The Six Boxes Blog

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!

Let the Performer Decide What Works

by Cynthia Riha

This is another of our occasional discussions about using the Six Boxes with family. But I think the point will prove important for all situations, so I hope those without children, or whose years of active parenting are (finally) behind them, will hang with me for a moment.

Being one who lives and breathes the Six Boxes Model, I’m always using it to analyze and solve performance problems at home (my kids would just love being called a performance problem). And following the shoeless-cobbler-kids metaphor, I often default to nagging, begging or screaming. We all know how well that works. So I was happily surprised recently to see a successful example of the use of the approach at home – with highly desirable results.

My youngest son has never liked to brush his teeth. He probably has more sensitive gums than most which makes it unpleasant, but being a parent more interested in the result than his experience, I try to be as insensitive to that as possible. Naturally, my efforts often went nowhere. But as a good performance consultant, many times over the last few years I have tried all the boxes:

Box 1 – calmly explaining how often and why to brush, feed-forwarding when it’s time to do, checking quality, nagging, harassing, feedback on how he did each time, pointing out people with bad teeth

Box 2 – fun toothbrushes, electric toothbrushes, timers, every flavor of toothpaste imaginable

Box 3 – verbal approval, thanking him, and more punishment than I want to admit

Box 4 – diagrams of how to brush, brushing demonstrations

Box 5 – once we decided the gum sensitivity was real, we adjusted his toothbrushes and quit insisting on the electric one

Box 6 – he’s too young to “prefer” not to brush. I’m the mom.

All of this produced limited results, and nothing produced a self-managed kid.

Until he saw a commercial on TV for this “really fun blue mouthwash” that shows you where to brush. I just thought it was consumerism trying once more to get my child to demand yet another useless product, but being somewhat desperate we went for it (actually Dad did).  Happy ending: It worked perfectly and I have never nagged again, and everyone has noticed how much better his teeth look.

At first, I smugly took credit for a great Box 2 (tools and resources) intervention. But the truth is, I had tried many things and in all the boxes. What actually happened was that the performer, left on his own but knowing it was a problem, found something that fit in Box 1 (it showed him both where to brush and when he was finished), Box 2 (it was a perfect tool), Box 3 (he felt a sense of accomplishment getting rid of the blue), and maybe most importantly, Box 6 (it was fun for him and made him feel independent).

As performance consultants, we love to engineer solutions. In reality, we are here to organize the influences on performance in a way that makes sense for the particular performer (or group of performers). The perfectly engineered solution is only perfect if performance is changed. Motives and preferences (Box 6) can’t be changed, but the rest of the system pivots on what they are. The system and the performer are actually one unit – we don’t design a performance system and then plop a performer into it. It’s a fascinating challenge – especially for those of us who love to “engineer” the perfect solution from our desk (or the kitchen table).

The Value of a Good Organization Map

by Carl Binder

One of the best ways to understand the performance of a whole organization is to "map" it graphically. 

With a clear picture of the organizational system, including its cross-functional processes, we can better identify key Work Outputs of individuals and teams, and link them to Organizational or Business Results in the Performance Chain.  

Our colleague, Rick Straker, brought to our attention that blogger and consultant Tom Gram recently posted an excellent summary of the value and benefits of mapping an organization "from the top down" and using organization maps to better understand how the organization actually works, to make decisions, and to gain leverage in planning to improve performance.

Another of our colleagues, Carol Panza, wrote a very practical book that describes the value of and process for doing organizational mapping. 

Organization maps can help to focus application of The Six Boxes Approach and I always like to  bring such practical methods and tools to your attention.

Revised Six Boxes Web Site and ISPI Conference Highlights

We've just returned from a week at The International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) where we were busy, and where The Six Boxes Approach continued to attract a lot of enthusiastic interest.

Before giving you a run-down on the highlights of that conference, we want to direct you to our revised web site, SixBoxes.com.  This is an interim site, meant to update information about The Six Boxes Approach and our new suite of Six Boxes Programs, prior to a major re-launch of the site scheduled in a few months.  We hope you'll take a few minutes to check it out.

Kicking off ISPI with a pre-conference workshop, we facilitated a Basic Six Boxes Program for a group of seasoned performance improvement professionals, including two planning to become Certified Six Boxes Coaches.  The workshop was lively and engaging and, as usual, we probably learned at least as much as the workshop participants.  It's always great to see how The Six Boxes Approach stimulates new thinking and helps people "connect the dots" about performance and how to improve it.

We also presented four educational sessions at the conference, one an "Encore" session, voted as one of the best from last year, describing how The Six Boxes Approach synthesizes an enormous amount of what is known from both research and practice related to managing and improving performance.  

We were pleased to partner in presentations with three of our colleagues.  

Brian Turner from Microsoft presented with Carl about how we have been working with Microsoft's Engineering Excellence group to transform it from a learning and development department to a performance consulting organization, using The Six Boxes Approach as a foundation.  

Art Stadlin of Ceridian Benefit Services described a beautiful implementation of Six Boxes Skip-level Meetings in his IT organization, using our model as a framework for the meetings, to summarize findings, and to plan for improvement. 

Carl also presented a session with our old friend and mentor, Dr. Don Tosti, whose work on clarifying and strengthening organizational culture has been a major influence on us.  Carl and Don facilitated a discussion with an overflowing audience contrasting a proactive "design engineering" approach to performance improvement with the more reactive problem-solving approach that seems to characterize so much work in organizations these days.  Our view, seemingly shared by most in the audience, is that taking a design optimization approach offers much greater power and potential for improvement than focusing exclusively on specific problems, root cause analysis, and specific solutions. We think the latter approach misses many opportunities for truly breakthrough results.

Carl conducted a series of roundtable sessions showing how we use The Performance Chain to identify measures for evaluating the impact of performance improvement efforts.  This combined one element of The Six Boxes Approach with some of our previous work on performance measurement.

After the conference Carl and Timm Esque (ISPI Director) met with a group of delegates from Korea, convened by our associate, Kinam Sung, for an open-ended discussion about the entire conference.  Our Korean colleagues, who have shown a keen interest in The Six Boxes Approach since we first introduced it at LG Academy 2005, once again demonstrated their eagerness to learn and enthusiasm for new ideas. 

One of the most significant parts of the conference for us was an inspiring keynote presentation on leadership and values delivered by Frances Hesselbein, a remarkable woman who is Chair of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. For anyone interested in leadership for the 21st century, we highly recommend her books. And at a personal level, when she signed our copy of her most recent book, the humanity and authenticity that she radiated person-to-person were truly awesome.

Last, but perhaps not least important, we were honored and grateful that Carl received ISPI's highest recognition, the Honorary Lifetime Membership Award, for his contributions to ISPI and to the field of performance improvement.

We're looking forward to the next few months, during which we expect to certify several new Six Boxes Coaches, begin implementing Six Boxes programs for Executive Leaders, and prepare our new web site with additional resources and web 2.0 features to support our growing community of practice.

As always, we welcome your comments, questions, and new ideas.

All the Best,

The Six Boxes Team

We have Ignition!

Yesterday (March 23, 2009) we convened our Seattle area Six Boxes® Development ('lab") group for a face-to-face meeting, something that has been happening about once per quarter since we began the group last Spring.  In between such face-to-face gatherings, we meet each week via web conference to learn, share work, and give each other feedback.  This is how we have been learning from our successes and shortcomings, slowly refining our tools, methods and language so that we can reliably produce competent Certified Six Boxes Coaches and Affiliates.

Our group brings together ten colleagues representing a wide range of backgrounds, interests and areas of expertise -- including an experienced training manager working to develop performance consultants in one of our largest corporate clients; several young professionals with technical backgrounds in organizational behavior management now working as either employees or consultants in human services agencies; a senior manager of finance with an MBA from prestigious American university who began her career in her native Nigeria and who is developing a team leadership program on the side; and three former executives now providing consulting services in cross-cultural leadership development, marketing, and performance improvement, respectively.

What was remarkable, and very gratifying about yesterday's meeting, is that among this very diverse group of professionals who now share the language and concepts of the Performance Chain and The Six Boxes Model, there emerged a true community of practice, a shared vocabulary and increasingly clear understanding about human performance and what makes it tick.  It was an explosion, or at least an ignition of "performance thinking" in a group that is in many ways representative of the types of people in organizations who we believe can benefit from The Six Boxes Approach. 

It was absolutely fantastic to see them, all with different technical and professional backgrounds, speaking as peers in plain English about The Six Boxes Approach, giving each other feedback and suggestions, presenting each other with performance descriptions and analyses, talking about how they use the tools, and so on.

We have envisioned for at least 3 years the possibility of a global community of practice sharing the simple but powerful language and tools of The Six Boxes Approach, each involved in their own work and bringing the particular details of that to the table, contributing to and participating in a growing collective understanding about performance and how to improve it. I can honestly say that it is no longer just a vision!

While this is certainly just a start, our work together has paid off. We have learned a lot about what it takes to get people to this point, and we are certain we can do it with increasing speed and ease for future groups.

We have ignition, and now we can build on that bright spark!

Thanks to all who have been involved.  I think this is going to be BIG!

Carl Binder, Senior Partner

Binder Riha Associates

The Six Boxes at the ISPI Conference April 18-23

For those interested in learning more about The Six Boxes® Approach we will be offering our one-day Basic Six Boxes Workshop at a reduced fee in Orlando, FL, on April 18 at the annual conference of the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) to be held at the Dolphin Hotel at Disneyworld. This is one of the few times we do the workshop publicly so it’s a great opportunity for individuals to get an introduction to the Six Boxes.

There will also be others talking about the Six Boxes at the conference. Here's a list of all the events where we or others are presenting on the topic:

Removing Performance Obstacles: Connecting Leaders with Staff Using The Six Boxes® 

Art Stadlin, Ceridian Benefits Services, Carl Binder, CPT, PhD, Binder Riha Associates, and Julie A. Capsambelis, CPT, Ceridian - Military OneSource 

Using the Six Boxes® Model to Synthesize Research and Practice – An Encore Presentation (one of last year's best)

Carl Binder, CPT, Ph.D, Binder Riha Associates 

Making the Six Boxes® Your Ultimate Analysis Tool -- Microsoft Case Study 

Brian Turner and Carl Binder, CPT, PhD, Binder Riha Associates  

Creating Opportunities or Repairing Broken Systems: Proactive Design vs. Reactive Problem-solving? 

Carl Binder, CPT, PhD, Binder Riha Associates and Don Tosti, Vanguard Consulting Inc.  

Cracker Barrel: Measurement Counts! Using the Performance Chain to Plan Evaluation

Carl Binder, CPT, PhD 

In addition, Carl will be receiving the Honorary Lifetime Member award for his many years of contribution to ISPI and the field of performance technology.

You can learn more about ISPI and the conference at http://www.ispi.org/content.aspx?id=308&linkidentifier=id&itemid=308.  A brief description of the workshop is below.

 

 

The Six Boxes® Approach: A Fast On-Ramp to Human Performance Technology
Carl Binder, CPT, PhD, Senior Partner, Binder Riha Associates  

Workshop Code: WSD 



The simplicity and plain language of The Six Boxes® Approach can drive rapid communication and implementation of human performance technology across all organizational levels, in diverse cultures, to address performance challenges great and small. This workshop teaches the language and concepts of Six Boxes "performance thinking" for organizational alignment, needs analysis, best practices initiatives, implementation planning, leadership, and other performance improvement efforts. It introduces practical tools and templates plus language that participants can start to apply immediately. 

Participants will be able to: 

·      Communicate in clear, plain language with everyone about causes of deficient and exemplary performance. 

·      Identify metrics for measuring the impact of programs and interventions.

·      Gain consensus about performance objectives and how to achieve them.

·      Obtain and analyze information for needs analyses, best practices initiatives, performance system design, implementation planning, process improvement, and training support.

·      Spread fundamental HPT and performance thinking across diverse organizations and cultures.

 The price for the workshop is $395 for conference attendees or ISPI members, and $445 otherwise, discounted from our usual $495 price.