Tag Archives: goals

Culture, Excellence, Leadership, Process Improvement, Service

Targets only motivate people to meet the target (not to do good work)

January 14, 2017 Simon Black Leave a comment

The reasons for employing people are:

1) to do the work (produce output, product, service), and

2) to improve the work.

If the person is clear about the purpose of their work, then 1 and 2 should be easy to deliver if they have the right resources, skills, and understanding of users’ (e.g. customers) needs.

But managers rarely leave it at that…

Traditionally, managers get people to do ‘better’ in their work by what John Seddon tags as ‘sweating the labour’ – getting the people to work harder or faster. The idea is that you get more output for the same hours work – essentially more for the cost (efficiency).

Of course the idea of the sweatshop is morally uncomfortable – exploitation to achieve a profit motive. Yet we still stick to the idea by setting targets: ‘You produced 100 widgets last month, let’s have you aim for 110 widgets this month‘.

It seems plausible – motivational even! What possibly could be the harm in setting a target?

Well, the widgets are being created for a purpose – presumably the purpose for which the customer buys them. And that purpose is associated with the design and quality if production in the widget that is produced.

If you create arbitrary targets (and measures of performance) you will create a de facto purpose in people’s mind which is to deliver those targets. This is different from actually delivering the purpose of the work.

Your worker will work to produce 110 widgets BUT not necessarily a widget that meets the customer needs, nor a widget that could be produced faster or at lower cost whilst still meeting the customers needs, other than by cutting corners (lowering quality or increasing risk). The worker is busy but has got his eye off the ball. This produces errors and lowers the quality of work – which will probably have to be redone – at greater cost.

Targets are not motivational. They might make people move, but that is not motivation. A dog that moves is just one looking to avoid the next kick. It is not a motivated, free thinking, creative, proactive animal. Why would we exect people to operate any differently?

Reading

Herzberg, F. (1968) “One more time: how do you motivate employees?”, Harvard Business Review, vol. 46, iss. 1, pp. 53–62

Seddon, J. (2005) Freedom from Command and Control, Vanguard Press, Buckingham, UK.

Excellence, Leadership, Trust

Self-Determination and Intrinsic Motivation

January 4, 2016 Simon Black Leave a comment

Dan Pink’s 2009 talk on The Puzzle of Motivation was one of the most-watched TED Talks (see the video link above) and draws from the ideas he researched for his book ‘Drive’. In the book he explores the research around aspects of intrinsic motivation which he divides into autonomy, mastery and purpose.

This knowledge of human behaviour counters traditional models of motivation driven by rewards and punishment (i.e. ‘carrot and stick’) which are dominated by a focus on external factors such as pay.

This new thinking around motivation is based around Self-Determination Theory (see Ryan and Deci, 2000), although the origins also link back to the core ideas of systems thinkers and practitioners such as Deming, who was also a student of psychology.

A sense of purpose is essential for people to focus their work AND to give meaning to their work (Deming 1994). Autonomy involves the opportunity to influence the work that is being done and is based on an ability to make decisions using information to hand.

As Pink points out, any work requiring some degree of cognitive ability (i.e. aside from the most menial), will see higher worker performance when degrees of autonomy, mastery and purpose are increased.

Reading:

Deming, W.E. (1993) The New Economics, MIT CAES, Cambridge MA.

Pink D. (2009) Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us. Riverhead Books.

Ryan, R.M. and Deci, E.L. (2000) Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being. American Psychologist, 55 (1): 68-78.

Four years of reflection: many years of learning

November 24, 2015 Simon Black Leave a comment

This article sees the completion of four years of blogging on this site and this is the 112th article. There is a wide range of material available across the site.

Use our search facility for any keywords you wish, to find a relevant resource.

Key themes we have highlighted over the years include:

• Don’t do it to people: understand the system of work first

• Don’t chase things that don’t
exist (like supposed trends in data)

• Build knowledge, not opinion

• Don’t rely on top down change Culture change is not something that you 'do' to people

• Change can be quick & painless at the right point of intervention

• Leadership is about followers more
than about the leader

• Decision making can involve people in many different ways

• Teamwork is about Purpose, Goals & Process more than about Behaviour

Some key searches which may be of interest include:
Team; Improvement; Leadership; Motivation

Key source articles include those by:
Deming; Herrero; Seddon; Senge; Covey; Scholtes

Excellence, Service

Good Performers will fail in a bad system

February 5, 2015 Simon Black Leave a comment

Examples of failing systems are numerous, although often the finger of blame for failure is pointed at the people who are at the sharp end (for example, over-worked social workers spring to mind).

If we cast our minds back to the pre-2012 Olympic Games security shortfall scandal, the British Army had to bring in thousands of troops at the last minute to work as security staff at the venue entry gates, due to critical shortfalls in numbers of trained security personnel promised by a commercial provider. This shortfall was not caused by a lack of recruitment, but apparently by failures in the system of appointing people into the jobs, plus late scheduling of training and induction to prepare recruits to start on-time in their role. Allegedly, some new recruits were never confirmed dates to get their training, others, despite being recruited months before the Games did not complete their training until just a few days before the Games programme ended (so late were the arrangements that many recruits didn’t bother to attend since the Games had only a couple of days to run, and some people had already found jobs elswhere). These failures were not “nobody’s problem” – they were the problem of managers in the security company.

In a blame culture managers will identify the problem as being the people at the sharp end (so blame those pesky security recruits for not showing up to training just before the Games ended – what a lack of commitment!). Blame is both a self-fulfilling and a self-deluding philosophy.

There is a neat way to define the power of the system, versus the expectations placed on people, in a quote which I understand is attributed to Geary Rummler:

“Put a good performer in a bad system
and the system wins every time”

But why blame the manager, then? Well, simply, because their job is to manage the system (and to improve it). In fact, that is pretty much all that their job should involve.

Lessons from the 2014 football World Cup!

July 14, 2014 Simon Black Leave a comment

In a late response to the drama of the football world cup I have a list of lessons learned prompted by HR Grapevine. I have amended their proposed list and have included a couple of items which I have interpreted quite differently, so here is my personal list:

1: Don’t be too reliant on one star player

A number of matches have shown balanced teams succeed ahead of those that relied on one star player. Argentina’s Lionel Messi underperformed in the final and the German team got the result. Brazil struggled as soon as Neymar was ruled out through injury. Uruguay were at sea without Suarez. Weeks earlier in the tournament England were too reliant on the Rooney factor and appeared simply not to set up to act as a unit.

The system should be greater than the sum of its parts, and no more so than in a team. Algeria, Mexico and Costa Rica performed above and beyond expectations.

The same is true about the capability of any team.

2: Trying hard will only get you so far

I think the England team were well prepared and earnest in their efforts (despite the hype – both negative and positive – from the tabloids). Best efforts are often a sure fire way to failure (Deming has a lot to say about this). However mediocrity can be turned around – but this needs a transformation in approach.

A huge amount can be achieved by engaged the people who are ‘good enough’ to enable them to perform even better (see point one above).

3: Utilise technology – if it makes sense to do so

FIFA endorsed the use of goal-line technology to deal with the age-old problem of knowing whether a ball had crossed the line for a goal or not. This is not new technology – similar approaches have been used in cricket since 2001 and tennis since 2006. The issue is will it solve the problem? It has been a great success.

Another nice innovation was the marker foam to set positions of defenders in a ‘wall’ at free kicks. Again this was a repeating problem – could we make the job of the referee easier to implement? Simple and effective and in this instance no digital technology in sight.

The first question with technology and innovation is – will it improve what we want to achieve?

4: You need to align team and individual goals

One of the big stories for England in the run up to the world cup concerned whether Wayne Rooney would finally get a goal after 3 unsuccessful tournaments. A bigger question for England fans should have been ‘who cares?’. Ultimately the world cup is not about individual players achieving anything it is about a team wining the championship. All else is a side story.

The problems occur when one person’s goal overrides the team’s goals. Did Rooney shoot when he could make passes to better placed team members? Did he dive into shots which other players were about to take themselves? Did he neglect his defensive duties on the left against Italy allowing them to win the match? There is evidence that points to all of these things. Did England switch off once Wayne had ‘got his goal’ in the game against Uruguay ? Who knows?

The winning German team successfully rotated a whole range of players to do the job. The Netherlands played a recognised centre-forward as a wing back (Dirk Kuyt) and he studiously grafted into that unfamiliar role with great effectiveness. The Dutch even drafted a substitute goalkeeper just for the penalty shootout.

5: Clarity of purpose, identity, belonging and vision pay off

Germany’s plan to recapture the world cup (which they last achieved in 1990) started back in 2000 after a poor showing in the European championships. The German Football Federation invested heavily in the future with new academies and a manager with a long-term plan.

They developed an identity for German international football and engaged players on the basis of playing to that philosophy.

A footnote to this is that German midfielder Sami Khedira picked up an injury in the warm up a few minutes before the start of the cup final and had to be replaced. Khedira will be devastated to have missed the game, but it was clear in the post match celebrations that he revelled in the team’s success and fully identified with the achievement of the team for the part that he had already played in the tournament up to that point (see point 4 above).

An alternative view is offered at HR Grapevine:

http://www.hrgrapevine.com/markets/hr/article/2014-07-14-hr-lessons-from-the-world-cup?utm_source=eshot&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=HRM%20-%2014/07/2014

Excellence

Finding space to relax, flow and perform

June 30, 2014 Simon Black Leave a comment

Many of us have had an experience of ‘getting in the zone’ with work – in the office, in the garden, in physical pursuits, in sport, in artistic or musical endeavor. Things just hit the spot and we are performing at our peak…satisfaction is part of doing it.

As Brian Clough, the outspoken, but assuredly talented European Cup Winning football manager once said “Remember this…you can’t do anything to the best of your ability unless you relax. Nobody can. Nobody can…you’ve got to relax, then it ‘oozes out of you’ – IF you’ve got anything in you.”

Csikszentmihalyi emphasises this idea in his book ‘Flow’, where he describes the phenomena as:

intense and focused concentration on the present moment
merging of action and awareness
a loss of reflective self-consciousness
a sense of personal control over the situation or activity
a distortion of your awareness of time, one’s subjective experience of time is altered
experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding

Can we ever hope to get close to this in the world of work? On the basis of Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas, three things could be considered in the way we design work:

Goals are clear (we know what and why we need to get on with the work)
Feedback is immediate (if we are, or are not, doing things correctly – we see it ourselves)
There is a balance between opportunity and capacity (we can do it and we have permission)

Of course we also have to be bothered about the work. We have to care – the goals of the work should relate to our own purpose. This idea, in relation to Quality, is explored in Robert Pirsig’s famous philosophical fiction book ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ (Pirsig highlights this book “…should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles, either.”).

People should have a sense of purpose, should care about their work, should have their own goals, sources of feedback and the capactity and opportunity to perform. Maybe managers should reflect on this the next time that they: don’t allow people to make decisions; give jobs to people who lack capability; offer their own ‘feedback’ in the absent of decent measures which staff could use for themselves. There are lessons for us all…

Incidentally, Zen and the Art…’ was rejected by 121 publishers before finally being accepted (a world record for a bestseller). It has since sold more than 5 million copies. There is probably something in that for another blog…

Reading:

Brian Clough on British Success in Europe. National Football Museum’s ‘Kicking and Screaming’ project. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olVNwDK3UD8

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) Flow: the psychology of optimal experience, Harper Perennial, New York.

Pirsig, R.M. (1976) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An inquiry into values. Corgi, London.

***this is the 100th post since we launched this blog in November 2011***

Change Principles, Excellence

Tell me – what’s your purpose?

May 2, 2013 Simon Black 3 Comments

To be clear about our work – namely, who we are serving, how to do the work, how to change, what improvement looks like- we need to be clear about one thing:

WHAT IS OUR PURPOSE?

Peter Scholtes was one of the clearest writers on this concept; for him, like Deming before, everything starts with purpose; “Without a purpose there is no system”.

Until we have clarity of purpose, all we are doing is completing sets of tasks. ‘Purpose’ should be embedded in our thinking about work, people and organisations.

Scholtes offers a very clear analogy to illustrate the importance of purpose:

“Cleaning a table cannot be a system until the purpose of the clean table is made clear. A table clean enough to eat on requires one system of cleaning. Clean enough to dance on requires another. Clean enough to perform surgery on requires yet another. Everything starts with purpose.

“What is your purpose?” is the most useful question one can be asked.

When thinking this way, work is transformed from being seen as tasks to carry out, to become a reason to do something which adds real value; a framework for making decisions and seeking ways to improve.

Deming, W. E. (1993) The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education, second edition. MIT CAES, Cambridge MA.

Scholtes, P. R. (1998) The Leader’s Handbook: A guide to inspiring your people and managing the daily workflow, New York: McGraw-Hill

Scholtes P.R. (1999) The New Competencies of Leadership, Total Quality Management, 10: 4&5, S704-S710.

Myths

Teamwork is best – or IS IT?

April 2, 2013 Simon Black 1 Comment

Group working is one of those topics that is awkwardly both straightforward and complex depending upon how you look at it.

Conventional wisdom sets us to assume that more heads are better than one and this maxim is often used as a justification for working in teams. But is it always a helpful perspective? In the spirit of Change Academy, we need to consider alternative views in order to get a more complete picture.

Cindy Vallance recently posted the question “When are many heads better than one?” This is a sensible question to ask when considering group working. As Cindy points out, sometimes teams are created to simply fulfill a structural need; to fill an office space or to organise a number of individuals under the supervision of a manager. These, as Cindy implies, are not good reasons for organising group working.

Tug of war — A set of clones with the same job is not a recipe for a successful team

What do we really know about team performance? And, if we are honest with ourselves, do groups always work better than individuals?

The answer, surely , is no. Have you ever sat on a committee and wondered ‘why are we all here?’?

Let’s take a sporting analogy. Put five excellent runners into a relay team. How well do they perform? In many cases, really well.

However if I think of the British men’s sprint relay team, in four of the last five Olympics they have been disqualified (1996, 2000, 2008, 2012). In 2004 they won the gold. In each Olympic competition the job is the same and, for the British team over this period, several individuals participated in the team more than once . So why is there such a wide difference between good and poor performances? It is sometimes easy to put it down to a mistake; incompetence or lack of attention, but sometimes the truth lies deeper.

The Ringlemann effect suggests that something different can happen in teams. If people’s personal roles are similar they can be disinclined to put everything into their work (this is a subconscious effect causing ‘free-riding’ rather than deliberate loafing). This effect has been shown in cases where a single worker has been put in a team with ‘non workers’ (i.e. people deliberately faking effort, but not actually doing real work). Even in these instances, the ‘real’ worker is often measured as putting in LESS effort than if they were doing the task on their own. In the classic experiment, assuming that men pulling a rope individually perform at 100% of their ability, apparently two-man groups perform at 93% of the average member’s pull, three-man groups at 85%, with eight-man groups pulling with only 49% of the average individual member’s ability.

So what is the solution? Never work in teams? No this would be a bit foolish, there are better questions…

1. Design team work carefully? Yes

2. Ensure a clear sense of purpose? Yes

3. Establish some reasonable measure of performance or achievement? Yes

4. Agree ways of working together, along with a readiness and willingness to improve ? Of course

5. Encourage trust and mutual respect amongst team members? Yes, but make sure that at its foundation is an understanding of 1-4 above.

So, reverting to my previous blog on teamwork, we must focus on our purpose, our goals, understand our differing roles, agree how we work together at a practical level and look to build positive working relationships based on mutuality and trust.

Like anything in life, if we have a team of people, we need to regularly re-consider the purpose of the team. Do we have a team because it adds to achieving the purpose, or is it just because we have always had a team?

Next time you are in a turgid committee meeting, or your project team has ground to a halt, – have a think about how the group could work better…

Features of a high performing team

January 28, 2013 Simon Black 1 Comment

In the past I have made a several links (some more oblique than others) to celebrated efforts and achievements of sportspeople over the past year including Bradley Wiggins, Usain Bolt, and the British Cycling team and the London 2012 Olympics.

Bradford City ‘picked up the ball and ran with it’ by working together, playing to their strengths, committing effort, taking responsibility, keeping discipline, and always believing the dream!

After a pulsating year of sporting moments in 2012 and having previously prodded at the excesses of football management, I simply cannot miss the chance to celebrate the achievements earlier this month by a humble, honest lower league football club. Bradford City FC are close to my heart, having spent many occasions at their Valley Parade home in years gone by and since then, despite a move down south, I have been able to follow their tortuous progress through financial misfortune and near-collapse with nevertheless genuinely joyful moments amongst a few hundred Bradford faithful as a regular ‘away’ fan down south) …

In the early weeks of 2013 lowly Bradford City, a club that have been in the doldrums of lower-league football for over 10 years, set the media alight with successive victories against Premier League opposition in a winning run that has taken them to a major Cup Final for the first time in 101 years. This gives the team a further chance to shine in front of 90,000 fans at Wembley, the national stadium. At the time of their only previous success, winning the FA Cup in 1911 (a week-and-a half after the Titanic had sunk in the North Atlantic), the site at Wembley was still a rural landscape of fields and woodland copses. Bradford are the first 4th tier (lowest division) team to reach any final in England for 51 years. The story is well documented elsewhere, but it is worth noting that Bradford’s entire squad of players was assembled for a total of £7500 of transfer fees – in a world where opposition players in the Premier League teams which were defeated to reach the final cost millions (often tens of millions) – EACH.

How is this possible? Surely it is a matter of assembling a team of the best, to achieve success? Bradford illustrates that there is an alternative model – to build the best team you can with what you have. And how? To get the team members to prepare and focus on the things that matter. For Bradford this was all about playing to strengths, taking responsibility, keeping discipline, committing effort, working together, and of course always believing that they could achieve the dream! As the team’s winning run extended from August 2012 against lower league opposition through to a thrilling December night against the big-guns of Arsenal and later Aston Villa in the January semi-final, all of the team’s values and actions were validated and rewarded through the results that they achieved together. This builds both self-belief and belonging which enables performance; a difficult blend to achieve purely through big-money signings. In Premier League teams this process usually takes years to achieve – with a lot of waste and at great expense! It is not just a matter of ‘chemistry’, but rather a matter of focus and action.

So in our teams let’s focus on our goals, our various roles, how we work together at a practical level and how we build positive working relationships based on mutuality and trust.

Olympic success & continuous improvement: accumulation of small gains.

August 8, 2012 Simon Black 3 Comments

Having sneaked the Tour de France success of Bradley Wiggins into my last blog I cannot resist a reference to the London 2012 Olympics. Team GB’s successes have be encapsulated by the achievements of the track cycling team which virtually swept the board in the velodrome. Members of other national teams questioned how this level of achievement was possible.

I am no cyclist, but for what it is worth I can recall the machine-like efficiency of the East German (GDR) athletics teams of the late 70s and early 1980s, particularly the dominance of the women (there was a similar story in the Olympic swimming pools during that era). A decade or so of women’s athletics was dominated by the stereotypical ‘East German shot putter’. Sadly it was a factory driven on the fuel of anabolic steroids; after reunification of Germany the coaches, who had fed drugs to thousands of unwitting athletes, were discovered and convicted of intentional bodily harm of athletes, including minors. The coaches had attempted to impose control on the athletic system by introducing a new approach (systematic drug-based training programmes), but ultimately they failed themselves and tragically failed the athletes in their charge, many of whom suffered lifelong side-effects from the drug programme.

Most certainly, GB cycling’s head coach Dave Brailsford has achieved success without resorting to the approach of the former GDR coaches. He has used a better way. Instead of imposing a command-and-control structure on his athletes, he has developed a ‘system’ and more importantly, he appears to be applying systems thinking in the way that he manages the team. Every part of the team; cyclists, coaches, physiotherapists, equipment, clothing, catering, hotels, planning, finance, even the families of the athletes are considered part of that system.

“It was attention to detail that gave us the advantage over the other teams. We considered everything, even the smallest improvements, to give us a competitive edge. It was the accumulation of these small details that made us unbeatable.” Dave Brailsford, Team GB

Big leaps are an accumulation of many small improvements

The smallest things can be significant influencers. For example, each British cyclist has to bring his or her own pillow and mattress to a championship. A minor detail, but it is all about a much bigger factor – ‘sleep’, which governs athlete well-being, recovery and preparation. Being settled with the right pillow means more hours of comfortable sleep which impacts race performance. A pillow does not guarantee a good night’s sleep, but it improves the chances and the possibility of a fresh athlete on the day of the race.

So what does this mean for us in progressing our changes and improvements? It suggests to me that any organisation would benefit from a culture of learning and continuous improvement; work on what you CAN influence in the reasonable hope that it will overcome the factors over which you have no influence. As Juran (1989) said – focus on the vital few rather than the trivial many to achieve your purpose then, as Senge (1990) urges, always keep an open mind to unexpected outcomes and be ready to understand what else needs to be done to improve.

Juran J. (1989) Juran on Leadership For Quality,The Free Press, NY

Senge P. (1990) The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation, Doubleday, New York.

Follow the tags at the bottom of each article or the theme bar shown at the top of each title to find linked topics to help stimulate your learning. The search facility (top right 🔍 in green) allows you to browse the site using any keywords that you wish

“Put a good performer in a bad system and the system wins every time”

Follow the tags at the bottom of each article or the theme bar shown at the top of each title to find linked topics to help stimulate your learning. The search facility (top right 🔍 in green) allows you to browse the site using any keywords that you wish

“Put a good performer in a bad system
and the system wins every time”