I hope you find comfort in my latest Talent Management blog post where I explain why we shouldn’t fear change. In this post, I also debunk the myths that surround it and discuss ways you can achieve meaningful change in yourself and in others.
‘Culture "Change"’ Articles
Why Wall Street won’t ever change their spending ways
I’m going to get right to the point. I have little faith that Wall Street will ever get smarter about how they spend their money. The reality is they have too much of other people’s money and deal in such large amounts day to day that they will never take seriously the efficiency and effectiveness of their own management systems. They have seen good times and bad. While they are talking about making dramatic changes now, history has proven that they will only be temporary. Even though they are in a position now where their financial belts will have to be tightened, it will be only for a short time because when the economy improves they will return to their spendthrift ways. Why? Because they don’t know any better and since they are in the business of selling money have come to believe that money will solve their problems only if it is given in large amounts. It is an environment where $100,000 is considered “chump change.”
What prompted this blog was an article in Bloomberg News titled, “Wall Street Mulls Partial Pay Freeze” by Jeffery McCracken and Christine Harper. They talk about the fact that revenues in the investment-banking business have been so bad that they might have to resort to eliminating the practice of boosting pay automatically each year. They quote Joseph Sorrentino of Steven Hall & Partners, an executive-compensation consultancy who said, “Pay increases have been traditionally automatic because there are traditionally very long hours in terms of the amount of work and this is another way to try to boost their morale and signify that they’re a strong part of the firm and that they’re appreciated.” This quote cracks me up because it shows the almost total lack of understanding of the laws of behavior.
I can assure you that Mr. Sorrentino has no data showing that the way these investment banking firms structure bonuses improves junior bankers’ performance, retention or morale. It is naïve to think that you can treat people poorly day to day, give them money at the end of the year and think that will create the feeling that “they’re a strong part of the firm and that they’re appreciated.”
The reason these firms can get away with wasting millions of compensation dollars is because practically every company in the industry is using the same poor uninformed compensation practices. Therefore, no firm has an advantage or disadvantage. The customer pays the freight.
If these firms ever get to a point where they must operate in a more sound way financially, I can suggest several things.
- Every problem cannot be solved with money, even on Wall Street. What causes people to quit and go to another company is more about the way they are managed than the money they make. If employees are treated poorly, they will leave for a dollar more. If they are treated well, it will take a lot more to hire them away. Make no mistake, loyalty cannot be bought. Big bonuses have often helped a disaffected employee start a competitive company or retire early.
- Bonuses that are not earned, more often than not, do not strengthen productive behavior because that is not the contingency involved in receiving the bonus. While upper management believes that annual bonuses increase loyalty and performance, they do neither because they don’t have to be loyal or productive to receive one. They have to do just enough to stay on the payroll. Of course management doesn’t believe this because if they did, they would make immediate changes where nothing would be automatic that was not individually earned. A system where employees knew the personal accomplishments they had to achieve to earn the money would be far superior and less costly.
- Forget what rival firms do. Focus on promoting to management only those who have good social skills and an understanding of the science of behavior. Pinpoint the behaviors and results that are valuable and generously reinforce those behaviors and reward those who produce the results. That way, the only thing that executives will have to “mull over” will be how to spend the money that is left over.
Ethical Lessons for Every Workplace
The recent scandals at Penn State and Syracuse have ignited larger concern over whether or not organizations devote the proper attention and care to building ethical structures in their workplace. My colleague, and ADI President and CEO, Darnell Lattal, was interviewed recently for both Training Magazine and Talent Management as she has written extensively on the topic of Ethics at work. I encourage all to read and consider how behavioral science should be used to ensure that your organization builds an “ethical infrastructure” that defines, measures, and reinforces ethical behavior.
Good Intentions, Bad Effects
Guest post by Darnell Lattal
Throughout the past several years, ethics has made its way into business headlines, more often than not for bad rather than good. What people may be surprised to know though is that to get an organization to behave in ethical ways, it takes more than good people seeking to do good. It takes more than rules of conduct. Ethical behavior is what is shaped day in and day out by unintended consequences that occur as work is done. To “be ethical” requires a very deliberate focus on the impact, not the intention, of actions. It is also a clear-eyed review of how behavior got going to begin with and the unethical effects on the organization. It requires looking ahead at impact, not what has happened but what could happen and evaluating the degree of harm or good such impact could have.
There are things that each of us can do to contribute to a stronger ethical workplace. The best way to protect you and your organization is to understand how consequences increase or decrease the likely occurrence of certain kinds of behavior now and in the future. Here are a few suggestions:
- Talk openly. Make ethics a part of your workplace culture by talking openly and often about it. When you provide examples and take the time to communicate its importance, individuals will have a stronger understanding of how to avoid slippery slopes.
- Build ethics into hiring and training. Include ethics as part of your selection interview. Examine a person’s responses to ethical dilemmas and identify specific actions to take. Ask about times when they did something wrong and how they decided what to do. Look at a candidate’s ability to balance among conflicting values and how the individual might apply his/her judgment to “messy customer situations” or with coworkers. In training, have your employees define terms such as treating others with respect and how they demonstrate that in their behavior. Present case studies that require discriminations among choices and discuss the implications. Have individuals bring real-life ethical dilemmas to the team for discussion and resolution.
- Focus on consequences. Attach consequences to desired behavior and measure its occurrence. Extreme behaviors lead to immediate termination, but most actions are not stuff of moral outrage. Remember that ethical discrimination is shaped, reinforced, maintained and changed by the contingencies that surround and support individual actions. Make your expectations clear and then follow up.
- Define criteria. Establish a set of criteria to evaluate your own actions and share those with others.
- Support others. Encourage, model and help others establish a method to discuss actions and increase alertness to the ethical issues in everyday decisions.
- Monitor and enforce ethical behavior. Assure that structure and resources exist to monitor and enforce commitment to an ethical climate. Regular coaching and feedback, training sessions to increase skills, customer and employee feedback, structures, systems and processes that allow for the orderly flow of work are all important in reinforcing ethical behavior.
Be alert to what the longer term effects of consequences are for individuals and for the culture of an organization. The ethical traps, unintended consequences, are easy to fall into and none of us are immune from the fall.
Read more…
Personal Responsibility within a Behavioral Approach
Guest post by
Judy Agnew
We have received much positive feedback on our book Safe by Accident and we are delighted that so many people find it helpful. There is one issue that some people are struggling with so we want to take this opportunity to clarify. Some readers are having trouble reconciling our discussion of the influence of organizational/management systems on at-risk behavior and the concept of personal responsibility for safety. The question is: if at-risk behavior is found to be influenced by management-controlled organizational systems, does that let the frontline performer off the hook?
To some extent this is a philosophical issue. The notion of personal responsibility is embedded in our culture. It is present in our judicial, political and social systems and has served us well in many respects. In a work setting, telling employees that they are “responsible for their personal safety” at work is helpful as a broad antecedent. It sets the expectation that each person must do what they can to protect themselves and others. The question is what specifically are they responsible for? Telling miners they are responsible for their own safety and then sending them into a mine that is poorly ventilated and structurally unsound is absurd. They cannot be responsible for their own safety under those conditions because they do not control them. We think everyone will agree with this extreme example. The difficulty comes with less extreme examples. Workers who are trained in procedures but don’t follow them consistently, for example. Our position is that there is shared responsibility in most cases. Our concern with the notion of “personal responsibility” is that it sounds like an easy solution to a very complex problem. We are sure that some of you have told employees in your organization that they are responsible for their personal safety. We assume since you are reading this, that hasn’t solved all your safety problems. Antecedents rarely do.
So where does personal responsibility fit in?
Let’s back up. The goal in safety is to prevent injury and illness. If we say that people are responsible for their own safety, then it follows that if they are not safe, they are to blame. Our point is that blaming people for things that are, at least to some extent, outside of their control does not accomplish the goal. If it did more organizations would be perfectly safe by now. But let us be very clear: we are not suggesting that accountability (a synonym of responsibility) is bad. Accountability is essential in safety. However, it is critical that organizations first determine WHO should be accountable for WHAT. The word, accountability, is often code for whom to punish. The issue is not who should be punished but what actions will correct the situation so that it will not recur. Although punishment is appropriate under certain circumstances, we see too often that organizations punish only the person at the point of the accident without fully understanding the systemic issues that have contributed. This is not only unjust, but it fails to rectify the situation.
Systems are designed and maintained by people. Therefore, there should be accountability for those who control the systems to change the systems if they are faulty. Once the systems are changed then everyone who works in those systems should be held accountable (positively reinforced for engaging in safe behaviors and corrected when they are not). This is not about absolving personal responsibility–quite the opposite. It is about establishing accountability, at all levels, that will lead to true improvement. Frontline performers need to be held accountable for those things under their control. They should be responsible for reporting hazards, providing feedback to keep peers safe, participating in safety meetings, talking to management when systems make working safely more difficult, offering solutions, and working to improve their own safe behaviors. Frontline performers will be more successful in “taking personal responsibility for their safety” if they work in partnership with management and those who control the organizational systems within which they work.
Schools and our Children: Administrations and the U.S. Education System get a failing grade
School bells may be ringing across the country but I am convinced now more than ever that we are not prepared to provide the best education possible for our kids.
I was disheartened to learn of the cheating scandal that is rocking the Atlanta Public Schools. And to further hear of the reoccurring issues with the government’s No Child Left Behind program. More than half the nation’s schools are in jeopardy of failing to meet reading and math adequacy standards. More than half! Monetary implications aside, what are we doing to today’s youth? And to our nation’s future?
It is clear, as was evident in the Atlanta Public Schools fiasco, that what was well-intended when the No Child Left Behind program was initiated has set up a culture of penalty and punishment if targets are not achieved. It can be said based on past history that the federal government spends little time when it designs regulations to consider how to create student success through policy. Little thought of how such a policy, if designed thoughtfully, can shape educational cultures of delight where students learn at high and steady rates. What we see instead are policies that often set a goal—and attach a penalty if the school does not do it.
What No Child has done is create threat and fear, in the administration, with the teachers, and even down to the students themselves. Teachers and administrators who participated in the Atlanta scandal, it’s fair to surmise, were doing what they thought ‘best’ in the name of avoiding the loss of funding they would be awarded by meeting government-set standards.
A major overhaul needs to be undertaken in Atlanta and across the country; and we must look to the context—the requirements that are naïve at best!
Much of what is wrong with these programs can be fixed and the yield will be outstanding and effective teachers and students that reach higher levels of learning. The solution is an understanding of behavior, not from a common sense perspective but a scientific one.
I believe the Atlanta Public School has done the right thing in firing school personnel who have been caught changing test scores. Not that cheaters cannot be changed but in my experience, lying, cheating and stealing have always been firing offenses. The problem in changing such behavior is that it is very difficult to put immediate consequences on the negative behavior (i.e. changing test scores) and therefore it makes the delivery of effective consequences necessary to change the bad habits difficult to manage.
Although I am sure that the problem was produced by ineffective leadership at the highest level that deliberately or accidentally created a system that tempted wrongdoing, it is better to eliminate those who folded under the pressure to produce false results.
The incident reminds me of when I was a lieutenant in the Army. If I heard it one time, I must have heard it one hundred, “I don’t care how you get it, just get it. And by the way I don’t want to know how you get it…” Although I am sure this was never said by school administration, the pervasiveness of the behavior indicates that the pressure was there.
Until there is an administration where leaders understand the direct and indirect impact of their policies, procedures and management and supervisory behaviors on the behavior of teachers, the problem will not go away. When you award a bonus for increasing test scores, you can hardly claim lack of culpability in the scandal as there are people who will lie, cheat and steal to get it. They may think they are working for the greater good—the survival of the school system, the obtaining of needed resources for the children, and of course, their own self-interest—continued employment.
When you only look at results and not behaviors, people often find “more than one way to skin a cat.” Taking the test for the student is one. That slippery slope of how we reach incredibly wrong decisions often starts with subtle or visible threat and fear, not from the ‘bad character’ of a few. In spite of the bonus, I am confident that most people who were caught did not do it for the bonus but because of the negative consequences around failing to produce the required progress.
I submit that all staff in the system is there for one reason – to help children learn. By doing some reverse behavioral engineering (RBE), the criticality of those jobs can be determined fairly quickly. By RBE, I mean start with the student and ask how a job helps the student learn. Of course the main responsibility falls on the teacher. Therefore most staff positions should exist to support the teacher in being effective in the class room. In my experience, most staff positions make it more difficult rather than easier to do the job.
As far as testing goes, the teacher should be evaluated on the number of children who perform to some standard or show significant improvement – not an average for the class but the number who are successful. The teacher’s success metric is ‘number of individual students making progress above their baseline’. Dr. Fred Keller, a pioneer researcher and teacher said, “If the student doesn’t learn, he wasn’t taught.” Local administrators should be measured on the number of successful teachers, and so on up the line. Rewards and punishment should not be delivered on results without factoring in how the results were obtained. This means that teachers should be observed so that inefficient and ineffective practices can be determined and corrected when they happen. The measure of observer (coach) effectiveness is whether teachers ask for the help. Artists want people to see their work; athletes want people watch them play; musicians want people to listen to them play. Why would teachers who are good at what they do not want people to see how they do what they do. They will when they are successful. If coaches (i.e. administration) help teachers teach more effectively, they want people to know and will welcome observers in their classrooms. What this means is that results will never be a surprise as problems will be identified and corrected in real time. Over time most of the observations will be positive as the students will be achieving at high rates.
In 1983, Dr. B.F.Skinner wrote in “The Shame of American Education” that the data showed that the technology of teaching existed to teach twice as much in half the time. That was almost 30 years ago. It has been done in only a very few places. It has been verified and documented in the toughest of schools and with a wide variety of students, some who are labeled as hyperactive, from poor homes, without qualities of persistence, without learning being a value in their home environments, all the things that have been said about why teaching is so hard. These processes have created eager learners, wanting to go to school, teachers who find joy in their impact, parents who are amazed and delighted with new found love of learning in their children and our society that benefits as these students go on to make a difference in our world. What better time than now to do it in the Atlanta City Schools and throughout the country.
Do Relationships Matter in Safety?
When it comes to safety, organizations need more than just compliance; they need people to follow the rules all the time, even when no one is watching. In this short video segment, Dr. Judy Agnew discusses why relationships are important and what it takes to build a strong safety culture. This video also explains why discretionary effort and trust are key to ensuring employees engage in safe behaviors around the clock.
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Gambling with Safety
Why companies unknowingly put
themselves at risk
It’s probably a fair statement to say that companies are interested in supporting a safe work environment in their organizations. But it is all too apparent through today’s news headlines that organizations gamble with safety, including Sky Express, a bus company that had a recent deadly crash in Virginia. While bus companies and other government regulated industries have legislation in place to protect the public, private organizations are on their own to ensure that their safety practices yield safety by design.
In this latest video blog, Judy Agnew, co-author of Safe by Accident?, discusses the misnomer of incident rate as a predominant indicator of a company’s safety level and why companies need to invest in the science of behavior in order to manage all aspects of safety.
A Perspective on Culture and Brand Japan, post-tsunami
Guest post by Darnell Lattal, Ph.D.
I came across an article from NPR (Of War and Kisses: How Adversity Shapes Culture) that provides great context for how cultures are shaped and nurtured. Before I go further, I think it’s important to add ADI’s definition of culture as a back drop for what defines a culture: Patterns of behavior (what we say and do), encouraged or discouraged (purposefully or inadvertently) by people or systems over time.
The article suggests that a culture can be shaped by its experience with major events and how the people of that culture come together collectively to address challenges. There is no better example of this than Japan.
Through the years, we have had the good fortune to develop a strong relationship with our Japanese friends and alliance partners at WILL-PM. I co-authored a book (written in Japanese) with Jun Ishida-san, CEO of WILL-PM, on workplace stress in Japan. Through this experience, I know that the cultural implications for behavior in Japan may not always be ideal and many cultural mandates or ‘rules of conduct’ can impede a feeling of wellbeing. But, what we have seen, post-tsunami, from the people of Japan paints a picture of a broad set of rules of culture unlike most.
The 10 items listed below came to me from a friend in Singapore who said she got it from someone in Malaysia, but beyond that, the original author is not known. This list states the value and, importantly, provides behaviorally anchored examples.
HATS OFF TO BRAND JAPAN: 10 things to learn about the Japanese culture.
- THE CALM: Not a single visual of chest-beating or wild grief. Sorrow itself has been elevated [although grief was present and pain was visible; there are many ways to express pain].
- THE DIGNITY: Disciplined queues for water and groceries. Not a rough word or a crude gesture.
- THE ABILITY: The incredible architects, for instance. Buildings swayed but didn’t fall.
- THE GRACE: People bought only what they needed for the present, so everybody could get something.
- THE ORDER: No looting in shops. No honking and no overtaking on the roads; just understanding.
- THE SACRIFICE: Fifty workers stayed back to pump sea water in the N-reactors. How will they ever be repaid?
- THE TENDERNESS: Restaurants cut prices. An unguarded ATM is left alone. The strong cared for the weak.
- THE TRAINING: The old and the children, everyone knew exactly what to do. And they did just that.
- THE MEDIA: They showed magnificent restraint in the bulletins. No silly reporters. Only calm reportage.
- THE CONSCIENCE: When the power went off in a store, people put things back on the shelves and left quietly!
There is much to admire about Brand Japan, and right now we, in America, are talking about lessons we might take as to how to embed certain culturally predictable values in how our people respond to crisis. It is quite likely you would have seen many of these traits during our own various disasters, but you would also have seen looting and stealing for example and we often highlighted the exceptions. The Japanese stood out because of the consistent response across a great many, with no fanfare or discussion of how noble people were. The newspapers were not seeking out the rare individual who demonstrated amazing grace. That grace was everywhere. Lessons can and should also be taken here about how we are designing our workplaces as cultural incubation centers in America. Actionable Values—mission driven and anchored—to what we say and do is essential to creating that amazing brand we all want in our work life and in our culture.
Read more on this subject at www.pmezine.com where ADI business partner Jun Ishida was recently interviewed for an article called Changing the Way Japan Works.
Mining Safety No Reality in Coal TV Series
Guest post by Don Nielsen
Spike TV’s show Coal provides a window into the practices of the Cobalt coal mine in McDowell County, West Virginia. The series clearly presents the pressure to bring the coal to the surface and produce enough revenue to stay in business while demonstrating the dangers of traditional coal mining in dark, wet, and cramped spaces with the ever present danger of cave-ins in the physical spaces of life underground. There are also very real dangers facing the coal miners themselves, such as the ongoing possibility of coal dust explosions and exposure to pneumoconiosis or black lung disease; realities for all those who enter the mine each day.
In my work with clients in mines, this show causes much discussion—much concern. Safety issues evident in the first few episodes raise questions about the real effort to keep each other safe. An operator moved equipment, crushing the power cable and nearly hitting a fellow miner. Miners I work with point out that the miners moving the equipment should have engaged in safe behaviors such as communicating with and making visual contact with everyone in the area to avoid potential line-of-fire dangers. In this same episode loose roof material was pulled down, using a pick hammer, nearly crushing two miners. If putting safety first is a concern, miners should pull down the loose roof material using a long bar in a process called “barring down.” Additional concerns noted from this episode were the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) including safety glasses, hearing protection, and respirators, which are typically standard in most mines. Supervisors in the Coal series say “Let’s work safe today” but there appears to be no focus on establishing and maintaining safe behaviors, in fact a dangerous disregard for all—even when it is clear that, as the TV camera captures, there are strong relationships and respect among the miners on the show.
Telling workers that he wants them to work safely today is likely a true expression of the mine supervisor’s feeling. He certainly does not want anyone hurt, he doesn’t want a lawsuit, he doesn’t want a work stoppage, or grieving families, and certainly not unwanted publicity. The owners of Cobalt Coal have personal friends, maybe even family working underground. I do not doubt for a moment that they truly care about the people as well as their company. They also care about production. We see a clear relationship between the amount of coal produced, the behavior that is required to produce the coal, and the likelihood that the company will remain profitable enough to stay open for another week. (This coal mine, in that respect, is different from large operations in which production quotas are established to maintain and increase large profit levels- not merely keep the doors open.) The words “let’s work safe today” though sincere, are just words; not tied to behaviors to ensure that safe acts occurred. Unless the miners practice safe procedures and are reinforced for using them, safe behavior (particularly if it is more difficult or slower than unsafe behavior) is unlikely to occur in the mine. Grabbing the closest tool to bring down loose –rock was the quickest and easiest, though not the safest, thing to do. And if the proper tool was not available, the safer thing to do was not available to the miner. Commitment to safety must be linked from the behaviors of the owner (providing procedures, tools, and reinforcement systems) to the supervisors to the individuals engaged in the work.
This reality show is most upsetting to my colleagues in the mines because it makes light of the very real acts of caring, the daily effort of miners everywhere to stay safe and keep their fellow miners safe as well. They still make production targets, but never at the expense of life and limb. As this reality show continues over the next few weeks, I hope to see some changes in their strategies and an increase in safe behaviors. If not, there is nothing to feel about this ‘reality show’ but extreme sadness about the carelessness shown for the human life at hand.
Editor’s note: At the end of the first show, the mine owners were informed that they were in trouble for violating safety guidelines. While the immediacy with which this was brought to their attention is good, the fundamental issue is, how many like-minded, eager and friendly coal mine owners are out there doing just this again…making a priority of trying to keep the operations going over safe practices.
Image via TrinityDC.edu