Performance Management: Changing Behavior That Drives Organizational Effectiveness (part 14)

Pinpointing

by

Charles Lamson

Pinpointing As A Critical Management Skill

Next to the delivery of positive reeinforcement, the single most important skill for anyone attempting to change the behavior of others is the skill of pinpointing. The term pinpointing simply means being precise. Unfortunately, most people asking for behavior change think they are being precise even while the person being asked to change is forced to guess at the criterion for success. For example, it is very common to hear people tell someone "You have to change your attitude." People, who are attempting to reduce some behavior, all too often say things such as "Pay attention to what you are doing." Even less productive is telling others to stop doing something with instructions like "Quit making errors" or "Stop being so careless." If you really want or need a change in performance, the key to success begins with precisely defining or pinpointing your expectations.

Characteristics of Pinpoints

While you may begin the change process with a generic statement of the problem, you must ultimately break it down into its components. For example, consider the term lazy. An employee who is called lazy may come to work late, take long breaks, have a high error rate, and never volunteer to help others on the team. All of these things describe the specific aspects of what might be termed lazy.

Pinpointing is the process of being specific about what people do. The specifics may be either the behaviors of the performer or the results produced by the behaviors. Therefore, pinpoints consist of behaviors and results.

Behavior consists of someone's actions. It is what you actually see if you observe someone working. The individual may be typing, talking to a customer on the telephone, making a presentation to upper management about a proposed project, drilling holes, or teaching a class. These are all behaviors.

Results are the outcomes or products of behavior. A result is what is left when the behavior is completed. You may observe the result independent of the performer. That is, you do not have to see the performer to see his/her output. Results, in fact, tell you nothing about behavior. Unless you see the behavior that creates the output, you must infer actions. Your inferences could be wrong. If you own a coffee shop and count $600 in receipts at the end of the day, you may take on faith that your shopkeepers sold that much in merchandise. Most store owners, however, verify these facts by cross referencing inventory and receipts on a regular basis. They also frequently find shrinkage. Does this come from theft, from the failure to ring up an item, or from an undocumented refund or unequal exchange? Are the staff consuming product? Was the product entered into inventory correctly? The physical results rarely answer the questions as to what the performers did to accomplish this outcome. Anyone who tries to manage by results only is making a fundamental mistake.

We concern ourselves with results because that is the primary interest of organizations. Gilbert captures this when he talks about "Worthy Accomplishment, Costly Behavior." We value behavior only in relationship to its output. If we do not value the output, we will not value the effort to produce it.

Results are usually pinpointed first to make sure that you do not consume time with reinforcing behaviors that produce no value to the organization. Deming (1986) and his associates have focused much attention on the fact that if a system is in control, then it is inappropriate to either punish or reward the performer for changes in the results because they are being produced by normal variation in the system and not by changes in the behavior of the employees. If you have not pinpointed the behaviors you want from the beginning, you will be unable to determine if changes in the results are performer-produced or system-produced.

Behavior counts are sometimes mistaken for results. In a call center operation, for instance, performances such as calls answered, time to answer calls, calls dropped, and the time an operator is available for calls are all measured. That is, each individual action is counted. The same is true in sports, where we measure balls thrown for a pitcher and balls hit for a batter. When you pinpoint behaviors to the extent that you can do frequency counts of them, you have increased your ability to change behavior substantially.

Some managers spend too much management time with nuisance behaviors such as taking long breaks. The challenge is to ensure that you are dealing with the real issue and not a symptom. If, for example, the real concern is productivity then it is probably a waste of management's time to focus on the break issue because people can be at their desks or work stations and still not produce much of anything. Activities that produce no measurable outcome must be called into question if they consume personnel and material resources.

*SOURCE: PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT: CHANGING BEHAVIOR THAT DRIVES ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS, 4TH ED., 2004, AUBREY C. DANIELS & JAMES E. DANIELS, PGS. 113-114*

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