Michael Jordan’s “Failure” commercial for Nike takes an interesting look at how negative experiences, or experiences that don’t turn out exactly the way we planned can become game-changing experience through hard work. In this commercial, Michael explains through this commercial he missed more than 9,000 shots in his career; he has lost almost 300 games; he has failed 26 times when trusted to take the game winning shot. If people are accountable for their failures and handle them correctly, failure can be a tool for greatness. “Accountability” refers to a person’s taking ownership and acting in a responsible way, despite personal feelings, potential outcomes, or even possible consequences of his or her actions.
Being accountable for one’s failures can be frightening for many individuals, but sometimes we have to realize that recognizing our failures, and learning from them, can actually help us become more successful in the long run. If we are able to change up our game we will become more effective and produce results that will benefit us along with our organization.
As seen in Michael Jordan’s commercial, a positive mindset turns failure into feedback. Scorekeeping can really help in turning failure into success, allowing us to receive visual feedback by tracking our performance on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Even though our performance may initially seem like a failure, if we use this information to our advantage. If we are able to better master these tasks, we can produce bottom-line results. In Michael Jordan’s situation, he learned to make the free throws, he learned how to lose, he learned to work hard, and after improving upon and harnessing his talents he was able to become legendary. If we can take the disappointments and failures and view them with a positive attitude, we can become successful and reach our bottom-line goals.
Scorekeeping allows us to visually understand how successful we are being in our work. By being able to see where we currently fall on our “Goal” Line, we can tweak the way we are performing and allow these changes to make us successful. Change is a process, and in order for our scorecards to really speak to us, we will need to make more than one tweak before we are perfect contributors to the bottom line. Michael Jordan understands this. He failed over and over again. Failure doesn’t make us successful, but taking that failure and allowing it to speak to you so that you can change for the better, is what brings true success.
The support functions in your operations are critical to the success of business yet it is often tougher to measure their contribution than those in production or sales. Too often we look at support functions, from HR to project management, as a cost center only incidentally connected to our focus on increased profit margins and improved efficiency. We treat them as necessary functions which we justify from the neck up, but starve budgetarily because it’s hard to draw a straight line from what they do to the P&L statement.
Just yesterday we received this e-mail from a frustrated senior executive:
“(The president of our company) has been on an absolute rampage about expenses lately & specifically complained last week that “education” on our P&L is up considerably this year. Coaching & counseling is largely seen as a negative. I’d like to turn it somehow to a positive.”
Making The Business Case For The Resources You Need The ability to measure the contribution of support functions is essential for many reasons. High on the list is the ability to know when to celebrate the best efforts and direct resources to these critical components that ultimately grow the people and improve the processes that drive our operation. Making the business case to justify resources or additional resources can be more difficult if the outcomes of your effort are distant. This can be the case if you’re responsible for long project cycles, when the outcomes are changes in human behavior or skill development, or in the case of health care, for instance, we are talking about the emotional and qualitative well-being of a patient.
Balance Scorecards – Only The Beginning The Balanced Scorecard methodology initially attempted to capture metrics to measure the effectiveness of those that support the operations. The original four sections were a first attempt at broadening traditional financial metrics by adding Customer, Learning and Growth, and Internal Business Process as categories. The second wave of Balanced Scorecard methodology focused on the linkage of the strategic parts. This cause and effect approach gave both context and connectivity to the overall strategic plan. In addition, the more altruistic, or ‘soft’ components were added as well.
If You Can’t Measure It You Can’t Demonstrate Your Value Added Yet the most common response to creating metrics for quality, hard to count results or long cycle R&D projects remains “You can’t measure what I do”, “I can see how that would work in the manufacturing side but it won’t work around here”. ‘We tried that last year, didn’t work”.
Demonstrating The Quantitative Value Of Quality A few simple steps can guide the process of discovering quantitative metrics for quality improvement efforts. If we consider and take ownership in the outcomes of our qualitative effort we go a long way to capturing a measure of our effectiveness. For instance, if we develop the skills of our leaders, and they impact the motivation and skills of our rank-and-file, what will change? The connection between people development and the resulting performance improvement can be clouded by many factors but, overtime, we must prove our efforts. Just a few examples of comparisons include:
1. Close rate of those that completed a sales training module vs. those that did not. 2. Average annual performance review scores of those leaving the company vs. those that stay. Obviously those staying are more likely our winners. But taken over time, as an average, what is the trend? Is it getting better or worse? Why? 3. Enrollment in company benefit programs as a measure of engagement, commitment and loyalty 4. Break down retention rate by department, supervisor, job description, tenure
Demonstrating the outcomes of your effort is obvious when your outcomes are quantitative in nature. Failing to own and communicate the results when the outcomes are more qualitative or long term is failing to make the business case for the critical contribution of your efforts.
In a previously posted article, Scorekeeping and Leaderboards to Drive Performance, the author discussed how measuring for performance cannot build fear and negativity into employees. Driving bottom line performance with the right measurement will engage people and get people excited and committed to push performance levels. Our experience with a retailer in Columbia, SC. proved that the right incentive can create a culture ready for the challenge. In this case a large part of the company’s business plan was to increase their sales per guest visit. The effort was a grass roots effort in which each employee picked a small, inexpensive item of the week that they would promote throughout the day. At stake for the company was a goal of 2% overall increase in sales based adding an item of the week to one out of fifteen customer visits. At stake for the employees was a pair of tickets to an upcoming NASCAR event. It’s important to point out here that, for many folks from Columbia and points south, NASCAR is life.
To keep score they painted a miniature oval on the floor in the back office. Each person got to choose a miniature car with the number of their favorite NASCAR driver. Once the dust settled over who was going to get #3, Dale Earnhardt’s old number, the race was on.
Each time an associate sold their item of the week they got to advance their car one length. The first ‘car’ to the checkered flag won.
It was a raucous week. Lot’s of fun, lots of incremental sales, and the store increased its sales for the week by over 6.5% which was an unqualified success.
In addition to making the scorecard fun by picking a game board that the team related to and had an interest in, this team captured the essence of effective scorecards as motivators. To be effective, a scorecard:
• Has to be about what I do
• Has to “talk” to me
• I Have to touch it and own it to believe it
• At some point is has to make me feel successful, whether it is hitting a target, showing improvement, or reinforncing my contribution
Simple, daily profit focused scorekeeping can be and should be fun.
Leave a comment telling us what was the most unique or innovative score keeping method you have seen in your company or another?
“When performance is measured, performance improves; when performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates.” –Thomas S. Monson
While working in the publishing industry Thomas S. Monson discovered that when workers were kept in the dark about their job performance they frequently became average performers, and for some workers less than average. But when workers were provided timely, relevant, and easy to understand information about their performance, many became superior performers.
As Marshall Sashkin explained in his book Performance Appraisal, annual performance appraisals can actually be a disincentive or de-motivator, rather than the panacea they are often held up to be. Sashkin observed that when workers’ performance is only “reported back” annually, they often become suspicious and distrustful of the entire measurement and reporting system. In a private conversation Sashkin once observed, “A manager would be better off with no appraisal than only an annual appraisal, because from a performance perspective being in the dark might be preferable than being surprised, shocked, disappointed, or even angry.”
Monson’s quote has been used for decades to explain why workers become more motivated when they are told how well they are performing. The trick in management is finding appropriate methods to not only measure, but also “report back” employee performance. Regrettably, left to their own devices, far too many managers give either vague or critical feedback on workers’ performance. And when the majority of feedback workers receive is unsupportive, untimely, unspecific, and uncalled for, the result can be poor performance at the best, or trouble performance at the worst.
Formal evaluations, such as performance appraisals, often measure job positions in subjective terms, such as, “Meets Job Requirements.” In today’s business climate do you really want an employee who merely meets expectations, or do you want an employee who smashes beyond “Meets” and consistently hits homeruns?
One of the reasons why annual performance appraisals can create more angst among employees than motivation is the subjective nature of the categories in which employees are measured. Workers’ performance must be thought of as scorekeeping, not as a measurement. We measure something to see what is wrong; we keep a scorecard to track what is correct. When employee performance is tracked with a scorecard that visually displays what went correct, the employee can connect his or her behavior with what is needed to win. By contrast, when employee performance is measured to find what went wrong, the employee may or may not be able to connect behavior with results.
Creating a scorecard system to “report back” performance must include ten essential characteristics.
1. The employee must have psychological ownership of his or her scorecards. People believe and trust what they own, not necessarily what is imposed upon them.
2. Scorecards must be based on specific measurable results for which that employee is paid. Traditional job descriptions are constructed with generalities that don’t include specific measurable results.
3. Scorecards must be posted near the employee’s work area. Scorecards place bottom line performance at front of mind awareness, not something that is discussed infrequently, or even annually.
4. Scorecards must be updated by the employee every day, or at the least every week. Scoreboards in stadiums are updated each time the score changes; likewise, scorecards must be updated as frequently as is practical.
5. Scorecards must include an agreed upon performance line. The performance line tells the employee how he or she is doing against an agreed upon standard.
6. Scorecards must include an agreed upon goal line. The goal line tells the employee when superior performance has been achieved and celebration is deserved.
7. Scorecards must include a way for the employee to compare his or her performance against past performance. An employee must be able to see in a glance how he or she is doing now verses yesterday, last week, or last month.
8. When a scorecard shows performance below a performance line, an action plan must be connected to the scorecard. An action plan is necessary for performance below the performance line, and it is optional when performance is above the line.
9. The employee’s coach must pay attention to scorecards and give daily, or at the least weekly, feedback and coaching. Scorecards must become the reason for coaching: supportive coaching for good performance, and corrective coaching for substandard performance.
10. The employee must feel a sense of celebration when his or her scorecard performance exceeds the goal. A goal achieved is worthy of celebration by the employee, coach, and possibly the entire team.
“When performance is measured [with effective individual scorecards], performance improves [because they become an incredibly strong motivational force]; when performance is reported back [through scorecards that adhere to the ten principles described above], performance accelerates. [Employees tap into discretionary performance when they believe their performance is being scored fairly and will make a difference].”
Developing and testing new business simulations at CMOE is always a lot of fun. It’s a time when the CMOE staff gets free lunches, prizes, and the opportunity to meet countless new people we ask to join us. So in addition to creating or reworking our products, we create a culture of fun.
This past week I was assigned to pick up the food for a volunteer test group. I went to get Pizza and as I was standing at the payment counter, I noticed a computer screen on this wall. In big, black, block print, it read “LEADERBOARD.” I was immediately excited to see this. As I was waiting for my order to be finished, I was trying to identify what was being tracked by the “leaderboard” and how it worked. It was obvious that the leaderboard was networked with other stores and I quickly noticed that the store I was purchasing from was second from the bottom. This piqued my interest further. I decided to speak with the manager to understand how it worked.
Me: I noticed your leaderboard on the wall; it looks interesting. It appears to be tracking certain success factors and percentages. Do you get rewarded when you hit certain levels of performance? The reason I ask is I work for an organization where we use effective management, measurements, and scorecards to drive bottom line profitability.
Manager: Yeah, it tracks just about everything in the store from the time a phone call was placed to the time the order leaves the store for delivery. Corporate can pull up data on just about anything in the store.
Me: It doesn’t sound like you believe it’s a good thing by the way you are speaking. Do you get recognized or rewarded for hitting certain levels of performance?
Manager: No, it basically indicates what you have to do as a minimum to keep from getting fired.
The manager continued to explain that this tracking system was to help employees have higher levels of customer service, reduced mistakes, and shorten production times, among many other things. While those are great focus areas, I was emotionally deflated by the way he explained it. This employee was telling me that the “Leaderboard,” this scorekeeping system, was the worst thing about his job.
If organizations are to succeed against strong competition and have higher levels of profitability, measurement cannot build fear and negativity into employees. Driving bottom line performance with the right measurement will engage people and get people excited and committed to push performance levels. By using our piles of data, managers can help employees sort out measurements that drive individual results.
___________________________________________________ Sales Training
Sales training and business development services for those selling complex solutions to businesses and organisations. Guaranteed performance improvement. Free sales training resources.
Are you a sports fan? Have you ever been part of a game where competition was very high, where emotions are running high and you can feel the palpable tension in the air? Maybe you were even more excited than the players and became one of those crazy fans sitting in the stands! Regardless of whether you were a player or a fan at this type of event, the word “scoreboard” should be familiar to you. Sometimes this term is used to “trash talk,” coming at a point in the game when a player on the losing team makes a great play or scores point, but not enough to put their team in the lead. Someone rooting for the losing team might say something about how great the play was, to which the fan or player for the opposing team might simply say “scoreboard.” What does it mean? It’s simple: While the losing team may have made one great play, it simply is not enough to take the lead in the game. The scoreboard is where the results of the performance are shown, indicating how well the team members are playing and whether they are actually accomplishing their goals. It is the tool that measures who is winning and, ultimately, who won!
Competition, Winning, and Business
Your company probably has its own corporate scoreboard, but do you know where it is? If not, ask around and see if you can find it. Company scoreboards will manifest themselves in how the company shows its stakeholders the business’ earnings. Businesses need to make a profit. Companies that don’t make a profit won’t stick around, so, making a profit is a focal point for all for profit organizations. What about at the individual level? Individual performance is also measured in this way, but rather than a scoreboard, some companies use and individual “score card.” A scorecard shows how and in what ways each individual is accountable for performance that increases the bottom line. Scorecards drive results and have a tremendous impact on the bottom line and help people become more engaged in competing for “wins” at both the personal and organizational level. Asking individual members of the organization to develop a scorecard to visibly show and track performance will inspire better performance across the company and make positive changes in the following ways:
1. Hold people accountable for what they do while at work and how they contribute to the bottom line profits.
2. Help individuals see that they earn a pay check for authentic achievement, not for mindless activity.
3. Help individuals understand how each person contributes in their role to the organization’s overall profitability.
Scorecards will drive bottom-line results and create bottom-line leadership as individual contributors think more deeply about their own unique areas of the business. Keeping score of their successes on a regular basis (daily, weekly, monthly) can help people feel more energetic at work and increase their interest in organizational success over the long term. In your next weekly meeting ask everyone this simple question: Did you win or lose this week? Followed this question with, “What were you responsible for in terms of helping our company grow and be more profitable?” Using scorecards, asking questions, and engaging the entire workforce is powerful stuff, critical to the organization’s performance.
While conducting a business transformation on driving bottom line performance a few years ago for department managers in a chain of supermarkets, I had an interesting experience. One of the participants was a rather elderly and somewhat crusty Bakery Manager. His name was Lynn and at the first session he introduced himself as having been a bakery manager for longer than most of the other attendees had been alive. I took his unusual statement to mean that because of his experience he was unlikely to learn any new tricks or techniques about performance at any workshop, especially one facilitated by me.
You Can’t Teach A Old Dog New Tricks
Over the course of a couple of sessions, Lynn participated just enough to stay out of trouble with his boss, but not enough to gain much advantage as a manager. After the second session he told me privately that with his considerable experience as a manager he didn’t need to attend the sessions, but that he was being forced to attend. He told me, “You know old dogs can’t be taught new tricks. Well, I’m that old dog.” I thought at the time that he was trying to put me on notice that I should back off in trying to change his managerial style.
Lynn’s statement motivated me to look for a way to get his attention so he could benefit from the workshop experience. That’s when I concocted an experiment that not only taught him and his fellow managers a valuable lesson, but also me as well.
In the workshop I asked Lynn if he would help me conduct a “psychological experiment.” Before he could say no, two of his bosses were nodding affirmatively. Truthfully, I had set that reaction up in advance. Shame on me!
With Lynn obviously very reluctant to hear my proposal, I nonetheless pushed on. I told him that the experiment was to test the power of a graph, or scorecard, to motivate hourly employees to change their behavior. I explained that I would help him create a separate scorecard for each of his employees who worked the bakery counter on Saturdays. The scorecards would have the person’s name at the top, and across the bottom x-axis of the graph would be the dates of the next six Saturdays. Up the vertical y-axis would be numbers from 1 to 20.
Driving Results To Increase Profits
His employees would be instructed that each time they mentioned the words “chocolate chip cookie” to any customer in any way on Saturday they could put a mark or dot for that date progressing up from 1 mention of chocolate chip cookie to as many as 20 mentions. The measurement would be voluntary, because about one person in five typically doesn’t like to participate in such exercises that require competition. We would be happy to deal with the four out of five employees who find such exercises fun and exciting. The scorecards would be posted in the bakery back room and employees would be encouraged to keep their scorecard up to date as often as they could during the day. The experiment would use an honor system, where marking scorecards accurately would be up to the employees. Lynn’s responsibility would be to explain the exercise to the employees, have a positive attitude toward the exercise, and, of course, lead by example, because he needed a scorecard too.
At the next two transformation sessions Lynn gave brief progress reports on the project, but didn’t elaborate very much. I became worried that the experiment wouldn’t work and that Lynn might miss the point of it. But those fears were forgotten when Lynn returned to the last session and exclaimed, “Did you know that it’s possible to sell too many chocolate chip cookies?”
Lynn explained that by the second Saturday most of his employees really got into the exercise. It became a Badge of Honor to be recognized as the employee with the highest number of chocolate chip cookie mentions each week. Lynn’s assistant manager had a badge made at a local mall that said, “Chocolate Chip Cookie Champion.” The person with the highest mentions each Saturday got to wear the Champion badge during the following week, which further intensified the competition. Isn’t it interesting how a simple badge can create so much excitement? During the week his employees plotted what they were going to do and how they were going to get the most mentions. Lynn said that he had to adjust the rules because people “were taking unfair advantage.” One employee got on the store PA and mentioned chocolate chip cookies, then walked around the store counting how many customers must have heard her announcement, trying to claim those mentions. Another employee stopped in the middle of taking a cake decorating order and said, “Oh, by the way we sell chocolate chip cookies. Now how do you spell your son’s name?”
Apparently the competition got so intense and the bakery was selling so many cookies that the ovens were consumed with baking cookies, at the expense of the other products that needed oven time. That’s why Lynn exclaimed, “It’s possible to sell too many chocolate chip cookies.”
As a facilitator it was fascinating to see the change in Lynn’s attitude over the six session series of workshops. The crusty Bakery Manager became a champion of measuring, providing instant feedback, and healthy competition. He even told me in the last session that he had “learned a ton of new stuff.”
So how did Lynn’s cookie sales go? In his final report he explained that for as long as he could remember his bakery had sold about 15 dozen chocolate chip cookies on an average Saturday. (Actually, for a bakery the size he managed, 15 dozen is at best only a fair result, so I’m told.) The first Saturday of the project the bakery sold 27 dozen. The second Saturday they sold 36 dozen. The third Saturday they sold 67 dozen. The fourth Saturday they sold 117 dozen. And on the fifth Saturday they broke the bank, or perhaps the ovens, with 157 dozen chocolate chip cookies!
Increasing Profits 10X
The improvement over a month was a ten times increase. How did this happen? Providing frequent feedback to people who otherwise had not much incentive to suggestive sell cookies caused the incredible results. The personalized scorecards each employee had in the back room provided a method to measure performance. Thomas S. Monson once said, “When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates.”
As Lynn was leaving the last session I asked him, “Well, was this experience worth it?”
With a slight smile on his face Lynn replied, “Maybe it’s possible to teach an old dog a thing or two. Thanks for your help.”
Michael Jordan’s “Failure” commercial for Nike takes an interesting look at how negative experiences, or experiences that don’t turn out exactly the way we planned can become game-changing experience through hard work. In this commercial, Michael explains through this commercial he missed more than 9,000 shots in his career; he has lost almost 300 games; he has failed 26 times when trusted to take the game winning shot. If people are accountable for their failures and handle them correctly, failure can be a tool for greatness. “Accountability” refers to a person’s taking ownership and acting in a responsible way, despite personal feelings, potential outcomes, or even possible consequences of his or her actions.
Making The Business Case For The Resources You Need
To keep score they painted a miniature oval on the floor in the back office. Each person got to choose a miniature car with the number of their favorite NASCAR driver. Once the dust settled over who was going to get #3, Dale Earnhardt’s old number, the race was on.
As Marshall Sashkin explained in his book Performance Appraisal, annual performance appraisals can actually be a disincentive or de-motivator, rather than the panacea they are often held up to be. Sashkin observed that when workers’ performance is only “reported back” annually, they often become suspicious and distrustful of the entire measurement and reporting system. In a private conversation Sashkin once observed, “A manager would be better off with no appraisal than only an annual appraisal, because from a performance perspective being in the dark might be preferable than being surprised, shocked, disappointed, or even angry.”
Me: I noticed your leaderboard on the wall; it looks interesting. It appears to be tracking certain success factors and percentages. Do you get rewarded when you hit certain levels of performance? The reason I ask is I work for an organization where we use effective management, measurements, and scorecards to drive bottom line profitability.
is used to “trash talk,” coming at a point in the game when a player on the losing team makes a great play or scores point, but not enough to put their team in the lead. Someone rooting for the losing team might say something about how great the play was, to which the fan or player for the opposing team might simply say “scoreboard.” What does it mean? It’s simple: While the losing team may have made one great play, it simply is not enough to take the lead in the game. The scoreboard is where the results of the performance are shown, indicating how well the team members are playing and whether they are actually accomplishing their goals. It is the tool that measures who is winning and, ultimately, who won!
