The Change
ProblemThe Change Problem by Kevin McManus
First published in Industrial Engineer magazine August 2003
“If you want to
retain those who
are present, be
loyal to those who
are absent.”
-- Dr. Stephen Covey,
The Seven Habits of
Highly Effective People
“Learning cannot
be disassociated
from action.”
-- Peter Senge, The Fifth
Discipline
“The most
important
measures are
both unknown and
unknowable.”
-- W. Edwards Deming,
Out of the Crisis
One of the best attended sessions at the 2003 IE Solutions conference, which was held in Portland,
Oregon, dealt with the topic of getting people to change their behaviors in support of workplace
improvements. After over twenty years in business, I have yet to see this topic not be a popular
one, and I continue to see people flock to such sessions in search of the answer to the “How do we
motivate people to change?” question.

my parents were about to discipline me. Since timeouts, spankings, and being grounded are not
really options that we can use at work, I really struggle to define meaningful forms of workplace
discipline that can be used on a regular basis. We could make Joe stand in the corner for failing to
complete his paperwork correctly, but I doubt that this approach would do much to motivate Joe
over the long term.
We can threaten to take someone off of a job, restrict their ability to receive overtime work, or make
them do work that is less than desirable as punishment, but does the use of these consequences
really keep the problem behavior from reoccurring? We still have people who yell at other people at
work when they fail to meet an expectation, but does this consequence help us correct problem
behaviors? It has been my experience that more often than not that yelling or nagging merely
creates a situation where the employee will make sure that the mistake is not detected again by
management in the future.
Conventional wisdom teaches us to use progressive discipline in order to get people to follow the
rules. As we progress from verbal warning to written warning, and in some cases to the latter two
steps of suspension and termination, we really do not do a lot to build the capacity for improvement
in our organizations. People will do what they need to do to stay out of trouble – they know the
restrictions that management has in terms of keeping an eye on them every minute of each day.
In order to motivate people, they have to agree that it is important that something gets done a
certain way. You also have to give them regular feedback (non-threatening of course) when they
fail to meet your expectations or do a good job of meeting them. We can base our list of possible
consequences on denying people privileges or taking away things they enjoy, but doing so will not
motivate them to consistently meet expectations over the long term. The focus instead will be on
staying out of trouble.
We hear talk about needing to hold people accountable – have we not lost if we as human beings
can no longer be trusted to hold ourselves accountable? We like to think that if a supervisor is
present, then everyone will follow the rules, but in reality, we supervisors are human ourselves. We
cannot be everywhere at once, and we cannot keep an eye on every employee action. We must
create systems that drive internal accountability, or we are destined to be parents even after our
children have grown up.
If you treat your people like children, you will get childish behavior. If you treat them like the adults