I love this picture as it is a classic image of cue, response and for the winner, reinforcement. We all apply elements of behavioral science to our everyday lives and often don't realize we are doing so. In business it is the same. Unfortunately our application of these principles is often poorly informed and sometimes we wind up promoting the wrong behaviors.
We All Do It For example, a well-meaning policy on financially rewarding safety on crews has the unintended result of driving reporting of incidents underground and overall safety actually suffers. Why? Because no one wants to be the person responsible for the crew losing a safety bonus. Or we think we can use "cues" like safety posters to drive safe behavior when cues are actually the weakest component of driving desired behaviors. Cue, Response, Reinforcement When we look at driving behavior we look at three things; cues, response and reinforcement. Research has shown that by far the best predictor of whether a behavior will happen again is NOT the cue but the reinforcement. That is what happens immediately after the response that the person perceives as a reward. A quick example that will date me - a lot - is the old fashioned telephone. When I was younger when that phone rang (cue) everyone would race to answer it (response) because most often is was someone we wanted to talk with (reinforcement). I can tell you with hardwood floors and socks the race for the phone was pandemonium. Today when our house phone rings not a soul moves. Why? Because while the cue remains the same the reinforcement has changed. Now typically it is a telemarketer on the other end of the line and no-one wants to talk with them. Key On Reinforcement As a leader, when you observe a response or behavior from a team member that is either good or bad, try to look for the reinforcement that happens right after it. Perhaps it is acknowledgment from fellow team members, perhaps it is the satisfaction that comes from getting a job done or not getting caught? Good or bad the reinforcement is the thing to key on with respect to either promoting or ending a behavior. Using cues is only a part of the process of shaping behavior and it is the weakest. If you really want to drive performance on your team insert an appropriate reinforcement immediately after observing the behavior you want. This can be as simple as a thanks or an acknowledgment. Try it you will be pleasantly surprised. Performance Leadership - Think About It! There are many great operational excellence programs out there. They share many common traits such as the need to align operations with company goals and objectives, the need to develop and use measurement and metrics and the need to report and use those metrics to drive innovation and performance. What many don't have though is the missing link that pulls it all together - behavior.
The Habit of Excellence Once of my favorite quotes concerning excellence is from Aristotle. “We are what we do repeatedly. Excellence then, is not an act but a habit.” I find this to be a very true statement. Habits are powerful sets or sequences of behavior that either inhibit or enhance performance. Our habits inform so much of our daily living that we often do them without even the smallest thought. We see that played out when we seek to go outside of our daily routine. If, for instance, I need to do an errand that requires me to drive somewhere other than my regular route to work I find from time to time that I have taken my work route instead of the new route simply out of habit. If Aristotle is right, and I believe he is, then as leaders we need to examine what our staff do in terms of habits that impact performance. What that means is we need to break down what they do into that series of behaviors that, altogether, produce the action or product we are looking for. These can include what we used to refer to as "intangibles" (they really are not) such as things like team work or work ethic or they can include very specific actions that relate to production such as work on a production line or in a plant. Cues and Reinforcement These habits and the behaviors that make them up revolve around a "cue" and a "result" or "reinforcement." The cue prompts the habit and the result or reinforcement ensure that the habit will happen again. In his excellent book "The Power of Habit" Charles Duhigg outlined how Tony Dungy one of the most successful NFL coaches created Super Bowl winning teams through the development of key habits and the behaviors that went with them. He identified the "cues" that he wanted his linemen to key on, the behaviors that followed the "cue" and how that would lead to the result he wanted. He wanted these habits so ingrained that much like the way we don't think about the route we take going to work his players wouldn't "think" about what to do when a "cue" happened they would just "do" the behavior they needed to do. In a game where mili-seconds matter that approach gave his team a decided edge and produced spectacular results. This approach is commonly used for folks involved in high risk activities such as the military, first responders, pilots and safety personnel. If you saw the recent movie "Sully" you would have witnessed how actions in the cockpit are governed by habits and the behaviors they drive that are so ingrained that even in a dire emergency (in fact "because" of the emergency - a cue) habits kick into gear and they quickly go through a long list of things to do. Folks involved in the world of Safety and Accident Prevention are now using this technique through what they call Behavior Based Safety. What Behavior Do You Want? The research is becoming more and more interesting and extensive around the use of habits and behaviors to drive performance. When I walk leaders and their crews through the process it does not take them long to pick up on the key components they need to master. They need to answer the question; What are the behaviors that I am looking for with my crew, team or staff? What are the current behaviors along with their "cues" and "results?" And if I need to, how can I replace those "cues" with new ones that will produce the behavior I want? It may sound daunting at first but it really is not. Let me provide a quick example. "Shelly" wants to see more cooperation among her staff. She sits down and breaks the concept of cooperation into behaviors that she can see. Someone lending a hand, someone offering needed information without being asked, or simply contributing at meetings. She decides each day that she is going to look for one of these behaviors and recognize it (result or reinforcement). Every time she observes someone participating in a meeting she makes a point of thanking them afterward. Soon participation levels go up and so on. Behavior The Missing Link Now to be fair there are a few other things to consider and I am going to explore them over the next few blogs. For the most part though, it really is as simple as what I just described. You want a high performing team? What sort of behavior does that require? What are the cues and what are the results? Driving the right behavior really is the missing link to driving performance. Performance Leadership - Think About It! The key to using metrics to drive performance and improvement on a team is that this process must be bottom up. Now before everyone spits out their coffee let me reiterate that metrics developed at the front line whether it is office staff or operations MUST align with company goals and objectives. Leadership in turn carries the biggest burden for this task in that they communicate those company goals down to their teams and draw from their teams the metrics that align with those goals. Crews that understand company goals and develop metrics that align with those goals will "own" them. Ownership is key to performance improvement.
Performance Improvement Let me share a short story of how powerful this is. A group that was responsible for plant operations had worked with their leadership to develop metrics and a process of reporting them. They had a bulletin board put up in the staff kitchen and everyone posted their daily results on the board. Crews would meet first thing at the start of the shift to allow each operator to report on the previous day’s results and to identify priorities for the upcoming shift. This was already a powerful process and the crew had taken ownership of their metrics and the process of reporting them. They had also begun to develop "opportunities lists" around discussion items from those meetings and were implementing local improvements to processes and safety. As a normal evolution of this process they had begun to experiment with spread sheets and dashboards. In fact, they had developed spreadsheets that literally could track all the daily events in the plant and that data connected individual results to team and company goals. The crews felt empowered because their ideas and contributions to the success of the company were at least being considered. They now felt like a valued partner on the company "team." That’s A Great Idea – Lets’ Help Out! It was a vision to behold and as you would suspect news of the success of this group had indeed made its way to the upper echelons of the company leadership. These were all great ideas and if it worked for this group why not implement it with the rest? A group was tasked with finding a software program that could really expand what this crew was already doing and the management had some great ideas about things they wanted teams to track as well. Sure some of the terms for some of the metrics were different as was the interface so data entry was a bit different too but all in all they were pretty sure this would be a big win with the crews. So the memo went out and the software was distributed. This particular crew instantly balked at the "heavy handed - top down" - manner that was used to implement this new program. It wasn't until I informed them that this new software was based upon collecting data they had already developed, only with different names for some of their metrics, did they understand what was really happening. Yet in spite of coming to this understanding they were unhappy and implementation was delayed because the crew balked at everything that was "different" from what they had developed. Why? Because in the company’s eagerness to support and drive what had started to happen with this group they had forgotten on key thing; to involve them. I learned two powerful things that day, first communicate, communicate, communicate. Second, when you give your team permission to own performance remember that they will guard it jealously. The tradeoff for getting people to develop and align metrics with company goals is to make sure that you uphold those efforts. As much as possible keep them in the loop in terms of how what they are doing is going to impact change in the company and in turn how those changes are going to impact them. Tail Wagging The Dog They had a good software program but it felt too much like the tail wagging the dog to the folks who had done all the leg work developing the metrics and tracking approach. A small point perhaps but if ownership is key to driving performance then allowing some ownership and input around software implementation is also a small price to pay for a big return. Performance Leadership - Think About It! |
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