Business and Marketing

Loose cannons-individuals who have been given (or falsely assume they have) a broad degree of control over their jobs, even though their low competence level causes them to experience performance problems. These individuals cause senior managers to add additional controls and check points.

Strategically empower lose cannons through the following steps:
• Prior to your meeting, identify performance problems that have previously occurred because the member attempted to take actions that were beyond her skill level. Try to pinpoint the primary gaps between the individual’s competence level and the degree of independent action and authority she exhibits.
• Review these situations with the member. Ask the member to summarize how he views his performance in each situation and the actions that could have been taken to avoid these situations; then provide your feedback. Be prepared to encounter some resistance; the member is likely to provide a number of excuses for his problems and attempt to draw attention away from his skill deficiencies.
• Outline your performance expectations and clearly explain areas in which you feel the individual may be deficient.
• Discuss alternatives for building needful skills. If your own time is extremely limited, ask a competent member to serve as a coach to assist the member.
• At the same time, discuss putting in temporary safeguards to prevent additional performance problems during the skill-building process, such as teaming the individual with another, more competent employee; limiting the member’s decision-making authority until she has successfully demonstrated skill growth; and clearly identifying check-in points at which the member will receive work review and coaching.
• Discuss a time for follow-up discussion on the individual’s progress toward meeting her skill development goals.

Create consequences that support desired performance. Make certain that the performance consequences you’ve put in place support the types of behavior you are trying to encourage from your team. To examine the performance consequences that you’ve put into place for your team, take the following steps:
1. Identify an area in which you are not getting the type of performance you want from your team. Be specific. Examples might include:

• The quality defects we are encountering in the finishing stage of production runs.
• Our ability to respond politely and completely to requests for information from other departments
• Our excessive time to completion for new project bids.

2. Now briefly describe the types of behavior that would support superior performance in the selected area. For example, if the area is “our ability to respond politely and completely to requests for information from other departments;” desired behavior might include such things as:

• Staying on the line until a problem is resolved
• Providing complete information to your internal customers
• Politely explaining to customers why certain requests for assistance can’t be met

3. Now contrast this ideal behavior with the behavior you are currently getting from members:

• Being rude or abrupt on the phone
• Providing minimal responses (“No, we can’t do that”) that don’t explain why certain requests can’t be met

• A tendency for individuals to pass on requests for assistance to other members rather than

tracking down information or attempting to answer difficult technical questions raised by customers.

4. Ask yourself the following questions:
• What consequences support desired behavior? What positive things happen when members do it right?

• What consequences actually discourage desired behavior? What punishing things happen when members do it right?
• What consequences support undesired behavior? In what ways are members rewarded when they do it

wrong?

• What consequences discourage undesired behavior? What punishing things happen when members perform poorly?

Send congruent messages. After successfully challenging your team’s limits, you need to send your team clear signals about the types of performance that you are looking for from them and then get out of their way. This is especially important when the performance expectations for your team are rapidly changing. When the messages you send to your team are unclear, ambiguous, or opaque, the result can be confusion, anxiety, and inefficiency. Ambiguous management behavior take a number of forms:

• Formally establishing quality improvement as your highest priority and then allowing wide fluctuations in quality standards to accommodate production pressures

• Telling team members to take greater initiative and then slap¬ping their hands the first time they overstep the invisible boundaries of their job descriptions

• Giving a pep talk in which you encourage members to confront problems honestly and to surface improvement opportunities and then publicly chastising a member for daring to challenge the efficiency of a procedure that you’ve put into place

• Stating that risk taking will be rewarded and then giving poor evaluations to employees who fail more often because they attempt to do more for the team, while rewarding employees who experience fewer failures simply because they lay low and accomplish little of value If you discover that your team is having trouble interpreting your behavior, you need to act quickly to correct the situation. A reasonable starting point is to pay attention to those subtle clues that indicate that your members are having difficulty interpreting your behavior, such as the following kinds of behavior:

1. Members hesitate to act on the decisions you’ve put into place or drag their feet in the completion of assignments.
2. Members frequently check with you for direction before going further. They have a need for confirmation and approval.
3. Members have difficulty sorting out priorities.
4. Members commit errors and do rework that could be traced to difficulties in interpreting directions.

The use of small wins and breakthrough projects is especially important when organizations are going through difficult times and teams feel overwhelmed by the changes. Through this tactic teams learn to redirect their energy toward factors that are directly within their scope of control and are better able to buffer themselves against stress.

When selecting a small-scale improvement project for your team, begin by identifying one major performance area that, if improved, would contribute substantially to your organization’s success and at the same time make your group feel like a winning team. To ensure success, select a goal that:
1. Is urgent and compelling-a real attention-getter.
2. Is a first-step goal achievable in a short period of time-in weeks rather than months.
3. Is a bottom-line result, discrete and measurable.
4. Is one the responsible participants feel ready, willing, and able to accomplish.
5. Can be achieved with available resources and authority.

—

Celebrate each success. It’s important to provide ample opportunities to celebrate team successes. Teams suffering from a deficit of positive feedback can quickly become demoralized. Take, for example, the manager of an international sales force whose team was responsible for selling sophisticated computer networks in the European and Middle East markets. Often the proposal development and review time for these projects stretched out over eighteen months or more. In consulting with the team on steps they could take to improve their performance, I discovered that over time members had been putting less energy into their proposals.

According to members, one problem they faced was their manager’s insistence that proposal milestone were not causes for celebration. Whenever a milestone was successfully crossed, the manager would quickly remind his team, “This doesn’t mean anything until we’ve won the proposal. It’s still early in the bidding process. A lot can happen.” What an inspiring speech! It’s sort of like standing at the twelve-mile marker of a marathon race and telling a runner, “Don’t start feeling optimistic yet. You’re only halfway there. You have more than twelve grueling miles to run under the hot sun.” Many marathon runners would soon drop out after such a pep talk.

Remind your team of its past successes. During tough times, people become preoccupied with the difficulties they are facing and the setbacks they’ve experienced. The talk in the hallways and the company cafeteria begins to focus on the big contract that was just lost, rumors of impending layoffs, or the problems created by the latest budget restriction. Sometimes it seems as if nothing is going right in the organization.

To combat this fatalism and pessimism, it’s important for you to provide a vehicle that encourages your team members to focus their attention periodically on what they’ve done right and on the successes they’ve achieved in the last few weeks or months. This shift in attention is particularly important when you are first trying to encourage your group to swim upstream against the problems facing them and to tackle initial improvement projects.
• Create small, incremental successes. Help your team develop a can-do attitude by generating a series of small incremental successes.

This article is second one from previous article: model limit-busting

Redefine achievable performance. An important tactic is to encourage members to raise their expectations for their own performance. You may find benchmarking a helpful tool for accomplishing this perceptual shift. Benchmarking can force members to challenge their assumptions about the best possible performance that can be expected within a given area and to identify the best practices that are consistently used by the top performers in a field.
As an example, one step that led to the revitalization of Xerox was its decision to compare its copiers to those made by its Japanese competitors. Xerox found that the Japanese companies could produce copy machines at a much lower cost, even when such factors as labor costs were taken into consideration.
To apply benchmarking as a motivational tool:
1. Identify an organization that has a function similar to your own and that is recognized for having demonstrated world-class performance. This function need not be in the same industry but should face challenges similar to your own.
2. Clearly determine the criteria that you will use to compare your operation with those of the benchmarked organization. If you are comparing your performance on delivery schedules, you could measure from the point a delivery order is received to final delivery or from the time a package leaves your shipping dock. Clearly defining your measurement process will keep you from attempting to compare apples and oranges during your benchmark study.
3. Measure the performance gap between your team’s performance and that of the benchmarked organization.
4. Identify those best practices used by the benchmarked organization that could be successfully adopted by your team.
5. Reach agreement with your team regarding the time frame that would be required and the improvement actions that would be needed in order for your team to close the performance gap.

Set up a performance monitoring project. Select an important performance area that is not currently tracked (e.g., response time to customers, shipping schedules, quality of service calls). Ask members to give you a rough estimate of their performance in this area, then challenge them to track their performance for one month. Teams often significantly overestimate their actual performance. Watching a trend line veer away from an overly optimistic performance estimate can be sobering experience.

Conduct a performance analysis. In this tactic the steps of a work process are outlined on a flowchart and the team then identifies performance steps that are prone to errors and bottlenecks or are overly complicated. One reason that performance analysis is a great motivator is that it opens up processes to review by and feedback from a broad cross section of your organization. As a team motivational tool, performance analysis is particularly useful when:
• Members are stuck at a performance plateau because of poorly designed or overly cumbersome processes.
• Members have difficulty identifying performance problems because they are too close to & process. They have stopped paying attention to the problems created by inefficiencies and have fallen into the habit of working around ineffective processes.
• Problems are partially hidden because they occur at cross-over points-points where work flows across the boundaries between your team and other groups. Each team assumes that the problem is the other’s responsibility.

Strategy Management: Overcome Inertia
Create a sense of urgency. The first tactic for helping your team overcome inertia is to convince members that their survival and success depend on their ability to act now to make dramatic improvements in their performance. The importance of creating a sense of urgency can’t be overestimated. It’s a key tactic applied by some of the world’s best organizational change strategists.

The difficult question is how to generate a sense of urgency within a team that has become complacent. I don’t think that this can be done by passing along the latest executive memo on the state of the organization or by the use of thinly veiled threats and intimidation. Threats and grandiose statements about the need for greater productivity are not effective motivators. Instead, try the following tactics:

• Give team members the opportunity to discover for themselves how important it is to meet the organization’s rapidly changing perfor¬mance expectations.
• Make use of the close-call phenomenon. Perhaps you know of another group or division that has already experienced considerable difficulties (staff or budget reductions, loss of management positions) as the result of performance problems like those just beginning to plague your team. If so, put your team in touch with these groups to discuss their lessons learned. Afterward, pull your team together and discuss how to avoid these problems.