Does Your Organization Walk Its Talk?
by Adele Sommers
Businesses often overlook many crucial opportunities to be sure their talk and actions are congruent. If the management says one thing but does another, it's sending mixed signals, and will likely experience mixed results. Mixed messages communicate to people that they can't trust what they hear, so they are unlikely to put forth their best effort. Casualties in these situations often include morale and motivation.
It's not difficult to imagine why leading by example and setting clear expectations matters in an organization. You might be wondering, however, "Why is managing consequences so important? Is it really such a big deal?" This article reveals four important keys to aligning expectations with consequences. First, let's take a look at an enlightening story that can help expose the answer for us.
In this sequence of events, ABC Company's Publications Department wishes to improve its customer service to the other departments. ABC Company as a whole strongly endorses teamwork. Yet, after a new customer service team launches 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 then 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 Penalties
You are assigned to investigate the problem by speaking directly with the team members. You determine that the team's skills and goals do not appear to be lacking. In fact, the team has been in the process of brainstorming several types of customer service improvements.
What you finally discover after probing a bit further, however, is that some team members are feeling penalized for doing things right, and others are 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 puzzle pieces together.
What's happening? You ultimately learn that the team had received a charter initially to meet on company time. However, once the team had 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 sounded like threats. The team members feel very torn between their team projects and their workloads. The lukewarm, or even slightly negative, signals about team meetings come across like a type of punishment.
 Next, you learn that management has been unintentionally rewarding the team members who are having to miss meetings because of hot work requests. They are receiving praise and thanks for putting out fires. Meanwhile, the rest of the team feels guilty for attending team meetings.
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 of the team members are feeling too discouraged to continue. The bureaucracy alone is daunting!
What's the Diagnosis?
These symptoms reveal a critical need at ABC Company: To align expectations and consequences in the organization. In so doing, the company ultimately will send clearer signals about the actions it supposedly encourages or discourages.
If the management broadcasts confusing messages, gives inconsistent responses, or simply ignores what people are doing when it should be giving them attention, any goal that it's striving for will begin to unravel, or not get off the ground.
So, if ABC Company is truly interested in encouraging 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.
 "Walking the talk" means that the organization will want to ensure that no one discourages people from doing what needs to be done, while also encouraging the behaviors, actions, and attitudes it does want to see.
As we've observed, the situation doesn't always reveal itself in 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 determine whether your organization's expectations and consequences are congruent, consider the following items. If the answers are all "yes," good work -- but remain alert for future inconsistencies!
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Do we consistently recognize (for example, do we acknowledge or reward) the desirable things people do? Do we also avoid penalizing or punishing people in subtle ways for doing what we've asked them to do? |
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Do we consistently discourage the undesirable things people do? |
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Do we consistently pay attention to things we should be monitoring? |
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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!) |
In conclusion, aligning consequences with expectations is easier said than done. But by becoming aware of and applying these cause-and-effect relationships, you'll encourage the very best results from your colleagues and staff.
Copyright 2009 Adele Sommers
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In a nutshell, I prescribe three ways to prevent or treat the symptoms affecting your personnel, which, in turn, increase productivity, effectiveness, and morale: 
That's because no matter how well you think you have set the conditions, you won't know for sure if they're set correctly until you carefully monitor how the conditions are shaping or influencing what other people are doing, saying, and feeling. 
