Image by Lenzstudios
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lentzstudios/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

Good question. I’m glad you asked.

The results your people deliver for you don’t just happen. Your people have to do something in order for them to be achieved. Sometimes they do the right thing; sometimes they do the wrong thing. And sometimes they just don’t do anything.

Your job as a frontline manager is to manage the behaviour of your team members to ensure they are doing the right things to achieve the results you need. When they’ve done the wrong thing or nothing at all, our inclination can be to tell them. Tell them what they’ve done wrong. Tell them what they haven’t done. And tell them what they need to do differently. However, often there is a better way.

To understand why asking questions will often be a more productive approach, let’s put you in the hot seat. Let’s imagine that your manager confronts you about a piece of work that you’ve just completed which has been done poorly. If your manager simply tells you what’s wrong and what needs to be fixed, what’s your level of motivation to make the improvements? I’m guessing that it’s relatively low. It is likely that you’ll just do what you need to do without any significant sense of commitment.

Imagine the same situation except your manager has chosen to ask you questions rather than simply telling you. He asks you questions such as, “What’s the impact on other people as a result of this work?”, “What pressure do you imagine I’ll come under when I present this to my boss?”, “What could you do differently to improve the quality of this work?”, “What are you willing to commit to in order to ensure that this doesn’t happen again?”

In this second situation you’re going to be doing a lot more reflecting, thinking and talking. Once a decision is made about next steps, to which you voluntarily agree, what’s your level of motivation to taking the action you said you would? It is likely that it is much, much higher than if you had simply been told what was wrong and what you needed to do to fix the problem. Agreed?

Apart from developing a higher level of motivation and commitment to the job, there are a couple of other benefits to asking questions rather than telling people what to do. You’ve probably thought of at least one of them.

Firstly, you probably don’t have all the answers. Frequently your people will know their job better than you do. So by asking questions you also tap into their expertise rather than solely rely on your own. Secondly, they will frequently already know what to do. They don’t need to be told, they need to be motivated to do it. And if they don’t know why they should do something, or how to do it, your questions will uncover that.

So that’s the why. Next week we’ll look at the how.

Let me explain…

You’ve been to any number of training courses before. For some of them your evaluation may have been, “Great lunch and good content.” Yet, four or five months later how much of what you learnt were you really applying? Some, but in all probability not a lot I suspect you’ll agree.

A well-quoted study by Neil Rackham provides the data to back up your experiences. Rackham, the founder of US sales consulting, training and research company Huthwaite, carried out an evaluation of sales training in the Xerox Corporation. By establishing the degree of carry-over from the classroom to the job, he hoped to gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of the company’s training.

The results stunned everyone. The study showed, on average, participants lost 87% of their new skills within one month.

Close investigation showed an interesting exception in the Xerox data. Some sales people showed a smaller loss and some showed a skill gain. When Rackham investigated these exceptions, he found those who lost least, or continued to gain skills, had managers who systematically managed the application of the new behaviours by their sales people immediately after the training.

Now, sales skills and leadership skills are not the same, although they both include a specific set of interpersonal and communication skills. This research simply shows what happens when training is regarded as an event that people attend without any effort being made to ensure competent on-job application of the skills learnt.

Why this happens can be simply explained through the concept of a performance equation. You may have seen more complex performance equations, but at its essence we can consider on-job performance in the following way:

Ability x Motivation = Performance

Ability is about the person. Their natural talents and inclination, work experience, industry knowledge and task knowledge and skill. Motivation, on the other hand, refers to how willing people are to apply what they know and can do.

It is self-evident that performance is maximised when people are both willing and able. Yet, training only deals with ability. It doesn’t address willingness. This is equally true for frontline staff, frontline leaders and senior executives. So leadership training will fail unless the participants are supported and motivated to apply what they have learnt in training back in the real world.

Similar problems have been highlighted in a recent report from the Center for Creative Leadership. They regard the gap between current leadership bench strength and future leadership demands as a serious liability for organisations.

Our client worked with us because the frontline managers in her business unit were supervising rather than leading. This meant that frontline managers spent the majority of their time behind their desks. Coaching was identified as a ‘result session’ focused on the ‘what did work/what didn’t work’ methodology, rather than any effective behavioural coaching to maximise team performance.

Contributing to these problems was an issue that appears across many industries. Frontline managers had been promoted because they were technically good at their job, not because they had leadership potential. And there was little, if any, training given to help them to be a leader.

The core problem is that there is a lack of leadership capability in frontline managers that limits organisational productivity.

Interestingly, the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) have concluded something similar in The Leadership Gap, a 2009 report on a study conducted over two years across 2,200 managers and three countries.

The leaders surveyed by CCL were asked to rate the importance of 20 research-derived leadership competencies, and the difference between what managers are actually demonstrating versus what they need to demonstrate to be maximally effective in the future.

The study found that the five most important future skills – leading people, strategic planning, inspiring commitment, managing change and developing employees – are amongst the weakest competencies for today’s leaders.

I’d argue that for frontline managers strategic planning, and to a lesser extent managing change, are lower importance competencies because they are less often called upon at that level of management. This means we can reasonably conclude that the three key competency gaps for frontline leaders are:

1. leading people
2. inspiring commitment
3. developing employees

This aligns with our experience with a range of clients across the Asia-Pacific region. Yet organisations need to seriously address these three key competency gaps evident in their frontline leaders if they want to:

• increase productivity
• ensure a greater retention of key talent
• improve customer satisfaction and loyalty
• and maximise employee engagement

I’ve always liked the half-Vulcan character, Mr Spock. Maybe it’s the nifty thing he does with his fingers – the Vulcan salute.

But mostly, I just love that phrase.

“Live long and prosper.”

May you.