How are your Actions Driving Outcomes?

Managerial actions drive employee beliefs; employee beliefs drive their actions and employee actions drive results.  However, I contend that your management not only changes behavior by their actions, but by their inactions as well. Maximizing employee engagement requires that you analyze your actions or lack thereof - and how those actions influence others in the workplace.

Quality problems, productivity problems and cost problems are the consequences of your employee behaviors and is often based on what is being reinforced by your senior leadership team.  Behaviors associated with undesirable outcomes are being reinforced by either negative reinforcement or positive reinforcement.   For example, if your employees are taking shortcuts in safety and quality, the naturally occurring positive consequences with doing the job with less effort will cause the undesirable behaviors to continue.

Negative reinforcement will decrease desired behavior.  Threats and fear lead to resistance and generates just enough behavior from your employees to escape or avoid punishment.  For example, if you stay late to revise a presentation so the first draft is perfect so your boss won’t chew you out – often you will do the minimum required not to get chewed out.  This does not encourage your employees to work hard, innovate or produce quality products as the main focus is on the boss and his actions and not the task at hand.  In addition, your ingrained beliefs about your boss will hinder efforts to produce your best efforts in the future.

Some other perceived negative consequences are unintended by your senior leadership team - such as requiring extra effort to learn a process.   Your employees will resist that which is not simple.  Another example of a negative consequence is when your manager assigns you extra projects because they ‘know you’ll get the job done’ and you get behind in your primary work – creating additional stress surrounding performance.

I cannot stress enough that most consequences are unintentional on senior leadership’s part.  However, intent does not determine effect.  Consequence is determined by person who receives it.  Inadvertent punishment can be just as harmful as direct punishment.

For example, your employee does something positive and nothing happens.  The employee then tells anyone who will listen, “Nobody appreciates anything I do around here!”  This is counter intuitive to many managers – as most managers feel that doing nothing has no effect on performance.  It is easier to do nothing when you don’t know what to do – but if employees take the initiative to go above and beyond and there is no favorable consequence – then at some point they will stop.

Let’s say you have 30 employees and 27 perform well and 3 are problem performers.  If the majority of your time is spent on putting policies and procedures in place to align the problem performers then you are ignoring the good performance that makes an organizational successful.  Instead, you should focus on identifying behaviors that will produce desired outcomes and arrange desired meaningful consequences to positively reinforce them.  This is the only way to maximize performance and to generate more behavior than is minimally required.  For example, in regard to the quality example given earlier.  If I buy an employee a cup of coffee while discussing the improved quality of his or her work – then the quality will go up even higher the following week. 

Idea Share Tip of the Month!

Help your employees find meaning at work by connecting with your employees and being empathetic to their needs and issues.  Create the freedom for your employees to be creative and come up with great ideas.

Sign up for the Idea Share Tip of the Week! at Frame of Mind Consulting

Frame of Mind Consulting understands the unique DNA of your organization, which is necessary to turn any organization into one capable of leveraging the full idea potential of its employees.  Would you like to drive connectivity and ownership throughout your company?  Contact Page at (860) 559-7942 to set up your complimentary consultation during which you will receive some invaluable tips that you can apply to your business right away.

Does Your Leadership Create Innovation Misalignment?

Idea generation and innovation do not operate in a vacuum or with ideas flowing one way up to leadership.   Innovation must be collaborative and open to be effective.  Many companies block the very innovation they desperately need, simply because they don’t take the time to actively listen to and respond to employee ideas.

 Peggy has often been on the receiving end of sarcastic comments from her manager, Keith, regarding her ideas for improvement.  This makes her feel disrespected and angry.  She feels her ideas are too small or insignificant to make a difference. 

·       When Keith asks her for her ideas, Peggy does not feel her ideas are taken seriously.  She thinks to herself, “Why ask for my ideas if you are not going to use them – or even consider them."  Peggy then stops giving in her ideas.  Nothing she says or does is going to make a difference.  Peggy is clearly frustrated by the lack of follow-up.

·       “Did you hear the idea Peggy had to … That is a bad idea!”  We’ve all witnessed this attitude from our co-workers!  However, the key is to look deeper into the problem that Peggy was trying to solve.  She risked coming forward with her idea for a reason – and doesn’t want to feel belittled for it.  Chances are one of Peggy’s co-workers has the solution to her problem, even if Peggy doesn’t.  If the idea is unable to be used, it is important for Keith to share with Peggy why the idea is not able to be implemented. 

      It is a well-known fact in Peggy’s department, that if Keith accepts an idea, it will become the job of the idea originator - rather than a team effort.  Peggy has lots of ideas on how to make things in her department more efficient, but she knows Keith will not provide the needed level of support and resources.  So she stifles her ideas as she is already stretched to her limit. 

Peggy has become fearful of giving in ideas due to significant misalignments on how ideas are handled in her company.  Create a win-win for your company by providing the proper training (tools and methods) for all levels of staff to understand how to generate, capture, respond to and implement those valuable ideas that generate future value for your company.  A professional idea management company, such as Frame of Mind Consulting can assist you in identifying those misalignments that prevent ideas from flourishing in your company.  Give Page a call today at (860) 559-7942.

Idea Share Tip of the Month!

An ineffective employee idea system or a lack of employee ideas is a sign of deeper issues within your company culture.  If management does not support employee ideas, and secretly sabotages employees’ efforts, you must push them out of the company – no matter how good they are at their jobs.

To sign up for Page’s Idea Share Tip of the Week! Please visit Frame of Mind Consulting.