Organizational Performance Systems: Performance Improvement Articles -- Leaderspeak

The words you choose to use, or use but do not choose carefully have a significant impact on the performance of your organization. Whether you are the CEO or a new frontline supervisor, the words you use shape culture, employee relations, performance management, problem solving, trust and decision-making.

Corporations lose millions of dollars each year because they cannot transform strategic language into messages that guide and support specific actionable employee behavior resulting in inexact interpretation and performance variability that creates performance problems followed by reduced profit.

Typically, an organization's leadership team describes the company strategy and the values that will guide individual behavior in executing that strategy without asking the following questions:

The Language of Leadership

In the last two decades, business and industry have significantly elevated the quality of products and services provided to customers. These common gains have in turn compelled business leaders to microscopically examine every structural and functional aspect of their business and redefine performance criteria in order to remain competitive.

However, organizations have neglected one of the most obvious components of enterprise-- language. Business leaders create a multitude of problems by failing to examine leadership's language with the same scrutiny applied to other organizational systems and processes. And, they have failed to establish a line of sight between the language of corporate direction and its very real impact on individual employee behavior.

Organizations can and should examine the language used by their corporate leaders. They could then identify the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in values propositions and strategic language and track the impact of that language through to the frontlines. It would then become possible to review performance problems associated with written and spoken strategies and to construct an integrated, systematic solution.

The Generalization Gap

Generalization in language is a mixed blessing. In the world at large, it is a marvelous method for shortcutting lengthy descriptions in favor of words that summarize. It offers us a type of shorthand, an economy of communication that conveys the general meaning. For example, if I say an employee is a team player, we recognize the term, but not necessarily all the behaviors required to earn that categorization. In a casual context, we do not have to explain all the things an individual has done to warrant the "team player" moniker even though he or she may have done only one thing that led us to use such a description. We employ hundreds of these types of words and phrases every day when communicating to people about people. These words and phrases most often describe the effect of one or more behaviors. Responsible, cooperative, confident, committed are similar words that describe the effect of a series of behaviors.

Unfortunately, in the world of work, where similar descriptors are used in many kinds of discussions about employees and their performance, the very ease of using these types of descriptors creates problems. Performance dialogues require much more precision around meaning to allow for effective communication. If you ask individuals to define any of the previously mentioned words, they will often offer varying definitions. It is within this variability of interpretation and understanding that problems begin. However, alternatives exist that will not only solve performance problems created by vague descriptors but will elicit discretionary effort and performance gains for the organization.

Imprecise Language Breeds Imprecise Performance

Imprecise language causes several problems for organizations, but the most conspicuous is the confusion surrounding what needs to be done (the behavior of employees) to implement strategy, accomplish the vision and support the stated values of the business. The measure of a company's performance is its ability to operationalize its values throughout the organization, assuming of course that those values coincide with good business methods. One of America's best performers, General Electric, has done an excellent job of activating its values in every area of the company. Still, GE's value statement contains many examples of complex language that requires interpretation. Some of that language exhorts GE employees to:

GE has done a good job at translating these broad, inspiring imperatives down to the operating unit level. The mechanism for doing this at GE and other companies involves interspersing concrete examples of value statements into speeches, presentations, and written materials. A consensus and general understanding develops for each individual, work unit, department and business unit in terms of what people need to do to operationalize the broad performance imperatives.

Behavior Analysis

Behavioral technology allows us to clarify for each employee the actions and behaviors that support organizational strategy, thus allowing us to avoid the performance discrepancies associated with the misalignment of the two.

The values expressed in GE's value statement have no meaning unless they are grounded in the actions that define them. If we want a frontline employee to be "passionately focused," we must tell him what that means in terms of his work behavior. The key questions are, "What does a frontline employee who is passionately focused do?" "What does a frontline supervisor who is passionately focused do?" If we can answer these questions by identifying specific, concrete behaviors, we can accomplish the company's strategic objectives.

The process of transforming the language of values and strategy into actionable behavior for all employees is not the sole responsibility of the leadership team. It is the job of an organization's managers, supervisors and team leaders (with any necessary oversight of the leadership team) to convert the complex statements of organizational strategy into the specific behaviors for each job function and work group.

Behavior analysts possess a variety of root cause analysis methods for identifying distortions between individual action and organizational performance systems. Once identified through concise and actionable language the behavioral changes necessary to correct the performance discrepancies are well within the control of the performer. Leaders, managers and supervisors who have been educated in the use of behavior analysis tools are therefore much more likely to obtain high levels of performance from their workforce. The negative emotions and expectations that characterize performer problems as willful, unchangeable personality issues are replaced by solutions that change the employee's behavior.

Language and Performance

Performer Profiling

An equally important facet of organizational language is its impact on the deliverer or the messenger, so to speak. The models promoted by earlier schools of psychology present man as the willful agent of his every action, meaning that all of his behavior is under volitional control.

The problem with this perspective is that it characterizes the performer as purposeful or intentional in every aspect of his job performance. Therefore, problems and errors appear to be under the constant management of the performer's active thought processes. With these underlying assumptions, is it any wonder that emotionalism is generated between employee and supervisor when the supervisor uses expressions like, "Not a team player, not committed, unenthusiastic, negative, or no sense of urgency"?

These words depict employees with performance problems as people who have decided not to perform or who don't care. This leads to the classical self-fulfilling prophecy in which the supervisor's expectations are low for the performer and he communicates those expectations both verbally and non-verbally in discussions about performance. This type of profiling (or pigeon-holing) does not provide the supervisor (or the employee) with an accessible problem-solving model.

Conventional wisdom tells us that most performance problems are personality-driven and too deeply ingrained to change. Problem formulation stated in generalized terms such as these makes the problem seem unsolvable and in a way lets managers and leaders off the hook. If we operationalize the problems into the specific behaviors for which those expressions are verbal shortcuts, we are presented with a solvable problem. Behavior can be changed without changing personality.

Management-Employee Relations

When no systematic process exists for examining leadership's use of language, emotionally loaded words can deteriorate relationships, morale and overall performance. Presenting performance feedback and discussing problems can be sensitive occasions that create emotional responses from employer and employee. Generalized words tend to carry along an element of blame. They appear to be statements about the person, not about what the person did or did not do. Negative emotions are a major cause of performance problems in business and industry. Resentment or anger toward a supervisor is transferred to the company, the product, the customer and the job in general.

The one word or simple phrase summary conveys a totally different message than a list of desired and specific behaviors. Rather than tell a performer that you would like him or her to be more… involved, conscientious, committed, decisive, ambitious, focused, cooperative, collaborative, supportive, etcetera," describe or list the actions that, to you, demonstrate such adjectives. For example, I would like to see you come in on time, double check your work before distributing it; use spare time to help coworkers, and so on. These are doable requests that don't implore the employee to view himself as an unfixable person assigned permanently to a negative category. This change in language will build the relationship between you and the performer and aim the individual in the right direction for performance improvement.

Six Sigma Solutions

Six Sigma is a popular movement that identifies process problems, generates ideas, organizes information, gathers and analyzes process data, and suggests process management strategies and changes. With few exceptions, Six Sigma's tools do not contain a formal process for examining the factors that encourage and discourage specific behaviors either under current circumstances or related to the change process itself. These Six Sigma tools also seldom define for employees how to initiate new behaviors or drop behaviors they have been engaged in for years. Six Sigma problem solvers do not perform an analysis of the effect of new or old behaviors (behavior analysts call this a consequence analysis) on the probability the performer will adopt new ways of doing things or what changes must be made to increase the probability that they will.

The Six Sigma movement, for example, asserts, "more teamwork; take your role seriously; abandon your assumptions; avoid paranoia; take responsibility for your own learning; work collaboratively and thrive on change." How this is demonstrated largely remains a mystery to the employee being urged to do so. These terms leave too much latitude for interpretation, particularly, within a process that is trying to reduce variability to obtain a performance level of 99.99966% accuracy! More clarity in the language used to set expectations and give direction would enhance the efficacy of the movement as well as decrease the time it takes to get to that level of efficacy.

The breakthrough opportunity that still exists for Six Sigma, then, is to operationalize the language used throughout the organization to discuss human performance, not just process improvement. This metalevel analysis would reduce the error (variability) in the language used to characterize and define problems, thereby eliminating multiple meanings and interpretations regarding how people are to accomplish the process changes defined by Six Sigma.

Leaderspeak Solution Strategies

"How do organizations eliminate performance variability created by the unmediated use of language?" Any organization can create a management system to monitor the use of performance language. It does not involve a new initiative or a new process but rather a series of tasks and roles augmented by some training in behavior analysis, all of which should be integrated into existing processes.

The systems language problems identified here may seem innocuous or trivial, but their impact on organizational performance variability is unquestionable. Addressing the issue for many organizations would mean finally closing the gap between the things they tell their employees to do and the level of performance they actually get.

Leaderspeak: Converting the Language of Values to Frontline Performance