Behavioral School Part 4: Pinpointing
Pinpointing or to be precise is an important part of Organizational Behavior Management (OBM). In order to work with consequences, you need to be as precise as possible about what you want to achieve.
Pinpointing works both when working with traditional performance goals and with behavioral goals, although most organizations are much more used to performance goals. BUT behavioral goals – if used correctly can be much more effective!
Traditional performance measures can be, for example, sales, number of new customers or reduced costs. But there are areas that are not so easy to quantify, such as quality, service or satisfaction. Being precise with performance goals may require a little effort, but there is a lot of experience in the market or in your industry to learn from.
Regarding behavioral goals is a little worse with experiences in many organizations. Usually we have not worked with goals expressed in behaviors. Here it is important to become more clear about which behaviors we want to see more of within our organization (and why). It may require some training in understanding what is meant by behavior and how to actively work with setting behavioral goals. The advantage of behavioral goals is that they are easier to handle from a consequence point of view.
Take a longer project as an example:
If you have a project cycle of perhaps three years before you can see the final results of the project, you can support the performance goal with a number of smaller behavioral goals that are much closer in time and can be followed up much more often. Setting behavioral goals provides the conditions for keeping track of how things are going and for giving employees strengthening consequences already today compared to just one traditional performance measure.
With a little training, first-line managers usually find that it becomes much easier to maintain a dialogue with employees based on behavioral goals and to be able to provide confirmation that they are on the right track much more often.
Staff are usually the best at describing which behaviors lead to results, which means they are a great resource for the organization's management to turn to when it comes to identifying key successful behaviors.
If you want to work with clear goals – pinpointing – we are happy to help you get started right. Contact us here!
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