BOX 1 Expectations & Feedback

Information provided to the performer that specifies desired outcomes, how to produce them, and how performers are doing with respect to expectations. Feedback loops are often among the weakest components of performance systems. Likewise, individuals and groups are often unclear about how their particular performance expectations link to the organization’s strategic objectives. Senior executives and middle managers can often improve performance by clarifying that connection.

BOX 2 Tools & Resources

The job designs, organizational processes, environmental and ergonomic factors, tools of various types, people, and other resources needed for tasks to produce the desired outputs. These are the “enablers” of desired behavior and offer great leverage for improving individual and group productivity, all the way from the individual performer to the level of cross-functional processes.

BOX 3 Consequences & Incentives

The explicit compensation and incentives, as well as informal consequences, which can either increase or decrease performance. This category includes perceived “reasons” for people to behave as they do. Answers questions such as “Why care?” and “Why bother?” or “What would make it worth doing?” It also includes impediments in workflow that sometimes punish performance.

BOX 4 Skills & Knowledge

What individuals must learn to perform effectively. This box prompts us to consider the means designed to produce those abilities to behave (e.g., job aids, training, coaching, practice), and is the traditional domain of training. However, there are other (often more cost-effective) means of providing skills and knowledge to consider before assuming that traditional training is a solution or a necessity.

BOX 5 Selection & Assignment (Individual Capacity)

Includes the personal and professional characteristics and behaviors that the individual brings to the job, those that the Company expects to be present when they hire the employee – often as recruitment or selection criteria. Characteristics such as “intelligence” and “social skills” fit into this category, as well as physical features such as height or strength that qualify people for certain job functions.

BOX 6 Motives & Preferences (Attitude)

Includes factors that reflect positive or negative feelings about the job, its compensation, etc. In general, if factors in the first five boxes are well managed, this one is positive. If factors in the first five boxes are not well-managed, there may be little an organization can do directly to affect “attitude” other than to select people who are motivated to do a good job and then support them with factors in the first four boxes. Within Box 6, the Energy/Attitude matrix (originally developed by the late Claude Lineberry) enables managers and executives to understand what might account for “Players” becoming “Spectators” or (worse) “Cynics,” and what can be done to reverse these negative outcomes.

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