Aligning Consequences: 4 Keys To “Walking Your Talk”
by Adele Sommers, Ph.D.

Businesses often overlook essential opportunities to be sure they’re “walking their talk.” If the management says one thing but does another, it’s sending mixed signals, and will likely experience mixed results. Mixed messages can communicate to personnel that they can’t trust what they hear, so they are unlikely to put forth their best effort. Casualties in these situations include morale and motivation.

This article reveals four keys to ensuring that your organization continually aligns its consequences with its expectations. But right now, you might be wondering, “Why are consequences so important? Are they really such a big deal?” Let’s take a look at an enlightening story that can help expose the answer for us.

In this sequence of events, the ABC Company Publications Group wishes to improve its internal customer service. The company as a whole strongly promotes teamwork. Yet, after a customer service team forms and meets several times, it stops meeting. Why?

Management believes the team has not received enough training, and asks the Training Department to intervene. The Training Department researches the situation and notes that the team has already received plenty of training. So, what else could be the team's problem?

Confusing Rewards and Punishments

You are assigned to speak directly with the team members. You determine that their team skills do not appear to be lacking. In fact, the team was already in the process of brainstorming several customer service improvements.

What you finally discover after probing a bit further, however, is that team members are feeling punished for doing things right, and receiving rewards for working against the goals of the team. The mixed signals are so subtle that no one in management could easily spot them. They become evident only after you put the pieces of the puzzle together.

What’s happening? You learn that initially, the team had received a charter to meet on company time. But once the team started meeting, some members began hearing perplexing warnings from their supervisors, such as, “Just because you’ve been given a charter to meet doesn’t mean you can let your workload slip.”

While not intended as such, these caveats sound like threats. The team members feel torn between their team projects and their workloads. The lukewarm, or even slightly negative, signals about team meetings come across like a form of punishment.

Next, you learn that management is unintentionally rewarding team members who have to miss meetings because of hot work requests. They receive praise and thanks for putting out fires. Meanwhile, the rest of the team feels guilty for meeting.

Finally, you determine that the team is receiving little management support after submitting its first set of customer service improvement ideas. With several layers of decision-makers and a long coordination process required to approve even a simple procedural change, most team members feel too discouraged to continue.

These symptoms reveal a critical need at ABC Company: To align consequences in the organization. In so doing, the company ultimately will “walk its talk” with regard to the actions it supposedly encourages or discourages.

If ABC Company broadcasts mixed messages, gives inconsistent responses, or simply ignores what people are doing when it should be giving them attention, any goal it’s striving for will begin to unravel, or not get off the ground.

So if ABC Company is truly interested in getting personnel to participate on teams, managers and supervisors will need to be more aware of how even mildly confusing messages can discourage people from putting forth their best. The organization will want to ensure that no one discourages people from doing what needs to be done, while also encouraging the actions, behaviors, and attitudes it does want to see!

As we’ve observed, the situation doesn’t always reveal itself in pure black and white. Misalignments can appear in shades of gray, where they are difficult to detect. That’s where vigilance, awareness, openness, and looking at a situation from all angles come into play.

How to Be Sure Your Organization “Walks Its Talk”

To adjust your “walk” to match your “talk,” try answering the following questions about your organization. If the answers are all “yes,” good work — but remain alert!

• Do we consistently recognize (for example, do we acknowledge or reward) the desirable things people do? Do we avoid punishing or penalizing people in subtle ways for doing what we have asked them to do?
  

• Do we consistently discourage the undesirable things people do?
  

• Do we consistently pay attention to the things we should be monitoring?
  

• Do we make the work rewarding? That is, do we offer incentives that will motivate people to do the work well? (Although there is much more to the recipe for motivation, if consequences are not aligned, all of the incentives in the world cannot correct the resulting imbalances!)
  

Aligning consequences with expectations is easier said than done. But by becoming aware of and applying these cause-and-effect principles, you’ll encourage the very best performance from your colleagues and staff.

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About the Author

Adele Sommers, Ph.D. is author of “Straight Talk on Boosting Business Performance: 12 Ways to Profit from Hidden Potential.” To learn more about her book and sign up for more free tips like these, visit her site at www.LearnShareProsper.com

This article may be distributed freely on your Web site, as long as this entire article, including the links and full “About the Author” section, are unchanged. Please send a copy of, or link to, your “reprint” to Adele@LearnShareProsper.com.

Copyright 2005 Business Performance Inc., Adele Sommers, All Rights Reserved.

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