Performance Management: Changing Behavior That Drives Organizational Effectiveness (part 19)

The Right Pinpoint

by

Charles Lamson

All of us, at one time or another, face the challenge of distinguishing between the important and the urgent. Depending on the immediacy of consequences, even the trivial can become urgent. When consequences are delayed, the important can lose urgency. In this post I describe the process of identifying the most important result of a job or an organization - its mission. Once specified, this result lays the groundwork for all further pinpointing. 

Identifying the Mission

The right pinpoint always begins with identifying the outcome you want. There are relatively few times, outside of raising children, when you want to change behavior only for the sake of behavior change. This is particularly true in an organizational setting. Yet we see people expend considerable effort and resources attempting to change behaviors that have little, if any, impact on organizational performance. Most often they try to punish behaviors because the behaviors are annoying. Nuisance behaviors, such as complaining, being tardy to meetings, overstaying breaks and the like, cause others anguish because of the way they value the appropriate behaviors.

We also find people reinforcing behaviors that have little organizational value. Since you will get more of what you reinforce, this sometimes causes a problem because reinforcing the wrong thing gets you more of the wrong thing. You may reinforce something that contributes little to the desired result or that takes time and energy away from behaviors that are important to success. One of the greatest challenges to building a positive work environment is the matter of contingency, or what you reinforce. Too many people reinforce trivial behaviors and ignore those that really matters.

When deciding what to reinforce, always start with the outcome, but keep in mind that selecting the right outcome requires some thought. When managers are inundated with data on every facet of performance, how do they pinpoint behaviors that will make a difference? The answer is to begin by defining the mission.

We define the mission as "the reason the organization or the job exists." It is the single most important outcome associated with success. A mission statement does not define everything you must accomplish to be successful, only the core outcomes. Usually this is a three- to five-word statement of why the job exists.

There are two kinds of missions: organizational and job. At the organizational level, the mission is a short pithy statement that defines what the customer values in your product or service. The mission for a nuclear power plant might be as simple as, "Generate power." Usually these statements are wordier in an attempt to make them motivational to many constituencies. This is fine as long as the essential statement is clear and not obscured by the verbage. This same type of mission statement applies to internal units of the company. The sales department's mission, for example, should state as simply as possible the essential outcome of its efforts: contracted sales.

Managers should not confuse their function's mission with their own. If a sales manager's unit mission is to sell insurance, she should know that is not her function. Her boss should use sales data, not to reinforce or punish, but for analysis of her unit's performance. The sales manager's consequences should come primarily from what she personally contributes to the sales effort and success. This is usually defined by her job mission. How do we identify and quantify how her personal role contributes to the sales effort and success. This is usually defined by her job mission. How do we identify and quantify how her personal role contributes to the success of her unit? Most managers have worked for someone, at some point in their career, who was promoted not because of their competence, but in spite of their incompetence! This occurs because that manager's bosses only looked at the unit performance and mistook it as a reflection of the manager's performance. Just as every organization has its mission to perform, each job has a mission that contributes to that organizational mission. This is true of work at all levels, from the president to the head of research and development, to the customer service representative in the call center.

Once the job mission has been identified, measures and subordinate pinpoints flow naturally from it. However, the vague description of a personnel supervisor's job as supporting the organization by providing human resources does not naturally lead to job measures. Words that denote process, or how you will do something, generally are fatal to mission statements. But if you describe this same mission as an outcome such as job positions filled, several possible measures become apparent. They are percent of job positions filled, time required to fill open positions, percent of job openings with qualified applicants available, and percentage of new hires retained after probationary period. Missions are statements of outcomes, not of activities. In other words, missions should describe pinpointed results, not pinpointed behaviors.

Once you have defined the mission, measures of quantity, quality, timeliness, and cost naturally follow. The resulting measures will focus your efforts on the critical issues. Most jobs require many behaviors and produce many results. Until you know the most important result, priorities are often confused and much time and energy is wasted changing behaviors that are insignificant or in some cases counterproductive.

The best way to determine a job mission is to start by listing all the results and key activities of the job (with appropriate measures). Then try to summarize in one short statement why the performers do these things. The outcome of the combination of these activities, the single most important result of the job, is the job mission. Once you have a mission, go back and check all other results against it. If achieving these other results does not help achieve the mission, they are secondary to the mission, or they belong to some other job.

The process of identifying the most important results of a job consists of these three steps:

1. List all the results and key behaviors for which you are accountable.
2. Extract from the list a single result that explains why the job exists.
3. Check each remaining result against the mission and determine which ones (results) are critical to the accomplishment of the mission.
4. 
   

An Example of a Job's Mission

Let's illustrate this process by looking at the job of personnel supervisor, mentioned earlier. The list below contains some possible important results for this position.

• Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) requirements met
• Employee files current
• New applicant files available
• Recruiting interviews conducted
• Exit interviews conducted
• Jobs filled with qualified personnel
• Job openings filled within target time

With this list, it is easy to see that the one overall result the job is directed toward is jobs filled.

*PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT: CHANGING BEHAVIOR THAT DRIVES ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS, 4TH ED., 2004, AUBREY C. DANIELS &JAMES E. DANIELS, PGS. 155-157*

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