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MYTH: ONE-MINUTE PRAISINGS - THE MOST PRAISEWORTHY THING TO DO

No way!

You and I may want to improve our performance. We want raises and "attaboys" and an office that is truly topside of the rockpile. And, yes, we're running hard all the time just to see the score change and get our daily feedback. But what are we fed instead? Programs designed to give us "job satisfaction" and one-minute pep talks. Can you imagine any athlete succeeding from nothing more than pats on the fanny? What we really need is more attention to what we're doing. When I perform well, I want to know it. I want to know how and why my performance was good - and how it can be better. Being a happy player doesn't necessarily make me a better player.  The opposite is true: being a better player makes me a happier player.

Managing performance means giving feedback and reinforcement - lots of it, in very specific terms and often. For me, the ultimate form of feedback has always been the scoreboard. In business, you create a scoreboard not so different from the ones in sports: a graph used to chart your own or your employees' performance and production. And it works. Not just in keeping score, but in improving the score. People actually improve their performance just because someone pays attention - often for the first time - to what they're doing. Years ago an experiment showed that people improved their performance when factory lighting was turned up, and improved again when it was turned down. But productivity remained steady or declined when the lighting was left alone, because people felt they weren't getting any attention. Most of the time I'll increase my productivity if I know someone cares.

Andrew S. Grove, president of Intel Corporation, the California semiconductor manufacturer, uses a scoreboard technique in his business. "For years, the performance of the Intel facilities maintenance group, which is responsible for keeping our buildings clean and in good shape, was mediocre; and no amount of pressure or inducement seemed to do any good. We then initiated a program in which each building's upkeep was periodically scored by a resident senior manager, dubbed a 'building czar.' The score was then compared with those given the other buildings. The condition of all of them dramatically improved almost immediately. Nothing else was done; people did not get more money or other rewards. What they did get was an arena of competition."

My style of business scoreboard is based on a procedure called P.R.I.C.E. Think of it as the price you must pay if you want to win. Each letter in P.R.I.C.E. stands for a step to take to create a winning performance for yourself and for your employees. Unlike the zillion management theories floating around the landscape - management by objective, management grids, transactional analysis, theories X, Y and Z - with a lot of ideas but few guides for concrete action - P.R.I.C.E. is a concrete, practical way of beating the odds against you. Here is what the initials stand for:

P = Pinpoint any measurable performance of yours that needs to be changed.
R = Record the performance on a chart for everyone to see just as he'd track a scoreboard.
I =  Identify the results of the performance: how much money or time is lost as a  result of
      inattention or a job poorly done; then intervene to modify the performance.
C = Change the consequences of that behavior, give reinforcement and performance
      feedback in the form of praise and recognition and with graphs and non-money
      rewards.
E = Evaluate the changes in job performance, continue to review yourself or your
      employees and modify the consequences based on the direction of progress.

We've tested P.R.I.C.E. at Tarkenton Productivity Group over a dozen years of consulting in a variety of manufacturing, sales and service organizations, with excellent results. What makes it good is that it works.

As a quarterback, I was always searching for ways to achieve the winning edge. In football, whenever we do something right, it goes straight into our records. But in most companies, good performers don't get much attention (according to Boardroom Reports). Usually, the way to get reaction from a boss or a coach is not to perform.  Managers spend most of their time seeking out problems, not praising. The beauty of determining everybody's P.R.I.C.E. - your own included - is that everybody's performance improves, both the benchwarmer's and the star's.

That's where pinpointing behavior becomes so important. Focus on one step in the process of doing something that can be observed and measured. You cannot measure a "bad attitude," but you can measure how many times you growl (or make any negative remark) at your colleagues during the day. Doing "poor work" is not measurable; a certain number of errors per page in secretarial typing is. Spending "too much time" untangling a spinning frame in a textile mill is not a clear measurement; counting the frequency of misplaced bobbins on the frame is.

You set up your scoreboard by listing these pinpointed behaviors, which are simply things you do, not the effects of what you do. For example, sales won are the outcome of calls made. A completed pass is the result of good footwork, a quick reading of the defense and a smooth release of the ball. It's important to pinpoint accurately the behavior that you want changed to solve a problem, not simply to state the problem itself.

In devising my business scoreboard, I follow the "Dead Man's Rule," which luckily means you are responsible only for actions you are alive to engage in. You can forget about the rest. If your department has an absenteeism problem, you should focus on attendance rather than absenteeism. (Even a dead man is absent.) This means you can concentrate on praising (reinforcing) what the person does right (coming to work) rather than criticizing what he does wrong (being absent).

Next comes the record phase of the scoreboard. One of our clients recognized that some of his employees thought he was "unfriendly," that he wasn't reinforcing their work often enough. The pressures of his job often provoked him to chew people out and to criticize their mistakes. He pinpointed his growling at staff members as the behavior that had to be changed. He then asked his secretary, who sat within earshot of his desk, to mark down every time he made negative or positive remarks over a six-day period, but not to show him the results until the end of the week. Using graph paper and marks to show his daily changes, the manager got a baseline against which to compare his later behavior.

The identify/intervention phase came when the secretary gave him the chart at the end of the first week. He was embarrassed to see that he had made more negative than positive comments every day, including one day where the ratio of bad to good was twelve to one.

For the next three weeks, this manager kept the chart in his desk and made his own record of his positive and negative remarks. He was now actively participating and confronted with an ongoing, daily scoreboard on his behavior, noting any change/consequences that resulted.  From the very first day, his positive remarks began out numbering the negative ones so that he had reversed the twelve to one ratio by the seventeenth day.

And just as a traditional scoreboard focuses on points and winnings, often the only intervention that workers need is having their performance called to their attention, then being reinforced for positive results. One of the country's largest record-producing companies pinpointed a problem at the end stage of the manufacturing process.
The department in charge of enclosing the albums in their final plastic wrapping was falling behind the pace of the rest of the plant. Finished records were stacking up in the department faster than the shrink-wrap operators could prepare them for shipment. Production was below engineered standards.

The first thing the department foreman did was to establish a baseline of performance. He kept records over the course of three months. They showed that each of the eight operators in the department was wrapping an average of 5,991 records per day.

For the intervention stage, the foreman posted both individual and group charts within the department. Each operator could measure himself (keep score!) against his co-workers every day, as well as see the department's aggregate total and individual average performance per day. The stated goal was to achieve a higher average performance across the board. This reinforced individual as well as group performance. The foreman reinforced the operators with personal praise as their performance increased. For especially dramatic improvement, he also wrote the operator a memo of commendation. As a result, the department's productivity during the following year rose by fully 27 percent, to an average of 7,662 records wrapped per person per day.

The program was so successful that the foreman instituted similar methods in another department at an earlier stage of production, the one where the records were inserted into their jackets. This seems to have had a stimulating effect on the record-wrapping department, because in the next year it averaged 8,789 units wrapped per person per day - fully 46 percent above the original baseline.

By this time, the operators in the department were no longer working simply to "improve the department standard," but began setting their own goals based on previous individual and departmental records. This meant that the foreman's personal reinforcement gradually became less important; the operators had in effect developed their own built-in systems of reinforcement by trying to set new records.

Just as in sports, scorekeeping led to goal-setting, which led to record-breaking. By establishing a score-board that initially showed the home team losing vis-à-vis the other departments, the players became concerned about their performance. But the scoreboard did something even more important: it established accountability.

Before the scorekeeping started, workers may have been vaguely aware that too many albums were piling up, but no one considered this his personal problem in the greater scheme of things. No one could relate personal performance to team performance and profitability. Suddenly, everyone felt responsible for what was now a noticeable problem.

The same thing will work in sales. You may find your monthly and weekly sales rate dropping off without understanding why. That's when it is time to go back to basics. Either you or one of your colleagues should create some baseline data by charting your behaviors over a week or more. How many phone calls per day are you making to old or prospective clients? How many times per day do you check the newspaper or trade literature for possible leads on new prospects, clients or contacts?  How many personal face-to-face sales calls are you making per week? How many times per week are you asking for an account?

After one or two weeks, tally these numbers on a chart.  Then set objectives that you can reasonably meet for gradually increasing the frequency of each of these behaviors. Forget about sales - they are the result - and focus on the behaviors: phone calls, prospecting, sales calls and asking for accounts. After reaching your new goals over a full week, set a new level of attainable objectives. Raise your performance in each of these categories for winning, and the outcome - increased sales - will take care of itself.

FACT: Give your people a scoreboard: They need to know whether they are winning or losing.

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