7
Put Your Brown Shorts to Work for More than Just Hiring
You now know how to effectively recruit the candidates you want. Together, your Brown Shorts, your Interview Questions, and your Answer Guidelines give you the tools you need to make a sophisticated apples-to-apples comparison of those candidates. You’re now able to confidently select the candidates who are the best attitudinal fit for your organization. It’s a lot to take in. But once it all has sunk in, new revelations will emerge about what else your Brown Shorts can do for you.
Here’s one revelation that I like to see our clients, webinar attendees, certification trainees, and now our readers have. I’ll break it down into a step-by-step process so you can see how the light bulb usually comes on.
1. The good and bad answers from the Brown Shorts Answer Guidelines came from actual employees of this organization.
2. Our own employees—people we have ostensibly trained—actually did (and probably still do) things that are in the bad column.
3. Thus the things we executives consider unacceptable is currently thought to be acceptable by a group of our employees.
4. That either means that we have employees who don’t have the right attitude (we didn’t do a good enough job selecting them) …
5. … or we haven’t done a good enough job teaching these employees what’s unacceptable here (we didn’t explain why we consider the things in the bad answer column to be unacceptable).
So far this book has been focused on fixing Point 4: doing a better job of hiring people with the right attitude. But here’s something very important: all the Brown Shorts work you do to fix Point 4 will also help you fix Point 5. You will be able to better instruct your current employees so they understand exactly what differentiates high and low performance. This, in turn, will result in a lot more of the high performance effort you want.
When you did your Brown Shorts Discovery, you probably learned that not everyone on your executive team shares the exact same understanding about what defines high and low performance. You corrected that by creating and sharing your Brown Shorts. This then leads to the obvious conclusion that your employees, the people under the leadership of those same executives, probably also differ in their understanding of high and low performance.
And if that thought isn’t enough to convince you to keep teaching employees your performance expectations, I can do even better. One of the benefits of Leadership IQ’s prominence in the world of employee engagement surveys is that I have the data to prove the value of teaching performance expectations. Our surveys often ask employees to rate the statement “I understand whether my performance is where it should be.” Frighteningly, only about 24 percent of employees feel like they really understand if their performance is where it should be. Another 28 percent are getting there (but don’t feel like they truly understand), and 48 percent really don’t know.
Those are not good numbers (and again, they’re real numbers from real employees). It’s a bad situation, analogous to a college student who, despite it being midsemester, has no idea if he’s heading toward an A or an F. And while providing transparent performance feedback is not the only function that managers (and professors) have to fulfill, shouldn’t it at least be one of the top five responsibilities?
WHY DON’T EMPLOYEES ALREADY KNOW THIS STUFF?
Employees don’t know enough about the differences between high and low performance for two reasons. First, some companies don’t believe they should have to teach it. And second, some companies aren’t doing a good enough job effecting knowledge transfer—their teaching isn’t getting through.
Regarding the first issue, I’ve had executives look me right in the eye and say, “I shouldn’t have to spoon-feed people about the difference between high and low performance; they should just know it.” When I hear that I think, “If you’re truly doing a perfect job of hiring people with great attitudes who already understand everything you want, and can deliver it, then I suppose you can skip the detailed teaching.” And that’s true. If 100 percent of your employees are demonstrably high performers and you have 0 percent preventable errors (no defects service breakdowns, or missed handoffs), then you can confidently skip the whole teaching/coaching concept as well as this chapter. But how many of us can truly say that? And, ironically, the companies who could be excluded are only that self-assured because they already do such a good job of teaching high and low performance.
On the second issue, lots of companies just aren’t teaching performance expectations well enough. I’m reminded of a behind-the-scenes football show about an NFL team during training camp. There was a scene with the third-string quarterback (who you just knew was going to get cut) asking the coach, “What can I do to get better?” To which the coach replied, “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”
The quarterback was pretty frustrated with the coach’s answer. He didn’t articulate his frustration well, so here’s a distillation of what he said: “What I’m currently doing has gotten me to be a third-string quarterback! What should I do differently so that I can become second-string or even first-string?”
I recount this story because I see this same kind of scenario over and over again when I’m working with managers. “Keep doing what you’re doing,” they tell their people. To which any employee can justifiably respond, “Well, what I’m doing just got me put on a 90-day improvement plan, so do you have anything a little more specific?”
And once again, we find ourselves going back to Chapter 1 on finding your Brown Shorts and the need for Behavioral Specificity. I gave some examples of the euphemisms, admonitions, and clichés that pass for performance expectations these days.
High performing employees will …
• Maintain the highest standards of professionalism
• Treat customers as a priority
• Regard responsibility to the patient as paramount
• Demonstrate positive attitude and behavior
• Lead by example
• Engage in open, honest, and direct conversation
• Respect and trust the talents and intentions of their fellow employees
• Challenge the company’s thinking
This kind of fuzzy language populates our Performance Appraisals, Codes of Conduct, Mission Statements, and more. But it doesn’t really count as teaching or setting clear expectations.
Let’s do a little comparison. Imagine that you’re trying to get your employees to be more accountable, so you decide to set better performance expectations. Following are two different ways to do this. Both examples are excerpted from two different companies’ performance appraisals, although both versions were also used in myriad other training and employee orientation formats. After all, if you’re going to hold employees accountable for certain behaviors, it only makes sense that you would use those same behaviors to constantly and continuously teach employees about your expectations.
After you read both versions, I think you’ll be able to see which company does a better job of setting expectations—and thus teaching employees—about accountability.
Version 1: This performance appraisal uses fairly common language, in standard paragraph format, for explaining accountability. For purposes of its performance appraisal, this company provided paragraphs, like the following one, on a variety of topics. It then asked managers to rate employees (on a scale of 1 to 5) on the extent to which the employees exemplified these behaviors. It’s all standard stuff that you find being done in any number of organizations.
As an employee, I am considered accountable when I take responsibility for my own actions and decisions. I keep to my commitments, and when that’s not possible, I notify the appropriate person and develop a Plan B. I act as a role model for accepting responsibility and being accountable, and I encourage others to do the same
Version 2: Instead of Version 1’s traditional paragraph, this example, shown in Table 7.1, explains accountability in three ways. The left column (Needs Work) describes the behaviors associated with someone who is not being accountable. The middle column (Good Work) describes an acceptable level of accountability, and the right column (Great Work) details the behaviors associated with a high level of accountability. (Note: I condensed the original descriptions in all three columns to provide a more succinct example.) For purposes of their performance appraisal, managers simply identified which employees belonged in which categories.
Table 7.1. Three Levels of Accountability (Word Picture)
Now let’s compare Version 1 and Version 2. Which of the two will likely do a better job of teaching employees what we mean when we say “be accountable”? Feel free to give your own answer, but I’ve never actually had someone tell me that Version 1 was better. I’ve used this example, and asked this same question, in hundreds of speaking engagements, and the answer is always unanimous: Version 2 is the more effective teaching tool.
Version 2 is more effective by design—it was created specifically to be a great teaching tool. We call the technique behind this example Word Pictures, and while we use it in many facets of our training, it’s a highly effective way to turn your Brown Shorts into a tool for teaching performance expectations. When used correctly, the Word Pictures technique clears up any performance misconceptions and shows your current employees how they can exhibit the same high performer behaviors you’re looking for in your job candidates.
Word Pictures and Brown Shorts are like siblings. In fact, once we help our clients develop their Brown Shorts, it’s a fairly straightforward process to immediately turn the Brown Shorts into Word Pictures. With Word Pictures our clients have a great teaching tool for use in orientations, onboarding, tenured employee training, performance appraisals, and coaching discussions.
Word Pictures have many uses, and because you’re already so close to having them, it’s important to take the time to develop this leadership tool. After all, the goal of hiring high performers is to get you more high performers (am I full of insight, or what?). And all the work you’re doing to hire more high performers from outside of your company can now be used to develop more high performers from within your company—truly a win-win situation. For you fans of Charlie Sheen’s glorious month of nonstop chatter, we could call this “bi-winning.” You’re winning here, and you’re winning there.
WHY ARE WORD PICTURES SO POWERFUL?
Word Pictures have two important characteristics that drive their effectiveness. And no, one of them is not because they are longer than the generic paragraph in Version 1; I could write an entire page filled with nonsense, but it’s not going to accomplish anything.
Behavioral Specificity
Word Pictures are powerful because, first, they require Behavioral Specificity. Word Pictures are exactly what the name tells you they are. You’re going to paint a vivid and specific picture with your words. Your employees, upon hearing these vivid words, will be able to envision themselves exhibiting the behaviors the words describe. To that end, Word Pictures use the same three tests of Behavioral Specificity that I provided in Chapter 1.
• Could you identify the specific behaviors in each category?
• Could two strangers observe those behaviors?
• Could two strangers grade those behaviors?
And just to give you a heads-up, the toughest part about creating Word Pictures is making them specific enough to pass the observable and gradable tests. But they must pass these tests or they won’t work in the real world. The good news is that your Brown Shorts Answer Guidelines can be distilled into a set of behaviorally specific lessons that can be generalized to all your employees. Or, to state it more simply, you can turn your Answer Guidelines into Word Pictures. So instead of teaching the differences between bad (Warning Signs) and good (Positive Signals) interview responses, you’re now using those guidelines to teach the differences between bad and good performance (Needs Work, Good Work, and Great Work).
And that categorical distinction (Needs Work, Good Work, and Great Work) raises the second powerful aspect of Word Pictures: they’re based on a scientifically robust learning theory called Concept Attainment.
Concept Attainment
In a nutshell, Concept Attainment involves learning through studying positive and negative examples. Do you remember the Sesame Street song “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other”? Well, that actually uses some advanced cognitive psychology—Concept Attainment. For example, to teach about the characteristics of a square, Grover or Big Bird has you look at a bunch of squares (the positive examples). But there’s one triangle (the negative example) hanging out in the middle of all those squares. Or you learn about the characteristics of an apple by looking at lots of apples (positive examples) and then an orange (negative example) or a banana (negative example) or a pear (negative example). By analyzing those positive and negative examples, you quickly figure out the characteristics that define squares and apples.
Research tells us that you learn the characteristics of apples faster and more thoroughly with Concept Attainment than you do if you listen to a lecture on the characteristics of apples and then go out into the world and try to apply that abstract knowledge to specific situations. This same idea of Concept Attainment can be applied to performance-related learning. While a great deal of research shows people can learn by being told how to do something (positive examples), those same studies also show that people learn even more when they’re also told how not to do something (negative examples). Or, as the poet William Blake said roughly 200 years ago “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”
Some of the greatest lessons you learned as a kid (and that you probably teach to your kids) are negative examples. Here are a few negative examples I’ve uttered to my kids in the past few days:
• Don’t touch the hot stove.
• Don’t put that thing in your mouth.
• Don’t hit your brother/sister.
• Don’t pick your nose.
• Don’t stand in the hallway without clothes on.
• Don’t talk with your mouth full.
• Don’t take such a big bite.
• Don’t touch the clean laundry with those grimy hands.
• Don’t jump on the clean laundry.
• Don’t stand on the furniture.
• Don’t stage dive off my new chair.
I do also offer positive examples, but if you’ve ever taught by negative example, you know how effective it is. Using the cognitive psychology of Concept Attainment, we’ve discovered that employees learn a lot faster and more completely when they understand both what you want and what you don’t want. Great teaching is not an either/or thing; it requires both positive and negative examples. Word Pictures are designed to provide both.
Since you already know about textual analysis from Chapter 5, I’ll make one more comment here. Did you notice how the Word Pictures example in Version 2 used first person pronouns (“I do” instead of “you do” or “she does”)? It’s not a deal breaker, but using first person pronouns helps the people hearing your Word Pictures paint a better mental picture. They can more clearly imagine themselves engaged in those specific behaviors. Thus, each of the categories is kept behaviorally specific and distinct.
By the way, most of us learned about concepts like first person pronouns with Concept Attainment—positive and negative examples. You learned the definition of a first person pronoun by seeing positive examples (“I” or “me”) and negative examples (“you, she, he,” or “they”). We learn many things through Concept Attainment. In fact, if you pay attention to the positive and negative examples that you see in the next few days, I guarantee you’ll be amazed by how many things you learn through Concept Attainment. Whether we plan for it or not, this kind of learning happens all the time. And once you realize what a great tool it is, you’ll do that “I could’ve had a V8” head slap and wonder why you haven’t used Word Pictures for employee training before.
WORD PICTURES WORK FOR ANY TOPIC
Word Pictures are a tool for teaching new and tenured employees. They’re also a tool for onboarding and evaluating performance. Use Word Pictures when giving instructions or constructive feedback. And you can apply Word Pictures as the foundation of your performance appraisals or for identifying stellar performance so you can reward high performers. Word Pictures, instead of a bland Mission Statement, can be hung on your boardroom wall or in your lobby. Quite simply, Word Pictures are a scientifically advanced method for teaching employees.
To that end, you can teach employees virtually any performance topic using Word Pictures. Some of the performance-related Word Pictures we’ve created for our clients include: accountability, customer service, leadership, service excellence, ownership, responsibility, problem solving, creativity, collaboration, teamwork, open-mindedness, communication, innovation, leading by example, professionalism, confidence, leading change, discipline, initiation, emotional intelligence, patience, perseverance, purpose, trust, respect, shared values, meeting challenges head-on, exceeding expectations, efficiency, passion, fun, individual growth, analytical thinking, persistence, organization, commitment, courage, openness, dependability, focus, motivation, transparency, expertise, compromise, delegation, competition, accommodation, reward, abstract thinking, outcome focus, credibility, truth seeking, diversity, flexibility, tenacity, entitlement, achievement, critical feedback, proactive, problem solving, and more.
The topics you choose to present to your employees in Word Pictures are entirely up to you. But one of the keys to effective teaching is maintaining the interest of the people you’re teaching. People learn best when they are inspired, challenged, and stimulated. And while Word Pictures certainly do all that, don’t inundate your people with too many Word Pictures. Using Word Pictures to teach everything under the sun causes employees to grow apathetic and stop learning entirely. So choose your topics carefully.
Back in Chapter 1 I mentioned LifeGift, a not-for-profit organization that recovers organs and tissue for individuals needing transplants. As you can imagine, a lot of difficult and highly sensitive work transpires daily at LifeGift. Its mission is to get donors, which requires a lot of teamwork. But just like any organization, day-to-day activities at LifeGift can lead employees astray of that mission. To combat this, LifeGift approached its first foray into Word Pictures with the goal of teaching its people about working together. Specific issues of concern included engaging with management in other departments and staying focused on the company mission.
LifeGift invested some serious time into shaping its Word Picture. And when the shaping was done, it had a teaching tool that painted a picture of the desired behavioral characteristics that everyone in the organization could benefit from. Once completed, LifeGift introduced its Word Picture at the close of a weekly management meeting during a time traditionally reserved for discussing topics or issues relating to leadership.
As President and CEO Sam Holtzman attests, this Word Picture has allowed LifeGift’s leaders to think along the same lines and to spread that message of performance expectation to every person in the organization. Since that time, individual departments have also been encouraged to develop Word Pictures, but Sam cautions them to choose their topics wisely. The characteristics the Word Picture describes must be broad and job related and not personal or subjective to a certain manager’s interpretation of what’s important.
Here’s another Word Picture, this time highlighting leadership. Your organization may not define leadership this way, but Table 7.2 shows how Caesars Entertainment Corporation saw the issue.
Table 7.2. Word Picture for Leadership
WORD PICTURES IN ACTION: CAESARS ENTERTAINMENT CORPORATION
Caesars Entertainment Corporation is the largest casino entertainment company in the world. It owns and operates casinos, hotels, and golf courses under brand names that include Harrah’s, Caesars Palace, Bally’s, Paris, Rio, Flamingo, and the Imperial Palace. It has more than 60,000 employees and is committed to hiring for—and teaching—attitude. Even in the midst of a global recession, Caesars Entertainment continues to reach new customer satisfaction benchmarks.
Caesars Entertainment is a great organization, so I was delighted to head to Las Vegas when Terry Byrnes, Vice President of Total Service, gave me a call. (Plus, hanging out in Las Vegas at Caesars Palace is not exactly a hardship.) Terry is well known and respected in the service world and has developed numerous innovations for delivering sophisticated customer service.
Terry and his team had assessed untold hours of mystery shopper video and knew exactly where service breakdowns occurred. They had also diagnosed their customers’ psychological state at every stage of the visit—from entry to exit, and every game, show, meal, and rest in between. Customer satisfaction metrics and predictions are world class; the team knows precisely how much more, or less, customers will spend depending on how delighted they were on their last trip.
On top of all that, Terry had assessed 30 properties around the country and knew exactly what separated high performers from everyone else. He knew that the organization’s Brown Shorts were built around a concept of ownership. High performers across the Caesars properties take ownership for delighting customers (and anticipating their preferences and needs); knowing the answers to the most important guest questions (where everything is and what’s going on); initiating interactions; and delivering service with quality, accuracy, and speed.
Terry had revolutionized the science of total service. Now he wanted an equally innovative technique for embedding these practices more thoroughly in the Caesars culture. He immediately loved the science behind Word Pictures. His first thought was that this was a great way to stamp out some of the behaviors that were undermining performance. Because as good as Caesars is, there are 60,000 employees out there, and some of them are not going to be performing at the highest levels. When that happens, guest satisfaction drops, which in turn means suboptimizing financial performance. According to Caesars’ CEO, a spending increase of only $5 per guest (about as much as a fancy coffee) in its regional markets would add nearly $50 million to its bottom line. (Those regional markets do not include Las Vegas or Atlantic City, so this is just a fraction of the total possible opportunity.)
So here’s what happened. Caesars’ research, analytics, intuitions, and experience were distilled into the following five key Brown Shorts characteristics: initiate, know, delight, deliver, and own. Then Word Pictures descriptions were created for each characteristic. I can’t share all of them with you—after all, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas—but I can show you some examples.
As a side note here, I need to mention that Word Pictures, like Brown Shorts, are meant to be customized to fit your culture. That’s a good bit of what we do at Leadership IQ. So at Caesars, Needs Work and Great Work are now called Never Acceptable and Role Model—different words, same system.
Here are a few Word Picture examples from the know and own categories:
Role model: When you don’t know, thank your guests for their patience and maintain ownership until someone can help.
Never acceptable: Guess or give out information of doubtful accuracy. Send the customers away without ensuring a suitable answer.
Role model: Report new or difficult questions to your supervisor so he or she can investigate and get back to you.
Never acceptable: Fail to report new or difficult questions.
Role model: Make it easy for your guests to get the answer by knowing the hours, prices, times, and locations of key property features and events.
Never acceptable: Start your shift unprepared to answer the most common and important guest questions.
Role model: Be optimistic and speak positively about guests, coworkers, management, and the company. Offer helpful suggestions.
Never acceptable: Complain, or speak negatively without offering legitimate suggestions for improvement.
Now, having Word Pictures is great, but we do have to actually use them. So it was determined that these lessons in high performance would be taught via monthly learning activities. Each month, supervisors were trained in a short buzz session—five minutes dedicated to building an awareness of the Word Pictures that reflected that month’s chosen topic (for example, know or own).
Supervisors were then sent out into the field and directed to find appropriate real-life learning opportunities that addressed that month’s topic and to deliver an individual 12-minute coaching session to each employee using those Word Pictures. Terry didn’t sit employees in a class and pound initiate, know, delight, deliver, and own into their heads for eight hours. No, Caesars took its Word Pictures out of the classroom and onto the floor and used them as live coaching tools.
This only works because of Word Pictures’ Behavioral Specificity and positive/negative example learning design. Abstract teaching or only using positive examples, like most traditional workplace training programs, just don’t work for this type of on-the-floor training.
Another bonus made possible by the design of Word Pictures was an employee self-evaluation. You see, this isn’t just about managers teaching employees; it’s about employees actually learning. So every month, coupled with the one-on-one coaching sessions, employees use Word Pictures to assess their own performance. This develops employees’ critical self-awareness and, because of the Behavioral Specificity and learning design of Word Pictures, they immediately see where they should focus their personal improvement efforts.
Now, this is Caesars. So there are some sophisticated incentives tied to this. There’s a tracking system for accountability, there are chips awarded to reinforce behaviors, and more. But fundamentally, Terry will tell you this whole program is about changing what, where, and how employees learn about delivering excellent service.
Terry’s not just a remarkably innovative service expert; he’s also one heck of a training innovator. This cultural change does not require trainers, space, or formal scheduling. Simply put, there are no additional labor costs. And in a truly radical paradigm shift, employee development will eventually be owned by operations, not HR.
For 22 minutes per employee per month, for six months, Caesars will get the following:
• Team members known as the most willing to serve found anywhere
• In response to customer questions, the first employee asked provides a compelling answer
• The skill and attitude of employees becoming the most compelling reason to visit
• Maximized fulfillment, quality, and efficiency through individual performance
• Extremely well-served guests because team members love their work
As I mentioned, Caesars has sophisticated and proprietary models that show exactly how much more customers spend when they’re delighted. As I told you earlier, even an extra $5 spent per customer at the regional properties (not including Las Vegas or Atlantic City) would add nearly $50 million to Caesars’ bottom line. Since we’re “in” Las Vegas, let me put all my cards on the table: I’m not allowed to divulge what the total payoff will be. But I can say that a few Brown Shorts and Word Pictures, along with an innovative training approach, are going to earn Caesars a lot more cash than the typical marketing campaign or cost-cutting effort. And that’s no gamble. (Ba-dum-dum.)
A FINAL THOUGHT
Leadership IQ has an entire consulting practice devoted to helping organizations develop Word Pictures. And while we’re aided by a big library of preexisting Word Pictures, it’s important for our clients to remember that their Word Pictures need to reflect their unique culture. It may seem as though it would be quicker to buy our library and call it a day, but that approach doesn’t generate deep buy-in from employees—the people who will actually be living in the organization every day. So, by all means, use the examples in this chapter as a starting point and a teaching tool. But then, work hard to make your Word Pictures reflect your unique culture.
For free downloadable resources including the latest research, discussion guides, and forms please visit www.leadershipiq.com/hiring.