Public Positive Measures
Monday, August 24, 2009 at 6:06AM Conversations between employees are frequently more morose than they need be. I've noticed this tendency across quite a range of organisations, and suspect it is near universal.
Employees being disproportionately exposed to problems is a significant contributor to this behaviour. Product problems, service delivery problems, customer problems, customer complaints. Even product development is frequently premised on overcoming current problems.
While there are many complementary approaches to dealing with this tendency, instituting a Public Positive Measure is a powerful technique for battling the brooding.
What is a positive measure?
The best positive measures are positive in two dimenstions:
- The measure is of a goal that represents the organisation's highest intent, and
- The measure itself always increases.
What is the organisation's highest intent?
The organisation's highest intent is an other-focused goal—it is the positive contribution to society for which the organisation exists. Here are some examples:
- In a public transportation organisation, the organisation's highest intent may be on-time passenger journeys.
- In a wealth creation company, the organisation's highest intent may be customer-generated profit.
- In a distribution company, the organisation's highest intent may be marketshare.
The more altruistic—or other-focused—the intent the more resonant power it has in focusing the attention and motivation of employees. While some organisations find it motivating enough to stipulate profit as the organisation's highest intent, this case is much less frequent than one would imagine.
It is vitally important that the organisation's highest intent always be good. That is, its increase must never conflict with any other goals. From this stand-point, the distribution company's highest intent is inferior to the other two, because marketshare can be bought at the cost of profitability.
How to construct the positive measure?
The best measures are represented by a number that can only increase. When constructing the public positive measure, it is not desirable to capture deviations from the ideal. Indeed, that is postively harmful. (After all, understanding the deviation from the ideal is what caused the behaviour we're seeking to alleviate.)
Here are some samples:
- The measure for on-time passenger journeys could be cumulative on-time passenger journeys.
- The measure for customer-generated profit could be cumulative customer-generated profit.
- The measure for marketshare could be a synthetic measure that multiplied the marketshare by the period in which that share was measured: i.e. share-months.
The simpler the measure, the better it is.
The numbers must always increase.
It is perfectly fine to exclude from the measure outcomes that deviate from the goal: you don't count late-running passenger journeys; you don't count customer losses. If someone complains that you're not measuring reality, you simply point out that you're measuring progress toward a goal—not progress away from it.
How to best make the positive measure public
Public Positive Measures are most powerful when they are natural, visual, persistent and celebrated. So, hand-drawing the measure (natural) on a whiteboard (visual) where it is visible to the most number of employees in the workplace (persistent) during a regular company gathering (celebrated) can help focus employees on the positive impact of their work.
Over time, the dominant employee conversation becomes the rate of improvement of the Public Positive Measure.
For more information
Top Management Strategy (the 1980 edition is superior to later editions) introduces the notion of an organisation's Motive Force, which is similar but not identical to my highest intent.
What I've termed the highest intent is related to the Goal within the Theory of Constraints literature; I've added the stipulation that the highest intent be other-focused.
Appreciative Inquiry emphasises focusing on and studying the good as a means of focusing corporate energy on that which you want more of.
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