Modeling Behavior: The Ripple Effect of Performance Management
September 2006 - Sam S. Adkins Email This Article To A Friend - Print This Article
Gandhi is reported to have once said, “You must be the change you want to see in the world.” Performance management professionals would put it this way: “You must model the behavior you want to see in the organization.”
The concept of behavior modeling has been part of the workforce performance profession for more than 10 years.
In that time, practitioners have collected a wealth of data to prove that performance management based on behavior modeling has a variety of ripple effects, including increased productivity, increased customer satisfaction, better business alignment, increased regulatory compliance, increased human safety and higher morale.
The Ripple Begins at the Top
Our culture is permeated with sayings such as “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” and “It starts at the top.” The culture at large seems to be in consensus that authority-figure role models have a significant impact on the behavior of subordinates. This belief is very strong in the corporate world, and extensive data suggest that the behavior of executives has a profound effect on the behavior of the workforce.
Human resource departments apply performance management methods and technology to align the workforce with organizational goals. Their efforts can be very effective when the executive leadership provides a positive role model, or they can be seriously hobbled by poor role models at the top. HR professionals and organizational development professionals have long been aware of the detrimental ripple effect of senior executives saying one thing but doing another.
In an article for Salary.com, “Seven Essentials for Effective Performance Management,” Bill Coleman wrote, “Performance management starts with the CEO doing a good job with the top tier of executives. It will cascade very naturally from there. It will fail for certain if performance management is deemed to be good for the masses but unnecessary for top management.”
Even investment bankers are aware of this and will make investment decisions based on the behavior of executives. Guy Kawasaki, managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, wrote a blog entry in April called “The Art of Customer Service” in which he said, “The CEO’s attitude toward customer service is the primary determinant of the quality of service that a company delivers.” The impact of the behavior of supervisors on the workforce has been extensively studied in public safety organizations.
“As an employee’s most influential role model, it is the direct supervisor who most shapes and molds the beliefs and attitudes of the workforce. The long-lasting effect of what an integrity-filled leader says and does is astounding,” wrote Neal Trautman in his 2004 article “Bad Leadership Role Models and Officer Misconduct.”
Although most performance-management professionals would agree that the example set by executives is very important, new data suggest the behavior of anyone in the organization can have a ripple effect.
The Ripple Can Come from the Bottom if the Organization Allows It
There is new research on the impact of behavior modeling from “below” in so-called bottom-up change-management processes. The data strongly suggest individuals who engage in positive and productive behavior have an impact on peers, supervisors and organizations. This traditionally has been called empowerment.
In 2003’s “Behavioral Coaching,” Suzanne Skiffington and Perry Zeus wrote, “Unleashing the full power of an organization starts with the individual. With behavioral-based coaching, the individual can be shown how to self-manage himself and significantly upgrade his personal and professional skill sets, feel balanced, alert, in control and powerful, and be able to make the greatest contribution to the organization.”
The recent phenomenon of corporate blogging provides ample evidence that the behavior of individuals can have a significant ripple effect on peers and the organization. This is a new type of bottom-up role modeling and has a striking likeness to the organizational practice of storytelling that human-performance professionals advocate.
Perhaps the best-known corporate blogger is Robert Scoble, who until he recently joined a new company, was the unofficial voice of Microsoft. His willingness to openly criticize the company and discuss its shortcomings in the public domain was a role model for other corporate bloggers. The company’s executive leadership publicly endorsed Scoble’s behavior. This endorsement set a positive example for the organization and has had a positive effect on Microsoft’s culture—employees now feel empowered to discuss issues openly, inside and outside the company.
But high-profile bloggers are just the tip of the iceberg. Many firms now have corporate bloggers who focus the content of their blogs on their area of expertise or specific products.
Technology firms in particular—such as Google, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and Novell—encourage their IT professionals to blog about the products on which they work. This often sparks heated debates with competitors, industry peers and customers, and the companies learn a great deal from this dialogue.
Yet many organizations still send a tacit message that bottom-up role models are not welcome. It is not uncommon for corporate bloggers to be reprimanded—or more rarely, even fired—for the comments they post on their blogs.
The real message being sent to bloggers by this reaction is that open dialogue is threatening to the executive leadership, and it indicates a deep need to control communication and to stifle candid comments. This kind of executive behavior is often found in companies that have something to hide.
It is not surprising that the recent securities-compliance laws make it mandatory to disclose any event that has a material impact on the company. As the old seat belt signs used to say, “It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.”
When Behavior Models Go Bad
Recent high-profile court cases dealing with corporate fraud have brought the issue of ethics to the forefront of organizational behavior. Unethical behavior can ripple through an organization, and as the headlines will testify, it also can destroy large global companies.
Preventing this negative ripple effect starts with modeling ethical behavior across the organization. If an organization has leaders who say one thing about ethics standards but behave contrary to them, there is a good chance that efforts to encourage ethical behavior will fail.
The 2005 global survey called “The Ethical Enterprise” commissioned by the American Management Association (AMA) and conducted by the Human Resource Institute (HRI) identified several ways that companies can encourage ethical behavior.
These include “leadership support and modeling of ethical behavior, consistent communications from all leaders, integrating ethics into goals, processes and strategies, and making ethics a part of performance management systems and a part of the recruitment and employee-selection process.”
The survey also found the most important ethical leadership behaviors are keeping promises and encouraging open communication. The study concluded by saying, “In summary, employees need to have a code to set the ethics foundation, training to help people truly understand it, and programs that permit them to inquire about and report ethical violations.”
In fact, many corporate ethics experts agree that if companies are serious about modeling ethical behavior, they must have a mechanism that allows people to report unethical behavior. This is often implemented by creating ombudsman programs and establishing methods to allow employees to remain anonymous if they are afraid to identify themselves.
Emotional Behavior Ripples Too
Information must flow freely in an organization before the ripple effect of performance management can take place. In 2002’s “Primal Leadership,” Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee wrote, “Even when a boss doesn't intend to quash dissent, subtle signals—a sour expression, a curt response—can broadcast the message that bad news isn’t welcome.”
Goleman was the researcher and writer who introduced the concept of emotional intelligence to the performance management profession. He believes the emotional behavior of executives and individuals has a ripple effect on the organization, and he calls this the “emotional climate” of the company.
His research suggests that the behavior of leaders is responsible for at least 70 percent of the emotional climate of a company, and this in turn drives 20 percent to 30 percent of the organization’s business performance.
The research of performance management experts David Sirota, Louis A. Mischkind and Michael Irwin Meltzer yielded similar findings. The researchers indicate that when companies create conditions based on positive behavior, they can reduce employee turnover by as much as 80 percent and can improve workforce performance by as much as 25 percent. One of the major symptoms of an unhealthy emotional climate is a high rate of employee turnover—people simply will not stay in an environment that is threatening or intimidating.
In a 2006 speech, Colin Powell said, “Leadership is all about people and getting the most out of people. It is about conveying a sense of purpose in a selfless manner and creating conditions of trust while displaying moral and physical courage. Never show fear or anger. You have to have a sense of optimism.”
Strategic Thinking Ripples the Farthest
The 2006 Accenture High Performance Workforce Study identified a group of companies called human-performance leaders. The thing they all have in common is effective HR and training departments that model positive behavior in their performance management efforts. According to the study, these human-performance leaders take a strategic approach to performance management. These human-performance leaders view human resources, training and executive leadership as equal partners in the efforts to model organizational behavior.
Peter Cheese, managing partner of Accenture's human performance practice, said, “Some companies focus well on one or two aspects of human capital management such as learning or internal communications, but the best take a broad view of managing their workforce. These are the companies that vastly increase their chances of being industry leaders.”
In contrast, compared with these leaders, the study found that companies that did not take a strategic approach to performance management had a very poor track record of acquiring new customers, developing talented leaders or retaining skilled employees.
Management consultants and executive coaches like to tell the story about the military officer who needed change for a vending machine. He casually asked a nearby soldier whether he had change for a dollar and the soldier said cheerfully, “Yeah, I am pretty sure I do, let me check.” The officer bristled and yelled, “Soldier, you don’t speak to an officer that way. Now let’s start over. Do have change for a dollar, soldier?” The soldier snapped to attention, saluted and shouted, "No, sir!”
The moral to this story is that it is a mistake to assume rank equals leadership—they are not necessarily the same thing. In a 2005 article, “If They Understand, They Will Do,” Marshall Goldsmith wrote, “Our greatest challenge as leaders is not understanding the practice of leadership; it is practicing our understanding of leadership.”
Modeling, Managing, Measuring and Modifying Behavior: Continuous Ripple Effect
The defining characteristic of traditional performance management is the integration of individual and organizational behavior models. New multidimensional performance management integrates two additional behavior models: operational performance models, also known as key performance indicators (KPIs), and customer-user behavior models. These integrated individual, organizational, operational and customer behavior models are the foundation of new, sophisticated, multidimensional performance-support systems.
There are now dozens of sophisticated business process management (BPM), business performance and business intelligence (BI) tools that enable multidimensional behavior modeling. Business intelligence and business activity monitoring (BAM) technology was originally designed to analyze customer behavior, but it is now being used to model employee behavior, as well. Professionals now have a wide range of tools at their disposal.
There are four major categories of enterprise technology that performance experts use to harvest behavior models: resource management, collaboration management, process management and product management. These categories map neatly with the four components of the Balanced Scorecard System, the four phases of the new process-centric ISO 9001:2000 and several variations of Six Sigma.
Modeling Behavior: Resource management systems include applications such as performance management systems and ERP platforms designed to create inventory maps of tangible assets and resources. The resources include people, property, systems and data (such as performance-support content). Behavior models such as job roles and objectives, competency models and maps, personality maps, identity maps and expertise maps can be harvested from this technology category. These are the traditional performance-support materials developed by human resource and training professionals.
Managing Behavior: Collaboration-management technology analyzes the behavior patterns in structured events, work relationships, informal learning and work experiences. This is increasingly moving toward real-time experiences enabled by instant messaging and presence technology. Behavior models such as instant messaging patterns, Web conferencing logs, relationship maps, social-network-analysis maps, and content patterns from blogs and wikis are harvested from this category. The models derived from this category tend to be bottom-up, in that they originate from individuals, and the effects ripple throughout the organization.
Measuring Behavior: Process-management technology is characterized by analytical functions that calibrate and evaluate individual and organizational behavior indices. Productivity metrics, supply-chain behavior models, KPIs and performance gap maps are the behavior models harvested from this category. The professionals who model behavior using these metrics are usually business-process analysts and organizational-performance professionals. This tends to be a top-down form of performance-support development.
Modifying Behavior: Product life-cycle-management technology maps the behavior among employees, products and customers. When these models are harvested for performance support, the ripple effect produces the greatest innovation in an organization. Behavior models include customer behavior personas, knowledge-based support, best practices, product-support trends, quality and defect maps and customer feedback trends. Interestingly, the ripple effect is not being generated inside the organization but from the outside.
These multidimensional ripple effects challenge the traditional notion that performance support must be either bottom-up or top-down. The ripple effect of performance management is continuous performance improvement.
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