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FINE-TUNING THE SYSTEM

The answer is to review all the elements of the P.R.I.C.E. motivational system in turn, checking for weak spots, areas of strain, and places where the principles of motivation are not sufficiently understood, or inappropriately applied, or both.  Even cars that have just rumbled off the assembly line break down sometime, and that's not necessarily because their design or basic structure is faulty.  Sometimes it's just because somebody has forgotten to tighten a screw somewhere.  So you go back and check all the screws.

You start with Pinpointing.  You started to apply our motivational model by Pinpointing specific Behaviors that you determine to be holding your coworkers or teammates back. If you're not to the Super Bowl yet, maybe you picked the wrong Behaviors.  Maybe they weren't the source of your problems.  Maybe Alex, the guy you suspected of not doing daily preventive maintenance checks, actually was doing the checks, and the real problem was that his machines had an internal malfunction that couldn't be picked up by a routine PM check.  Maybe the slowdown in sales didn't have anything to do with seasonal variations in market demand; maybe it was the result of a new competitor that your marketing department had overlooked.  So the problem to be Pinpointed was in marketing, not in the sales department.  If you find out information like this on a second investigation of the problem, it's time to Pinpoint again.  The same thing may go for your objectives.  Remember that they have to be Pinpointed, too, and that they have to zero in on quantity to be changed (increased, decreased) in a given Vocation (the market research department, for example) by a specified date.  If you haven't made your objectives specific and quantifiable in this way, the problem might very well be that your people, who want to work harder, just don't know what they're aiming for.

Finally, is the Pinpointing being used in a way that will effectively highlight Behaviors and objectives that can realistically be "owned" by the people who are supposed to be affecting them?  Do they all see your goal line as realistic?  Have they been involved in setting the mid-term goals themselves?  Do they believe that it's important and meaningful for them to be working toward the specified goals? If not, your goals can be as high (or as low) as you desire, but they're just not going to get accomplished.

What I'm saying here relates not just to Pinpointing, but to the Recording and Involvement elements of the P.R.I.C.E. system as well.  The goal is (or ought to be) to set team and individual goals that everybody has contributed to, that are clearly understood by everybody who needs to work toward them, and that are frequently assessed and posted so that the folks who need to pull harder know what it means to them when they do.  When you've got those kind of goals set from the outset, your fine-tuning is going to be a snap.  When you don't have those goals, you're going to have to work that much harder to instill confidence and energy and commitment in your people - no matter how smart or skilled they are.

Part of this comes from your personal commitment as a manager, and your ability to make that commitment contagious.  If you don't believe the new system (whether it's a P.R.I.C.E. system or a new cost-accounting method) will work, you've tied your people's hands behind them before they've even begun.  I've found this out a hundred times on the ball field.  Going in to any game without believing you're going to come out on top is a flat-out waste of time.  The best quarterbacks, and coaches, and managers can get that message across to their teams.  All of them.  Because if they don't buy it, it ain't sold. Total Involvement isn't something a good business organization can take or leave today; it's one of the few things keeping you from being plowed under by the competition.

In the next chapter I'm going to come back to this, and talk about ways I know of to convince your folks that they can win - that you all can win together, and only together. But here's the basic point.  In Evaluating your progress from Point A to wherever you are on the graph right now, keep in mind that, in business and in sports, superstars don't make it, and genius generals don't make it, and people who see workers just as "human capital" don't make it.  The only thing that makes it today is teamwork.  That means Involvement. So if you haven't yet reached that first goal line, find out if everybody's pulling.  Find out if everybody has a reason to.  

After you've reviewed the Pinpointing, Recording, and Involvement elements of the P.R.I.C.E. system, you only have one element left.  That's Consequences, and it's what makes everything else rise or fall.

In the last chapter I explained how to give positive and negative Consequences, and I don't want to repeat all that here.  Let me just focus on the three points that I think are most critical to this kind of performance-improving feedback.

First, I said you should keep your Reinforcements of good and bad Behaviors timely.  Are you sure that you are giving the relevant Consequences soon enough after the performance of the desired new Behavior?  In the management of people's motivation, "better late than never" just doesn't hack it.  If it doesn't come soon, it might just as well not come at all.  I knew a financial manager once who was doing handstands at lunch because his team of accountants had saved their company six figures in taxes one year by close attention to the tax laws.  "They really outdid themselves," he told me shortly after the April 15 filing deadline.  "Why don't you tell them that?" I asked him.  "I'm waiting until Christmas," he confided.  "Their year-end bonuses are going to be a big surprise." The only problem was that, by the time Christmas rolled around, two of his seven accountants had departed for new jobs.  They knew they had performed well, and wanted to be told so, right away.

You can overdo the timeliness, of course.  I found this out in the winter of 1975, when the Vikings and I had just fought our way to a Super Bowl slot, I was so high on my offensive linemen that, the Wednesday before Super Bowl Sunday, I took them all out to dinner at New Orleans's most famous restaurant, the elegant antebellum watering spot Antoine's.  We ate like royalty, and I think it's fair to say that every member of the line was pleased at the positive reinforcement. On Super Bowl Sunday, however, we gained a smashing total of seventeen yards rushing against the Steelers.  From which I learned an important lesson:  sometimes you can reinforce too early.  What I was trying to do (unconsciously, of course) was to ensure a Super Bowl victory by giving positive Consequences in advance. It didn't work.  It never does.  If you want continued improvement, continued high motivation on the part of your working team, you've got to reinforce them immediately after they've done the good work.  No later.  And no earlier, either.

Second point.  Keep it appropriate.  Are you sure that the Consequences you've been meting out suit the virtue being rewarded or the vice being punished?  I don't mean asking simply, "Did I kick his ass hard enough for screwing up?" and "Was that letter of thanks enthusiastic enough?"  Those are important questions, sure, but they're not enough. In giving out Consequences you've got to be attuned not only to the "objective" facts of individual cases, but also to the people involved.  Different people need different reinforcement.  The rewards or punishments you give out have got to fit the people, or they'll be meaningless.

Or worse than meaningless.  The distribution of inappropriate Consequences can backfire badly on you.  Most of the time this happens because a manager gives out a punishment which he thinks is a reward - or vice versa.  All of us in business could learn a lesson from old Tom Sawyer.  Remember when he has to whitewash the fence - a punishment from his Aunt Polly - and he convinces his friends that it's actually a reward?  Everybody in the neighborhood comes flocking, because Tom has managed to convince them that they ought to enjoy what he's doing.  If we were all that cagey, motivation would be a snap.  But we're not.  So we have to investigate - to track the "consequences of the Consequences" - in each individual case and for each individual person, to determine whether a given Consequence is a plus or a minus.  Otherwise we fall into the position of the manager who gives out "extra responsibility" to his best workers - and wonders why the others don't improve.

A final point about Consequences: they must be consistent.  That is, they must follow the hallmark of justice, which is to treat like things alike, or to reward (or punish) according to the quality of the performance, not because you like or dislike the person involved.  If the reward-and-punishment system you're working with is not giving you the results you expected, this might be a problem area.  There's nothing as hostile to performance, nothing as ultimately demotivating to a team member, as realizing (or just suspecting) that the coach or manager is playing favorites - and that he's not one of them.  The one way I know of to avoid this type of demotivation is to observe the behaviorist's basic ground rule:  reward (or punish) the Behavior, not the person.

This doesn't mean you have to be cold-hearted about giving Consequences, or adhere to some rigid schedule, like a scientist would do in programming rats.  Sure, there are opportunities for individual, differential reinforcement that don't do harm to the morale of the team, and a wise manager takes advantage of them.  But he does it with one eye open for trouble, because he knows envy and resentment are very strong human emotions, and that the "at least adequate" performer can easily be demotivated toward poor performance if he feels he's being given the shaft.

In the Gospels there's a tantalizing story about a vineyard owner who hires a group of workers early in the morning, another group at midday, and a third group late in the afternoon.  At the end of the day's work he pays them all the same and, not surprisingly, the second and third group take exception.  "We busted our butts all day long," they say in effect, "and these guys only worked a couple of hours, and you're paying us all the same. What gives?"  The vineyard owner explains that they have no cause to complain, because they agreed to work a given period of time for a given rate, and he hasn't cheated them.  If he chooses to pay the others the same money, it takes nothing away from them.

The parable is meant to illustrate the fact that, in the "competitive race" for God's kingdom, we are all equally sinners and all equally indebted to the grace of the Lord. Charity and common sense both dictate that, if a greater sinner than I is admitted to Paradise, I should be grateful that I got in at all, and not complain because God is all-merciful.  Theologically, this is watertight.  But don't apply it to motivating others.  As a manager of human beings, you've got to pay your workers differentially, based on their works, not grace.  God can get away with being generous to everybody alike.  You can't. If one of your junior marketing managers delivers twice as much good work as the others, you can't send him the same kind of "Thank you" message as the rest, or he's going to ask (quite reasonably), "What gives?"  You've got to be consistent.

One caveat, though.  I mean consistent, not rigid.  In Evaluating your progress as a motivator, you have to ask not only, "Am I giving everybody the same message for the same Behaviors?" but also, "Are my same messages getting boring?"  In our productivity seminars, we talk about a Satiation Principle as the key to maintaining an effective, not a rigid, consistency.  Something as simple as asking an earnest worker to have coffee with you can be an effective motivator if it's used consistently for every earnest worker.  But if coffee is the only reward you give out, people are going to get tired of it very quickly.  The Satiation Principle is going to set in, and the motivating value of the reward is going to be lost.  At that point - and ideally, well before that point - it's time to change the reinforcement schedule.  Consistency tempered by variety is the key.

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