The Six Boxes Blog

The Best Management Program Ever, but...

We've just finished delivery of our Six Boxes® Management Development Program in a great client organization partnering with an extraordinarily capable long-time colleague of ours inside the organization and her thoughtful, change agent manager.  We used a lean introduction to the Performance Chain and The SIx Boxes Model to teach Managers and Directors how to describe performance clearly so that they could manage and develop it effectively.  They learned to identify work outputs and the tasks or activities needed to produce them, and how to plan to develop individuals and teams by arranging the right combination of behavior influences -- not just training, but also clearer expectations, feedback, tools, recognition, etc.  

We taught program participants to create Individual and Team Development Plans using the best that is known about systematic performance improvement, using practical tools for day-to-day management of people. The classroom program will be followed by on-the-job coaching plus additional modules to teach specific skills and interventions such as how to give effective feedback, how to use The Six Boxes as a leadership model, and so on.

This was a pilot program in the particular organization and, as usual, we approached it with a lot of anxiety about how it would work out and how it would be received.  After this first iteration, we know there are lots of opportunities for improvement, and we're still collecting feedback to help us refine and strengthen the design.

The good news is that initial feedback from a Director who attended called our program "the best management workshop ever."  This is from someone who has seen his share of management development, from what we understand.

But there was a kicker:  Like many organizations, this one tends to reward "working managers" – managers who devote most of their time to putting out fires and being the very best individual contributors on their teams. It's a badge of honor to work late, and the idea that one could free up time to develop one's direct reports is not exactly "realistic" as far as many of the managers are concerned. This is a widespread phenomenon, common in growing companies faced with the current economic downturn.

It's clear that whatever training and coaching we might be able to provide to these managers, until the leadership of the company clearly establishes an expectation that managers spend some portion of their time (maybe 20%) focused on developing their people, and rewards managers for direct reports who demonstrate improved individual and team performance, the "best management program ever" will have little, if any, impact.

This takes us to a new level in discussing ROI for any sort of performance improvement. We know that organizations spend a lot on their people in so many ways. We also suspect that few organizations get the most out of those investments (and we have some hypotheses about why). In this case, training alone will not enable the managers to improve organizational performance, nor will training plus on-the-job coaching.  It will take a change in what we call Box 1 (Expectations and Feedback) aligned with changes in Box 3 (Consequences and Incentives) to produce real returns on investment in managers and their teams.  

Just imagine, if you combine "the best management program ever" with support and direction from the top what might be possible!  Managers who understand how to pinpoint performance and then help their people improve it in the most cost-effective possible ways have the potential for producing greater and more sustainable organizational performance improvement than any program or training session of any kind dropped into a context where the behavior being taught is not expected nor explicitly rewarded on the job.

We're excited by the potential of our new program, and we have every confidence that the shifts in expectations needed to maximize ROI will occur over time in the client organization. But this story, like so many others, makes clear once again how important it is to apply systemic, holistic "performance thinking" in any context where we attempt to produce significant improvements in results. We have to look at the whole picture, and change can only happen in most cases when leadership sets new expectations and arranges for new types of reward and recognition.

Enabling a Results Only Work Environment (ROWE)

Check out the recent article on the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) brought to my attention by our colleague and Six Boxes practitioner, Julie Capsambellis.  It makes clear that when people are held responsible for the products of their work, and not merely for showing up and engaging in lots of activity, that their productivity, engagement, and likelihood of staying with the company increase.  

This arrangement allows complete flexibility in scheduling and location of work, while holding people responsible for their results.

What is particularly interesting to me is that in order for this to work, the "results" expected from people must be very clear, both to them and to management. The only way I know to do that practically, with individuals and teams, is to focus on work outputs and links to business results via the Performance Chain. Using the Performance Chain as the rationale for defining jobs, job assignments, and accountability is one of the most powerful ways of gaining alignment from the individual and team level all the way up to the organization's strategic plan and business goals.

We hear over and over again from executives, managers and individual contributors that they need a way to more clearly link what people do to the results their organizations need them to produce.  The best way we know to do that is to focus job descriptions, management, coaching, and HRD efforts on work outputs rather than on behavior or competencies.

Once an organization is able to make that paradigm shift, measurement, management and compensation become easier and more focused. And people become more able to contribute to continuous performance improvement, both for themselves and for the teams of which they are members.

A similar shift is taking place in U.S. government agencies toward the PBO – Performance Based Organization.

It's exciting to see developments in how people are engaged with their jobs that will allow organizations to get the most out of their people while providing motivating and supportive work environments that people enjoy.  We think that The Six Boxes Approach can be an important part of implementing these strategies.

by Carl Binder

A Great Opportunity

For those of you who live near Seattle (or would like to travel here) we are doing a rare public Six Boxes Workshop with the local ISPI chapter Sept. 3. But there's even more. Carol Panza, author of the book "Picture This...Your Function, Your Company" and expert in organizational mapping, will be doing a workshop the day before. Both workshops focus on simple, direct, easy-to-communicate methods for managing performance in an organization. Carol uses pictures to understand how an organization works, while the Six Boxes leverages two simple models to understand and plan for performance improvement. 

For more information or to register, visit the Seattle ISPI site.

Hope to see you there. Let us know if you have any questions.... or just to say you'll be attending!

Do We Need Managers or Leaders?

A new article in BusinessWeek entitled The Best Leadership is Good Management sure caught my eye. Everywhere we go, the focus seems to be on developing great leaders. Leadership, leadership, leadership. The slightly cynical me (and the one who started her career being "led") wonders who's left to actually do the work. But even more importantly, I'm often frustrated by the fuzzy descriptions of what a good leader should be, and the accompanying leadership programs that develop these somewhat intangible qualities. I whole-heartedly agree that we need visionary leaders to move us into the future. I also think we need better managers who will execute on those visions with skill, efficiency and the ability to build a high performing organization that endures beyond a single project. 

What we find challenging in our work with clients and affiliates is defining what outputs or accomplishments managers versus leaders produce for the organization. Defining competencies and activities makes it difficult to link to actual results, which is where we start when describing optimal performance. What do leaders contribute to the organization that is different from a manager? What is "left behind" that contributes to the organization's success?

I'd venture to say that we need great managers who can become great leaders. By focusing specifically on what is similar and what differentiates leaders from managers in terms of the outputs they contribute -- the decisions, relationships, plans, communications and people that they produce -- and the criteria by which we judge them to be "good" ones, we may be able to bring into better focus what we need to develop in our organizations.

by Cynthia Riha

I wish I knew then...

by Cynthia Riha

I often look back over my management career and wish I could go back and re-solve some of those performance problems with the Six Boxes. How much time and energy was wasted! One of the most memorable for me, especially because the outcome was the loss of a good employee, always comes to mind.

I was part of the senior management team in a venture-backed telecom start-up. We were small, less than 30 people at that stage, and our functional staffing needs changed faster than we could hire (or even plan for). But we did hire strong players who we thought could flexibly contribute in many roles if needed. Unfortunately, we described that as hiring people “with the right attitude”. In this case, we hired a fellow with an excellent track record of bringing major divisions of global companies into ISO certification to set up our quality system as we needed to rapidly ramp a large scale manufacturing operation. Many of us had worked with him before and been impressed with his capabilities and easy nature. But that ‘rapid ramp’ turned into a slow crawl and we actually needed project managers to get the products developed. He’d be perfect, we all thought. But shortly, the CEO was grumbling, we still didn’t have product development under control, and it was all “an attitude problem”. He wasn’t “getting it” (no one ever told him what they meant by project management), he wasn’t “committed” (he wasn’t around at 9 pm with the engineers), he wouldn’t “get his hands dirty” (he didn’t know he was expected to be in the lab measuring the parts or even how to), and he was “a light weight” (he had a pretty interesting life outside the office). So without clear expectations of what project management entailed for this set of engineers (Box 1), or what constituted success (Box 1), without project management software and tools (Box 2), without being included in the personal satisfaction of being part of a team (Box 3), or ever having been taught the lab skills (Box 4), we had an “attitude” problem (Box 6). And he was the first to be laid off when the money got tight.

He did, of course, quickly get another job where he was successfully employed for many years, even through that company’s ups and downs. In retrospect, I see how unfortunate it was that we didn’t have the Six Boxes to diagnose and correct the challenge. While his personal capacity (Box 5) might not have been a perfect fit, he was a highly capable and valuable resource for a struggling young company that had precious little time and money to waste. Hours were lost as the CEO and others discussed his “attitude problem” while Rome burned (i.e. no working products). With the Six Boxes, we would have looked at our contribution before we jumped to his motives. Does he know what we mean by project management? What was the level of effort that the culture expected? Did he have what he needed to do the job? Was anyone coaching him and providing daily feedback? What would be a positive pay-off for him in this new role? How do we fit him in to a tight engineering team and make him feel accepted? With just a small amount of structured examination of the problem, I’m convinced he’d have been a valuable contributor.

Start-ups often claim there’s no time to bring people up to speed, to work with performance problems.  But the way that most companies are evolving, flatter organizations look a lot like start-ups and this challenge has to be approached differently. A quick, systematic approach to solving performance challenges is critical to not losing time or value from existing investments in people. Everyone needs to “think” in a way that gets to quick results and change without jumping to replacing the performer. Agility includes development of people and teams. Moving quickly and working with the people you have are what makes for successful companies.

I can't go back and change what I didn't know, but I sure hope I can help a lot of other people avoid the trauma that often accompanies unresolved performance problems. I truly believe that we can easily meet business goals and develop great people with really simple methods.

 

Leadership and Succession Planning with the Six Boxes®

by Carl Binder

I found a great article in my pile of tear-outs from reading on planes: a one-pager about leadership and succession planning at Proctor and Gamble.

What's important in P&G's successful approach is devoting as much or more of your time to developing others for success as you do to developing yourself.

This is why my partner, Cynthia, thinks that we should teach more people to use The Six Boxes Approach for creating self-development plans. I quite agree. It seems clear that we need to have simple tools for creating development plans for ourselves and for the people who report to us.

Question:  What do I produce?

If you think about your own job, or about the job of one of your reports, the immediate question should be: What do I produce that contributes to the success of the organization?  

You probably contribute things like important decisions, plans, communications, sustainable relationships and teams, and many other accomplishments that characterize successful leaders. We teach leaders to use the Performance Chain to think about the value each person, including herself or himself, contributes to the organization – based on the value of their outputs or accomplishments.

Question: What behavior is most successful?

If you can figure out from experience, from mentoring, training, or from study of others the best ways to produce your contributions to the organization, you and others will be better at delivering value. If you can determine what works best, most smoothly, with the least amount of cost and effort, you'll smooth the way for yourself and the people who work for you. We use the Performance Chain to identify best practices and strategies:  behavior for success.

Question: How can I develop and sustain successful performance?

That's where the Six Boxes model comes in. We can show people how to design their own development plans, and how to develop plans for their reports – using the Six Boxes model. 

Development requires more than training. In order to develop sustainable performance, the entire Six Boxes matrix needs to be balanced and complete in relation to the important components of your job.  We can help anyone at any level problem-solve their own development and know what they need to do or ask for to create sustained excellent performance and development in themselves and their reports.

Great leaders develop themselves and others

If we can help leaders develop both themselves and others with the same, flexible tools, then we've got a winner. That's why we think that Six Boxes Leadership is potentially a very big opportunity for forward-looking organizations.

Box 3 at Lincoln Electric – 20 Years Later. Wow!

by Carl Binder

In the final stages of a "Getting Things Done" project to clean up my piles of miscellaneous un-filed stuff, I came across a 1988 article from Inc Magazine about the incentive compensation system at Lincoln Electric, a Cleveland manufacturing company. The article describes the system as a key element in Lincoln's long-term success, explaining that it had hardly changed since the program's inception in 1934.

At the time of the article, virtually none of the company's 1,800 production employees received any base salary.  Their earnings were based on their own individual output and on bonuses from a profit-sharing plan. Described in a book by the Founder's brother, James E. Lincoln, called Incentive Management, the philosophy behind the system was to give non-management employees direct and powerful incentives to manage their own work as efficiently as possible and to look for opportunities to do better.  

To mitigate fear that people would work themselves out of a job by being too productive, at the time of the article the company virtually guaranteed employees that if they were not needed in one job, there would be another position in the company for them. Employee retention at that time was exceptionally high.  

While there are a lot of details that one should get right in order to install such a system, the reason for my bringing it up here is to make the point that when done well - with a clear link between Box 3 consequences and and Box 1 expectations – incentive compensation systems can be very powerful and engaging for performers. And at Lincoln there had been a lot of effort to get the system right. 

The article from 20 years ago got me wondering: How's the company doing today, and is this program still part of how they do business?  

I took a look at their stock price (LECO) - they are a publicly traded company now. Like most manufacturers, Lincoln has taken a big hit over the last few years and its stock price has been reduced to where it was in 2006. But the company has weathered severe downturns before, and the stock pickers say they expect it to rebound well in comparison to its competitors due to a "well trained and highly motivated work force."

I also took a look at Lincoln's web site, specifically their employment page. Not only is the incentive system still in place, but it's featured on that page as a core benefit of employment at Lincoln. Moreover, it appears to have been strengthened with guaranteed employment after 3 years on the job.

There's lots to discuss here, but since so few companies actually leverage monetary incentives very well, I thought it was noteworthy that such a system not only works, but it has continued to work for 70 years and running!

Self-management and a new paradigm for performance improvement

by Cynthia Riha 

I have for many years insisted that the greatest application of the Six Boxes Approach is self-management, quite the opposite of what most of our corporate clients are looking for. Rather, they appreciate the idea but come to us for ways to better manage the performance of their employees. That’s how companies have traditionally functioned – performance is managed by something or someone other than the performer.

I think this is changing more rapidly than we know, especially with the amazing growth of social networking. The tools for social networking are still in flux, but the autonomous, self-directed mindset that emerges once you begin to participate in multiple networks will surely flow into how businesses are organized. Harold Jarche  talks about this in an interesting post on changing business structures. He refers to Dee Hock’s work on chaordic organizations, the first book that really opened up my thinking about how businesses might operate in radically different ways. Harold suggests that the classical hierarchical management pyramid is being flipped, with so-called managers being on the bottom in service to the workers, providing practices, processes and tools. He closes by asking if managers are really necessary in complex networks.

This closely relates to the discussions happening among our team. The worker of the (very near) future needs to perform in cross-functional teams, with multiple managers, on short term projects, with changing roles and expectations, for organizations that re-organize frequently to meet changing market conditions. In order to effectively collaborate across networks, levels, and organizational structures, no one person nor one entity can realistically “manage” someone else’s performance.

So I will climb back up on that soapbox and again plead the case for developing  performance thinking and performance improvement skills in each and every performer. The emerging networked business models require new paradigms in preparing and supporting the workers. Giving each individual a systematic but easy way to understand and optimize performance that is shared across individuals would mean that the structure would become responsive to the individual and to the collective input of individuals who share a common view of performance, rather than imposing the solution from a single point or level – a manager or management level– in the network. While there might continue to exist all the current specialties and functions (training, recruiting, compensation, OD, talent management, process improvement, etc.), they would be in service to the worker and collaborative teams, sharing an understanding of performance and what drives it. “Solutions” to specific performance challenges will not likely be static, but will continuously improve with input and learning among the collective or network of participating individuals. As such, the workers themselves will need to know how to do a succinct analysis of a performance problem in order to know what support and input to ask for.  

This will be the new manager -- the individual and the collective self-managing, forming a true learning organization that shifts and reorganizes according to the needs of the larger organization.  

What IS "Performance Thinking" and Why Do We Care?

by Carl Binder

For several years we've been talking a lot about "performance thinking" and the Six Boxes Approach.  One could even say that we're building a whole company and community of practice based on this key concept. I'd like to say a little about what I think this phrase means, its implications for our business and your practice, and how it distinguishes the work that we are doing from that of some of our esteemed colleagues in the human performance improvement field.  This is, in some respects, an update on what I wrote last December about the same topic.

Some of the thought leaders in the field of human performance technology (HPT), represented perhaps most clearly by pioneering members of the ISPI community, have developed enormously detailed algorithmic approaches to analyzing and improving performance in the workplace, producing important and significant results in many organizations. These pioneering thought leaders have then applied their own methodologies to help others produce similar results. For example, one of those pioneers, Joe Harless, recently told me in an email exchange that the more detail he developed in his job aids and procedures, the more effectively his proteges were able to apply them with consistent results. 

On the other hand, with greater and greater detail, fewer people were willing to use his tools and he was not able to have the "market penetration" for which he had hoped. He was not able to produce the revolution of widespread science-based performance improvement that he and his own mentors had envisioned. This is the testimony from one of the most successful and important leaders in the field of human performance improvement.

With The Six Boxes Approach, we are trying to go in a different direction.  First, we are interested in a much broader audience beyond human performance improvement experts. We have seen over the years that when executive leaders, managers, supervisors, trainers, HR generalists and individual contributors learn about the Performance Chain and The Six Boxes Model, they become more able to understand and improve performance in all kinds of ways. Some applications are large, technical and detailed. Others are small, informal and ad hoc. But in virtually every case where the essentials communicated in these models and concepts have been applied, we've seen improvements in individual and group performance, employee engagement, and results.

So our approach, instead of providing extremely detailed job aids and algorithms, is to teach people how to understand, deconstruct, and then improve performance using these concepts and models.  We also teach people how to communicate with one another about performance using the plain English of these models.  Beyond the "big" successful projects we can claim over the years of applying what has become The Six Boxes Approach, perhaps our most important successes have been that people tell us with great enthusiasm how trainers and managers, leaders and HR professionals, team members and their supervisors, and people across all levels and all functions in organizations are communicating and collaborating with this "simple but powerful" set of models and language.

That is not to say we are ignoring the importance of tools and documentation. While we boast of using only a small handful of flexible work sheets and simple job aids, we are in the process of building what will eventually be a wiki for collecting and organizing what we and others in our community of practice have learned. We will document best practices, guidelines, hints, and other aspects of what w are learning about how to apply Six Boxes "performance thinking" to problems and opportunities ranging from corporate leadership to program implementation, from individual career development to process improvement, from departmental efficiency to onboarding, and from skip level meetings to raising our children.

The downside of not having finely detailed algorithms is that there is greater variation in how people apply elements of The Six Boxes Approach, and people sometimes struggle a little in the beginning. But this variation is also an upside because our fellow practitioners come back to us with applications and ways of using this approach that we would never have imagined. This, we believe, will be an important  strength of the Six Boxes Community of Practice – innovation and continuous evolution.  It's also why we see the core of this community as a growing number of Six Boxes Coaches who help others through initial applications to avoid beginners' mistakes.  We are in the process of building a Six Boxes Certified Coach Program, now in its initial stages, but soon to be much more broadly available. As part of the Six Boxes Application Program, participants receive coaching in their initial applications.

So this is a way of thinking, not a specific procedure. It's an approach, not a strict "methodology."  In the end, fluent Six Boxes performance thinkers are able to look at performance, link it to results, understand what drives it, and re-arrange behavior influences to move things in the desired direction. We hope through this work to enable many, many people around the world to benefit from the science-based principles embedded in our visual models and plain English concepts by  better managing their own and others' behavior to produce the results that they and their organizations seek.

 

Playing with Flash Video

I've been playing with flash video at a web site called animoto.com. Took about 5 minutes. And it's fun!