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Thoughts & Rants of a Behavior Scientist
In the Thoughts & Rants of a Behavior Scientist Show, Dr. Paul “Paulie” Gavoni looks at common issues or phenomena in our personal and professional lives, gives you his thoughts, sometimes rants about it, and provides you with practical solutions rooted in the science of human behavior.
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Thoughts & Rants of a Behavior Scientist
Shaping Corporate Success through Organizational Behavior Science with Francisco Gomez
In this episode, my good friend and Vice President at Aubrey Daniels International, Francisco Gomez, breaks down the application of Organizational Behavior Management strategies in organizations. If you are interested in learning more about OBM and leadership, this is definitely an episode for you. Francisco, an OOG in this space, has supported organizations with improving performance and achieving valued outcomes across different industries across the globe!
About Francisco:
With a career that has encompassed performance management consulting for multiple industrial sectors across the globe, as well as executive positions in the tech industry, Francisco consolidates this experience to generate results and bring value to his customers.
Francisco is a board member for industrial as well as a nonprofit organizations and serves as public speaker and columnist on behavioral science and performance management. He and his family currently reside in Asheville, North Carolina. In his free time, he enjoys spending time in the North Carolina mountains and playing music.
Be sure to subscribe to Dr. Paulie's Heart & Science YouTube channel for a variety of content related to behavior science and bringing out the best in yourself and others.
Welcome to the Thoughts and Rants of a Behavior Scientist show hosted by Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author Dr Pauly.
Speaker 2:Okay, welcome back to the Thoughts and Rants of a Behavior Scientist podcast. I'm your host, Dr Pauly, and I'm here with a good friend of mine, Francisco Gomez. Francisco, how you doing, brother? I'm all right. Very happy to be here with you, Paulie. I appreciate it, man. So, Francisco, I met many years ago I think what was it? 2002 or 2010 or 2012? Somewhere around there, Something like that? Yeah, yeah, he is a VP of Consulting Services at Aubrey Daniels International and I've always had massive respect for Aubrey Daniels. I mean, the fact is that I've gotten into the field because of his work. Bringing out the best in people is what turned me on to organizational behavior. Management helped me to turn around failing schools, failing now organizations, and I actually, coincidentally, now teach courses in obm and it's aubrey's work. That uh is the curriculum um, so it's great because I get very fluent in this work. Uh and uh. Aubrey is the uh. I guess we call him the godfather of obm. Is that or is the father of obm?
Speaker 1:I like godfather sounds kind of cooler man to me yeah, I think it's the father, but I'm sure he'd accept the godfather too hey, uh, anyway.
Speaker 2:So, uh, francisco's all over the place. I mean he's consulting in multiple fortune 500 companies. Uh, he's like literally all over the world north america, south america, africa, oceania, europe. Uh, we were just talking about him being on the road like 70-75% of the months. So he's doing some very cool things out there and I could probably pick his brain for anything.
Speaker 2:But I really like to speak about things folks are passionate about, and Francisco and I just chatted a little bit offline about he's doing a lot of work in these high hazard industries, helping people or helping leaders and their teams be more deliberate about setting up safe production cultures, things. And I was thinking, man, that's going to be a lot of pressure because I'm working in, you know, schools and organizations, but you know the stuff that I'm doing doesn't result in people, you know either, it doesn't result in saving lives. So, you know, I'm interested to hear about that. But before we get into that, man, could you just talk about how you came into being in the field? Just let people know a little bit about your background, francisco.
Speaker 1:Sure, well, I was a dog trainer. That's how I got started. I was an animal behaviorist. My very first exposure to the science of behavior many, many, many moons ago was as an animal trainer. I read a book called how Dogs Learn, written by John Bailey and Mary Birch, and that was my first exposure to operant conditioning and I fell in love with subject matter and I knew that I was going to.
Speaker 1:I had my bachelor's at that point. It was in philosophy, I had taken psychology classes, it was my minor, but I didn't really have a whole lot of exposure to behavior analysis until I read that book. But after reading that book, I thought I need to learn more about this and I need to go to grad school and equip myself with this material, this material. So I ended up writing emails and trying to connect with different universities all over the US, trying to figure out where I could learn more about operant conditioning. At that point in time it wasn't as clear of a path for people to get into behavior analysis. First of all, it was a different online world.
Speaker 2:What year was this?
Speaker 1:brother behavior analysis. First of all, it was a different online world. What year was this brother From the nineties man? I don't. I don't know exactly what year, but it was. It was a long time ago, all right. So I got a few responses that were very helpful, one of them, ironically, from John Bailey, and he said well, you need to go to the UNT program and learn about behavior analysis there. They have a good program, there's a lot of experimental stuff going on, they have some animal trainers there, and so that was the beginning of it.
Speaker 1:I ended up going to grad school, and it was in grad school that I maintained my animal training business, but it was in grad school that I was first exposed to OBM and I fell in love with with OBM. I was taking classes with Cloyd Hyten, and, and it was still during grad school that I was recruited by a consulting company that did performance management, and it was not ADI yet, but I that's how I started my work, which was yeah, I was still I was finishing up doing my thesis, running my animal training business and doing some consulting on the side. Once that I graduated, then I sold my animal training business and went straight into just 100% into doing OBM work and I've been doing that for the last, I guess going on 17 years now.
Speaker 2:Wow, man. So I remember the first time I met you. I remember like it was yesterday, I'd kind of gotten a scholarship for lack of a better term, I guess to ADI to spend the week there and it was awesome because you came into one of the trainings and we connected because my background mixed martial arts and you were doing jujitsu. Um, yeah and uh, obviously we think about the science. You end up writing an article. I think, uh, mma is everywhere just illustrating how the science can be used in mma. That was pretty cool, man. That was fun to collaborate with you on that article. Sure, yeah, it was fun, man, and uh, I mean, and since then, um, you know, I've learned a lot from you and uh, you know some key things, uh, I've learned. It's been very, yeah, very, very helpful to me. Um so, uh, this is gonna be fun to talk about this stuff, brother. Um so, uh.
Speaker 2:So let's let's start with what some of the issues in these organizations are. Explain a little bit about the organization that you're working about, about these hazards, what some of the issues are, and then what the typical approach is for addressing these issues and why that isn't necessarily the best approach, because what you're bringing to the world is organizational behavior management. We're bringing the science of human behavior to making a difference, and that must be different from what other people are doing, because my go with you or ADI, if you know what they're doing, is the best thing. I think we're biased about this and the science is the best thing you know. So just you know what some of the common issues and common approaches for addressing those and why they might be questionable.
Speaker 1:Sure. So just a little bit of background. I'm assuming, since most of your audiences, they're going to be behavior analysts and behavioral folks, so they probably have a general sense of what we do. But just briefly, my job is to equip leadership teams with some tools and some principles, derived from over 75 years of research in the science of behavior, to encourage, to motivate, the behaviors that matter most in their business. And so, as you know, every single business metric is driven by human behavior, and so what we do is we teach those leadership teams how do you leverage a better understanding of behavior? And so that's basically, in a nutshell, what we do, how we do it.
Speaker 1:To answer your question more directly, we typically start with a diagnostic where we need to figure out if our clients come to us and they say well, listen, we need you to help us with our productivity metrics or with our quality metrics or with our safety metrics. You know, the first place is we need to do some diagnostics to figure out, well, what are they doing or what are they not doing? That is, either optimizing or sub-optimizing employee performance, which you know in big picture. That's one of the things that's different that we bring to the table with the science of behavior, which is we turn the camera around on leadership teams. Historically, typically, whenever performance isn't where it needs to be, the finger gets pointed at the worker. And well, the worker's screwing that up. Regardless of the business opportunity, the worker's screwing something up. What we do is we turn the camera around and so if the performance isn't going in the direction that you want it to go well, what are you doing as a leadership team that's contributing? If the performance is going exactly in the direction that you want it to go well, what are you doing as a leadership team that's contributing? If the performance is going exactly in the direction that you want it to go well, what are you doing that's contributing?
Speaker 1:So part of that diagnostic is helping them understand that the definition of culture that you're familiar with and most of your audience will be familiar with that I think is very useful is culture is defined by the patterns of behavior that are encouraged or discouraged by people, by processes or by systems. So culture is defined by the patterns of behavior that are encouraged or discouraged by people, processes and systems. So that's an actionable definition of culture. You can do something about your culture. That's the first implication. The second implication is you are doing something about your culture, whether you're aware of it or not.
Speaker 1:In the leadership practices that you engage in and how you respond to a question when that employee asks you something, and what you talk about during an all-hands meeting. And then, of course, in the processes and the systems that you implement, you're moving the culture in the direction that you want or you're moving it away from where you want that culture to go. So what we do is we help leaders be more aware of how what they do is creating a performance framework for employees to respond to, how what they do creates the context for their performance. And so that's a starting point, the diagnostic aspect of it, which is letting leadership teams know these are the things that you're doing across your processes, your systems, your leadership practices that are helping or not helping with your objectives.
Speaker 1:The next component is we train leadership teams, from frontline supervisors up to senior executive levels and everyone in between, on the tools and the principles from the science of behavior to help them be more deliberate about how they're influencing the culture and the direction that they're moving the culture. And then the last component is the follow-up, which is where we're helping them implement these tools and these principles that they learned during the training. So, in a nutshell, that's what our initiatives look like, whether it's, like I said, could be in productivity, could be in quality, could be in safety. Now, most of my clients are in high hazard industries, and so what that means is, almost inevitably there's always going to be a safety component in the type of work that we're doing with them, because our focus is on not on production, but on safe, safe production Right.
Speaker 2:Oh man, that was cool man, that was some very cool things to unpack. So, behavior analysts if you're listening to this, just like any good behavior analyst, you're working with an individual learner. If you're working in the with autistic population or special needs, you start with an assessment. We got to figure out, you know what's going on and you know that I the shift I made when I went in, I learned OBM. The simplest shift I made I call it zooming out is that a lot of these, a lot of people are looking at learner behavior right when they're working with special needs, right. So the student, the client, the consumer, in this case, you know that person, that behavior is challenging, because that's a lot of times why behavior animals are brought in. But I think about it now through an OBM lens that that behavior is a result and it's really the behavior of the other people in the environment that are going to need to change in order to change that result. So I think about that. That. That is like the simple OBM shift that were at least how I describe it to other people, and so that's similar to what you're talking about there and that is you having performance in the environment and these organizations and that performance as a result of leadership and the systems that they develop or fail to develop, whatever the system is. That's what's producing that result right now. We need people to be deliberate about their systems. You know, good systems bring about good instructional control and stimulus control and all that kind of stuff and stimulus control and all that kind of stuff. You know.
Speaker 2:I usually use a driving example to say you know, imagine there's car accidents happening all over the place and people are getting pulled over, they're getting tickets, they're getting their driver's license suspended and some are even being sent to jail. But then you zoom down and you find out that there's no rules of the road. You know there's no lines in the road, there's no green light, yellow light, red light or signs that tell you where to go. And good systems generate positive reinforcement for value-added behavior, so they get people to get where they need to go or produce these results. That's your destination, you know, effectively and efficiently.
Speaker 2:So you guys assess that. I'm assuming that you figure out like what it should look like, what they want it to look like, where it's at, why we're not performing at that level, and then train people in the skills and I assume also if there's any process that are developed along with that, and then there's the follow-up, which I would just call coaching. So training doesn't stick. We need to make sure that we support the generalization of learned skills into the natural environment. That's pretty cool, man.
Speaker 1:Um, very yeah and and so to piggyback a little bit on what you just said, the whole statement of behavior, that is not a. That's a fairly abstract concept, and if they have an understanding of it, it's an understanding that requires some refinement, and so part of the work that we do I'm assuming part of the work that you do is really helping unpack that and show them precisely what that means. If you have a good understanding of behavior and you understand antecedents, you understand consequences, you understand stimulus control, you understand operant conditioning, then that statement is not that abstract. It's pretty clear. But if you don't understand that and somebody tells you that employees are responding to the context that you create as a leader, what does that mean? So part of the work and part of the training is helping them understand that. What does that actually mean and what are the things that they're doing that are helping or not helping when it comes to employee performance?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that's a really good point. Constant point of performance yeah, and I think that's a really good point. In fact, a lot of times we like to put our money where our mouth is. When we go into organizations, I'm like, before you like contract with us, I'm not telling other people to do this, this is just what we do. We want to create a want, you know is establishing operations, and it's like it's kind of like putting our money where our mouth is by saying like hey, you know, here in general, here are typical ways of producing results and here's why that's a challenge in most organizations and here's what it could look like. So it's like what you're saying, turning the camera on, you know, leadership. We'd like to promote a little self-awareness and like really getting people in touch with their pain points and their values, ie their reinforcers, because they need to see how there's a path forward to achieving some sort of results and they need to reflect on the way things are going around here right now, including their own behaviors and how that's either producing results or not. And so I think a little upfront education or just a talk, you know, again, I just like inspire people, like know, get it. You got to create a want for people like I. I used to go in there and just talk about all the great things the science could do for people, and it was putting people to sleep, um. So I think there's a way to go about it with asking good questions, um, to get people to reflect again on the way that, that that things are set up right now, and why, because they gotta see a path forward, uh, for this stuff. Um, that's one of the things that you uh, that that's one of the big things that I've learned, actually, from liple's book and uh, you know that you, uh, you and I wrote an article about actually getting better performance. Uh, um, in mma a while back.
Speaker 2:Uh, you know you guys call it reverse behavior engineering. Uh, you know you guys call it reverse behavior engineering. You know I like to call it. You know, planning with the end in mind. That's the way we talk about in education. You know instructional design does it that way. You know you have an objective in doing it, but unpacking your engineering performance across an organization, I mean, that's really what your system is made up of processes. Processes are made up of tasks. Tasks are made up of behaviors. It's all going to come down to that, so I think that it simplifies it for people. I think Otherwise, like, where the hell do you start? What does your assessment look like? I mean, how do you know how to scale your assessment? Even?
Speaker 1:when you go in there. Well, part of the assessment. There's multiple components to assessments and there's everything ranging from surveys that we do to give us a good perspective across all organizational layers about what's helping, what's not helping in terms of employee performance, and that's a survey component. And that's a survey component, the assessment itself. It's a combination of direct observation of meetings, people working, getting a tour of facilities, all the different processes, different systems that are being implemented. We look at their data. So if we're doing a, an assessment on safety, for instance, one of our safety culture assessments, we're going to be looking at the different safety data that they have and look at their near misses, look at their incident investigations and any of the leading indicators that they have. We want to make sure that we have a clear understanding of what those are. We want to make sure we have a clear understanding of what the safety processes that they're currently running look like and how that's working.
Speaker 1:A JSEA or a pre-task hazard assessment of some type, where the objective of pre-task hazard assessments for a worker to assess what are the hazards, given this job that I'm about to do, and how am I going to control for those hazards. That's a very important safety process a lot of companies use, and most companies that are high hazard industries. They have one of those companies that are high hazard industries. They have one of those, one of the many versions of those. So we want to see what those are and also, how are they being used. Are they actually being used the way that they were designed and getting the value that and providing the value that they're supposed to? Or are people checking the box on them?
Speaker 1:And so we need to figure out what those safety processes entail and how are they being used. Then we go into more the formal aspect of it. We're going to be interviewing people. We're going to be interviewing workers and leadership and again, to try and get a better understanding of what is it that the organization is doing, that leadership is doing and when I'm talking about leadership, I'm talking from frontline supervision all the way up to senior executive levels and everyone in between. What are these leaders doing that is helping or not helping, and that we do through the gathering of patterns from our interviews, where we're really just getting a better sense of what's actually going on here, which is backed up by the survey process itself, and so that's kind of the you know in a nutshell how we conduct our assessments Go ahead.
Speaker 2:So a couple of questions about that. Well, one I want to make the generalization of you know, for any behaviorist listening again, this is a good behavior analysis. I mean, they want to make sure does the plan look right? If it's a behavior plan you know, behavior plan Is it a good plan? Are people running the plan before we start changing a bunch of things Because it could be a great plan but nobody's running it. But we call it a fidelity check or treatment integrity, and then, I suppose, unpacking it from there, the survey man.
Speaker 2:I have always been a big supporter of social validity, people checking in, checking with the people to see how they're feeling about the way things are going around, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm guessing you guys have your own survey process. So does that make it easier to get surveys that are more truthful? Because what I've found, what I believe strongly, is that in organizations where there's toxic leadership and imagine that there should be toxic leadership in some organizations that people tend to be afraid to speak truthful, and that makes it hard to wade through and figure out what is really at the root of that. And so that's the first part of that question. Maybe we'll get this in a little bit. But I would also like to know how do you approach it when you've come across situations where, like you know, like hey, the real issue here it's not the processes, the system is fine, it's like the CEO, you know, it's like it's trickling down toxicity. So I'm not sure if you can talk about that or not.
Speaker 1:I'm assuming you've come across that kind of thing. So, yeah, there's two parts there, yeah, so you know, going back to the definition of culture, patterns of behavior that are encouraged or discouraged by people, processes or systems, we're looking at processes, we're looking at systems, but we're also looking at what people are doing. We're looking at what do the interactions look like, whether it's peer-to-peer interactions, which can certainly support or not support safe behavior. But we're also looking at, obviously, leadership interactions. And what do those look like, whether it's a frontline supervisor with frontline workers, or managers with frontline supervisors, or senior managers with managers.
Speaker 1:I mean, if we're talking about an organizational cascade, we very much care about what sources of motivation are these leaders leveraging? And so, are they leveraging primarily negative reinforcement? Are they leveraging the avoidance of punishment primarily as a source of motivation? Because if they are, the more that they do that, the more of the problematic side effects that you're going to get in that organization, which can actually be very dangerous from a safety perspective. If people aren't reporting near misses, if people aren't reporting injuries because they're afraid of getting in trouble, then you have an organization that doesn't truly understand what is going on at the front line and what are the hazards that people are truly running into? They can't learn from mistakes. So that type of approach that is heavily weighted on punishment and discipline Typically it's driven by organizations that care deeply about safety. They don't want their people to get hurt and they're doing the best that they can. And fortunately they don't have the understanding of behavior to know that you're sub-optimizing your objectives if you're pulling on that lever too hard.
Speaker 2:Yeah, winning the battle, but losing the war right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly. And so they're doing something about it and, without knowing any better, they are pulling on that lever. The more that they pull on that lever, the more side effects that they're going to get and therefore, the farther away that their culture is moving for where they want it to move. So what we help them with is we help them understand that and we help them understand that. Look, there are multiple tools that you can use to motivate behavior, not just discipline. Discipline is one tool, but you've got several other tools in your toolbox and that's what we want to teach you, and that's what we want to teach you how to use, so that they can actually start to use some positive reinforcement instead, and also an assessment of positive reinforcement, because I think quite often in OBM we talk about leaders providing reinforcement, and I think it's more important to talk about in terms of arranging sources of reinforcement and arranging multiple sources of motivation for employee performance. And so that's back to your question do we run into toxic leadership?
Speaker 1:We certainly run into situations where leaders are leaning too far into discipline as the primary source of motivation, and that creates all sorts of problems, as you know, If the primary source of motivation for an employee to comply with safety procedures is avoiding discipline. What happens when there's nobody there to discipline them? The rules are going to go out the window. I recently had a client of mine tell me something that really stuck with me. He said our culture is defined by what people will do at three o'clock in the morning and obviously this is a night shift operation and I thought that was such a great statement. That really highlights that point, which is you need to leverage multiple sources of motivation for employee performance, not just discipline, Because if all that you're relying on is discipline, you're not moving in the direction that you want to move in from a safety perspective or productivity or quality perspective.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if that's all you're doing, you're engaging in what I call my latest book, ass Clown Behavior. People are not aware of it. It doesn't mean they're ass clowns right, but it's behavior. We've all engaged in this kind of behavior. Again, it's winning the battle but losing the war.
Speaker 2:I always think about like if you could measure things right and the reason leaders do this stuff is because they see it improves performance. Get down, do your stuff right now, so there's a visible outcome there. But if you could see all other measures like morale, you know, and the likelihood that they're going to stay at the organization for a long time, and performance in other ways, we could see that data go like down. I think of like almost like bar graphs going down this side and like, wow, the one behavior goes up at least while the leader is looking, which is, you know the whole whole issue that you bring it up in your world. I mean, we're in any world, but in your world, when we're talking about safety, the people are not practicing safe behaviors when they're not being watched, and that's probably a majority of the time that people aren't watching them.
Speaker 2:That is a big challenge I'm assuming that you do anything with. Well, I don't want to. I don't want to skip ahead of that. And so when you, when you turn the because I do want to get to the follow-up piece on this when you turn, actually I want to look at the training piece at first, what your trainings look like or what you focus on there. But when you turn the camera on the leadership team, do you find that they're accepting most of the time? Do you find that? Or is it like? Is it like hard? Like you know, you look in the mirror like oh my God, I'm, I'm, I'm the issue here. You know how often does that become a thing and how do you address that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good question. I think, generally speaking, they're accepting of it. You know, the beauty of behavior analysis and OBM is it presents a pretty rock solid argument and, as long as you know how to present the argument, there isn't a whole lot of room for denying that what is being said is accurate and it's backed up, like I said, by 75 years of research. And so, as a starting point, making sure that you present it as objectively as possible and you do let them know that this isn't our idea, that this is something that is anchored on research, typically we're working with highly technical folks, we're working with scientists, we're working with engineers, we're working with people that their interests might be in cracking molecules or extracting minerals from the earth, and our interest is in behavior change.
Speaker 1:But ultimately, we use a lot of the same tools, a lot of the same principles, a lot of the same concepts quantifiability, the scientifically proven objectivity, and so whenever we go to leaders and we let them know that, hey, listen, we've got this way that you can manage human performance in terms that they understand, in terms that they can recognize, and this is the first time that they've been able to apply it to human performance they're fairly accepting, and we get a lot of pull from that. So I think it all depends on how you present it to them, but it is rare once that we've had enough time to speak with a leadership team and by that I mean anything beyond 15 minutes. They're in. They understand that, okay. So this is actually something that is legitimately going to help me on this thing that has always been somewhat of a mystery to me, which is human performance and the things that people do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that comes back to what I was saying earlier about. I mean, it's really a motivating operation if you have a want for people to want to engage in this change. I do a lot of stuff in the world where there's you know bit like in the educational world there's no more money, there's no money to pay people you know for. So they, they have to see how it's going to help them produce valued outcomes and get them away from some of their pain points there to create a want, and they've got to be able to leverage that stuff, that knowledge, so it trickles down I guess, for lack of a better word, or cascades down, that's probably the better word for it Um, so, um, now, when you talk about so you're going to you, so you, then you don't have to be what I think folks need to understand. They're listening to this.
Speaker 2:When in the OBM world you don't have to be a content expert, uh, when you're going into consult, uh, because you're just you, you're, you're relying on them as subject matter experts, You're still just looking at behavior change, right, You're not saying what behavior necessarily needs to change, You're helping them to change the behavior they tell you exactly. I mean, I suppose you can. You know you've been in. If you've been working in safety for a while, you have a good idea of what kind of behaviors need to be changed. But you help them unpack their processes and you ask them about the behaviors and what behaviors you want more of and what behaviors you want less of right. Is that a way to?
Speaker 1:simplify it. Yeah, I mean having a good understanding of their business, having a good understanding of their processes and the procedures is important. So yeah, just for me personally, I've worked in nuclear, petrochemical mining, manufacturing of various types, aerospace, banking, death care services, transportation I mean you name it. I've probably done some work in that type of industry. I'm not an expert in all of those industries by any stretch. My area of expertise is in human performance and that's why we can work across that many different type of industries and different business objectives. It's because our area of expertise is in performance management and OBM. So it is helpful to have a good understanding of the business, and we do a good bit of studying up when we're working with our clients to make sure that we understand it, and certainly a lot of us. I spend a lot of time in mining, for instance, and I've worked with some of the largest and most sophisticated mining companies in the world, and so you're going to learn a lot from that type of experience.
Speaker 2:But you're learning. In this case you can actually, as you go in there, through your initial assessment just think about somebody that went in there new and this wasn't part of the question but you're going to learn about their processes. But in the nuclear you don't need to know how to split atoms, for example. You need to know the process that gets there to that person and chain it. So you need to know kind of high level behavior processes and key behaviors that lead to that stuff. But you don't need to be an expert in splitting atoms. You know that's exactly right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, that's exactly right, yeah, yeah, you need to have a very good understanding. I wouldn't even say become an EHS subject matter expert if it's about safety or you know, you don't. We don't all need Sig, sigma, black belts in order to be able to work in manufacturing. It helps, and we do have consultants that have that type of background, but the most important thing is have a good enough understanding of their systems and their processes that you're able to provide support on the performance management side of things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is what's freaking amazing about our science. I I say it's the greatest science, uh, in the world. Case in point, what other science can improve other sciences by improving the performance of the respective scientists? Right? Uh, we are freaking cool man. Well, the science is cool. I don't know, I'm not always that so cool, but anyways, all right. So we train them in the science.
Speaker 2:Human behavior you unpack the process, you train them in uh, I'm human behavior. You unpack the process, you train them in, I'm assuming some performance management approaches. People listening to this need to understand this. If you're a consultant that goes anywhere and this is our folks that are going to schools or going to clinics If you're not going to be there all the time, you need to have local performance management, because if you don't, when you're going to give some recommendations, which are antecedents, you're going to leave and nobody's going to follow them In my. You know the way that I've approached things and I'm pretty sure it's the way that you approach things. I just call it a coach-to-coach model, because you need things to stick. It's going to be the people that are on the ground, that are there daily, that are going to help things to stick, so it's essentially not giving people the fish, it's teaching the fish, otherwise it's. It's just a waste of money, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is, that is very true, and I think that coach coach model is is a model that should be a part of any responsible performance management company, which is equipping them to be able to manage the their their own initiatives.
Speaker 1:And, again, our job is to equip them with those tools and those principles, and so the whole idea is to build sustainability and how they're going to be able to use those tools and those principles so they can address future initiatives, future performance problems that they need to address, and so that is a great part of coach, the coach model, which brings up an interesting point about coaching, because coaching is an important component, it's a critical component for the type of work that we do in this field. It's equipping leaders to become more like coaches that are going to be observing performance, that are going to be providing feedback, that are going to be thoughtful about the sources of motivation for the desired behaviors, that are going to do their best to arrange the right sources of motivation for the desired behaviors. And that's the kind of thing that you do as an MMA coach. That's the kind of thing that I do as an ADI consultant. It's the same thing different types of behaviors consultant. It's the same thing, different types of behaviors, but it's still the same principle in place.
Speaker 2:Yeah, nick and I you know your former colleague Dr Nick Wedley, my dog we wrote a book called Deliberate Coaching. I know you're aware of that, and what we did was we described coaching as functional Training is about skill acquisition. Coaching is about supporting the generalization of learned skills into the natural environment. I just like to think about it as getting people to behave well enough and long enough that it produces some sort of naturally occurring reinforcer or natural to the system, so that way you can fade out, and I think that is the ultimate goal, because if they don't see that's producing some sort of valued outcome for them, they're going to fall back into old habits or the habits aren't even going to generalize. They're not even going to start the habit, they're just going to go right back to the workplace and continue to do the things that they were doing before, and I see this happen all the time.
Speaker 2:I know that you do. So what is your, what are your coaching processes look like? I mean, I'm assuming there's some boots on the ground. I'm assuming that there's some remote work as well remote coaching.
Speaker 1:It's a combination of a variety of different things, depends on the client, depends on the contract that we have.
Speaker 1:Sometimes, most of the time, it is boots on ground.
Speaker 1:Most of the time, it is actually in great part because we like to see leaders in action in a variety of different contexts, not just like you and I are talking right now.
Speaker 1:That might be part of it, but I would like to see that leader in a start of shift meeting or in the production meeting or in an all hands meeting. I would like to see how people respond to that leader and I would like to see how that leader attends to that, how people are responding to him or her. These are all things that require some boots on ground, actually being out there observing, and so we do remote as well, no doubt, but I think for the most part, we spend a lot of time in the field, which is why we you know, I think we talked about this before we started the podcast but I could be a two-hour drive away from where I live and doing work in a manufacturing plant there, or I could be in Australia doing work in a mine, and it just depends on where the client is. But we do tend to spend a lot of time on site.
Speaker 2:So you're on site, though, and I mean we know we're in the business of creating habits, not just changing behavior, and it takes time to create those habits. So imagine you have some. Really, when you're on site, you can give some really tight. You have some really tight feedback loops going on, but still, how long are you on site for before you go back? You know it's not like it's not necessarily that that habit's going to be in place at that point. There's going to be in place at that point. There's gotta be. What do you have, like some champions that now are reporting out and that's where I'm assuming that's who you're coaching to begin with. But like you got to still keep that feedback loop process going right.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of models and it just depends on on who we work, who we're working with, what the initiative entails, and so there could be some champion components or it could be some coach to coach components. It just it really it depends on how widespread the initiative is. Do they just want to tackle this one initiative or do they want a more broad approach? Therefore, several different initiatives that we're going to help them with, and so it really it depends a great deal on what the client need is. We don't have one one approach. We we have multiple approaches to meet the client need gotcha, okay, so now, uh, but let's, can?
Speaker 2:we? We'll make the shift here, because we we started off saying that we were going to focus on when we have, you know, these, these organizations that are having safety issues, and what are? What does that actually look like? Right, a safety issue? I know it looks a little bit different. I mean, there's some common components, though, across these different industries. What is it that it looks like? And why are people not engaging in safe behaviors? Because then that's going. We'll go full circle back to talk about, like, why you're doing what you're doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So this goes back to where we started the conversation, which is employee performance is a response to the context that leadership creates for that performance. Leaders are going to be providing the vision and the mission and the direction. They are going to be providing the vision and the mission and the direction. They're going to be providing the resources, they're going to be providing the training. They're going to be providing the incentive programs, the systems, the processes, the feedback, the coaching. That's the context of performance, that's the performance performance, that's the performance framework for employees.
Speaker 1:And so what we do in order to figure out, well, why are people engaging in at-risk behavior? Why are they getting hurt, is we parse that out? We try and figure out well, what's going on, why are these performers not doing what they're supposed to be doing? A huge component there is the point that I made about the sources of motivation for them to comply with the safety procedures. And so, if we go back to, if it's primarily discipline that is driving their performance, well then not only is that going to be the example that I gave earlier is what happens when nobody's there to discipline them, but there's another problem with that, which is they're doing it because they were told to do it. They're doing it because they don't want to get in trouble. They're doing it because they don't want to get fired, and the problem with that is, if that's a primary source of motivation, well then they're going to do just enough to meet that criterion, just enough to not get fired. This is the kind of thing that you'll read all over Aubrey's books.
Speaker 1:When we talk about discretionary effort, which is is this an environment where people are just meeting minimum requirements, meaning they're doing what they're doing just to avoid discipline requirements, meaning they're doing what they're doing just to avoid discipline or is this an environment where they're doing it because they're connected with multiple sources of motivation to encourage them to comply with these safety processes and procedures, which is what discretionary effort generates?
Speaker 1:And so what you want is employees that engage in the different processes that you want them to engage in, because they're inspired by them, because they're motivated by them. These are the employees that feel motivated by seeing a safety metric up on a wall and they can say what I do impacts that safety metric. These are the employees that are motivated by providing peer-to-peer feedback and seeing their peers improve their performance and improve their safety practices. These are the employees that are motivated by providing input and ideas about safety improvements in the environment. So our argument is that leaders it is a leader's responsibility to help close that gap between they're doing it because they're avoiding discipline to they're doing it because they connect with multiple sources of motivation. And that's what we help leaders how to do, how we equip leaders to help their employees connect with multiple sources of motivation for following the safety processes and procedures, or quality processes, depending on the business objective.
Speaker 2:So you mentioned earlier and this ties right back to this in the OBM world, leading and lagging indicators, or the business world, is a common knowledge, right? So I'm assuming, when we talk about safety metrics, folks listening, you have to make progress salient. Assuming, when we talk about safety metrics, you have to folks listening, you have to make progress salient, and I'm sure that you've found this a lot. But usually these feedback loops are so delayed that people, it's like driving somewhere in the area that you don't know, like New York City, and the GPS is only coming on every 10 minutes. You know you end up engaging in a bunch of trial and error and it's not effective, efficient, efficient and sometimes you go down the wrong neighborhood. It could be even dangerous, uh, if you're not doing that.
Speaker 2:So you have to make progress salient. And so some of the progress that you you discuss is you know we wanting to have discussion and effort, and I suppose you could measure that in, in, in behavior. You know people going above and beyond, even when you're not looking, although you have to look at some point to know. But what other metrics do you use there to connect the dots right? And I'm assuming that social validity is one of these metrics.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, the leading indicators typically come from the client, meaning they're going to have some sort of indicator to show that employees are following the safety processes, following the safety rules. So they might have some process metrics. They might have some near-miss reporting, which is for those in the audience that aren't familiar with that. Near-miss reporting is whenever there was almost an incident that occurred, that gets turned in as a hey listen, there's this thing that almost occurred that could have gotten me hurt and there's a lot of learning that comes from that finding. And so the leading indicators really are the different metrics that the company has. That's letting them know if we do well in these, we will do well in our lagging indicators.
Speaker 1:So, in the context of safety, obviously you're lagging indicators. We're talking about the different injury rates, but an injury rate that is, you know, that is, that is about as lagging as it gets. It's too late if somebody already got hurt. So the leading indicators are the metrics that inform us on what's the likelihood that someone is going to get hurt. How well are we doing against these different safety processes? And if we're doing well in them, it decreases the probability that we're going to get hit on the lagging indicator side on the injury rates, and so the leading indicators typically come from the client. Now there might be some leading indicators that we set up, especially if we're talking about some sort of behavior-based safety program where there's going to be a tracking of safe behavior and at-risk behavior, but most of the leading indicators that we're helping our clients with are their current safety leading indicators.
Speaker 2:It's so ironic, man, that most of the OBM work that Anik and I do is in education or behavior analytic organizations. And the irony, particularly in behavior analytic organizations, is that they're not using OBM, but they're equipped with the science to do it. They have metrics that are very delayed. They usually don't have things like you know, good leading indicators, uh, in in place, especially with things like social validity. You know, they in education and these organizations, they have a, uh, a climate survey they give at the end of the year. That I call an autopsy, because what are you going to do with that data to let you know? You know, and I think that in in places where I've gone, where they're having lots of struggles, I I had coming out every week, you know, like a five question form just to see how people are feeling about the way things are going over there. That's that's really involving your stakeholders.
Speaker 2:I feel like, if people say they value safety, for example, or they value people feeling safe, um, you know, and feeling respected, I'm like, if you value it, you measure it. Um, if you're not measuring it, you're not really showing a lot of value for it. Now, um, one of the issues I've come across is that you mentioned like this near miss reporting out. I got to think you have to have a really good culture to support that, because that's a pretty scary thing to say that. Hey, I'm guessing that sometimes it's people made a mistake. That's why the near miss happened. So you know what kind of positive reinforcement is in place for somebody to actually report out that they had this near miss. Otherwise you don't have accurate data because people get punished for it, like you can't do stuff like that, and they're like well, screw that, I'm not going to report out.
Speaker 1:That's exactly right. Yeah, and trust is critical for a healthy near miss reporting system. And trust is critical for a healthy near-miss reporting system. And if an employee doesn't trust their leaders and their organization and how they're going to be treated, when they say, hey, I did this thing and it almost got me hurt, you know you fire that employee, you pretty much just destroyed your near-miss reporting system.
Speaker 1:It's not going to happen. People are not going to be reporting near misses, because why would they? So, yes, it does take trust and it takes a sophisticated organization to be able to run a good near miss reporting system. And also, you know, when we were talking about diagnostics and trying to figure out what is actually going on in this organization, one of the places that we start is we look at the near miss reporting system and if we see we see that it's a at a just flat lining, that tells us that's informative. That's a data point that says is there a trust problem in this environment? Are employees afraid of what's going to happen if they turn in their dear missus or their injuries, even?
Speaker 2:That's a very hard metric to get to have accurate, the closest thing I can. In schools we had things like office discipline referrals when kids were being called out of the classroom. The problem is you're measuring the behavior of people reporting it. I had to create a coding system that when everybody called for assistance, we'd log that data point in. If there were 100 calls for assistance, there should have been 100 referrals. I was getting about 40 to 60 referrals in places where there were a lot of behavioral challenges, because there's not only the trust component but there's the response effort. This stuff is effortful to do. People aren't going to want to do it. It's double jeopardy, I guess.
Speaker 1:Sure, sure.
Speaker 1:Something that's interesting that I've been noticing over the last few years is that there's been a first of all. There's a whole lot more education about leading and lagging indicators and the importance of making sure that you're looking at both, and I've seen that evolution in different industries like petrochemicals and like mining, where there was a period in time where, really, when it came to safety, they were just looking at their injury rate. Nowadays you'll still run into that, but it's typically not the companies that are calling us to help them with their culture. Typically, those are going to be companies that are fairly sophisticated and they already have some pretty world-class safety processes and systems. They just need a little bit of tweak, a little bit of help in the performance management side of things.
Speaker 1:But there has been a growth of leading indicators and safety that we've been seeing, including leadership behavior, including layered audits or Gemba walks where leaders. Part of what's being tracked is leaders going out, observing, giving feedback. So there has been some evolution in that in terms of the EHS metrics, which is good to see, where people are starting to understand that it needs to be another layer that we need to be looking at from behaviors of things that people are doing and are lagging indicators and that's, and that's been the growth of the leading indicators that we've been seeing.
Speaker 2:Yeah For for the behavior analysts out here, because the, the, the again, if you're not in the game field, the term can be foreign. But I'd like to give this example If I was going to drive up to see Francisco, and let's just say Francisco was living in Virginia, you know I might set a goal that I'm going to get there within, you know, 15 hours. I have no idea if that's. You know, a leading indicator might be that I'm, you know I have the mile markers going by right, and I'm making it every hour. I'm making it 70 miles. A lagging indicator might be passing the state lines in service of that in X amount of time. So one's letting you know where you're at at the moment, and you know you're right, of course.
Speaker 2:And next one, you look back and say did I reach this mile marker, did I reach this state line within the time that we thought? And then it allows you in both cases to make adjustments. Am I going in the right direction now and did I make it within that time frame? Do you think that's a good analogy, francisco? Yeah, that works. Yeah, because I think these, you know, I'm glad to hear that there are such sophisticated processes. That makes sense. That's why these companies are Fortune 500. They got a lot of good things and you go out there and you find that tweak, like the old man with the hammer story with the ship. You go out there and bang it in a place and you know exactly where to bang it. In this case, it's just making little changes in behaviors.
Speaker 1:Yeah, usually the way that I explain for folks the difference between leading and lagging when it comes to the business metrics, we're talking about a relationship of your KPIs and your indicators. And so your lagging indicator, that's going to be the one that has a lot of inputs going into it. You're probably not going to see significant changes on them very often or with high frequency. You might see some changes, maybe from a month to a quarterly basis. Your leading indicators, those are the ones that will change more frequently. You might see those change from a daily to weekly basis and the most important thing is, if you're doing well in those leading indicators, it's informative of how you're going to do when you're lagging indicators and that's the main difference. And so, again, if we go back to safety, the safety processes that people are following, the compliance to safety procedures or to training, following the compliance to safety procedures or to training those are informative of the lagging indicators and that's typically how we explain that difference. And also, the leading indicators are closer, from a correlation standpoint, to the behaviors.
Speaker 2:In fact, quite often they behave their own way themselves. Do you guys lean into things like I love Thomas Gilbert's work on accomplishments? You know, and that's the. I forget his name, it's just right in the tip of my tongue. I love this guy too. He does work on work outputs. Carl Binder, dr Carl Binder, he calls them countable nouns, you know.
Speaker 2:You know the number of people doing this, the number of meetings that have been, the number of decisions that have been made, number of relationships that have been made, those can all be unpacked into leading and lagging indicators. I think figuring out that stuff up front, you know it's like a behavioral roadmap. It becomes almost, like in my mind, like a checklist. You know, like, are we moving in the right direction? Check, check, check.
Speaker 2:And I think when you have this salient progress where people can actually self-monitor and report out which I've found to be a very valuable approach, because you know that's the one thing that everybody can take a look at their behavior and the results that they're producing and they can report it out to other people. And then you can pop in intermittently and you need to make it that feedback loop needs to be tighter at first, just to have a little inter-observer agreement and hopefully positively reinforce or ask some good questions and, you know, to help help improve performance if needed. But, man, these metrics, this, this, these metrics are so needed with a good feedback loop, and do you find that is often one of the main areas that you guys need to focus on, or is that just one of many different things?
Speaker 1:What do you mean focus on, like helping them integrate these, or helping them?
Speaker 2:Helping them integrate them, yeah, or I suppose that, helping them improve them. For my, you are doing Fortune 500 companies. I am not doing that. So, again, your systems are way more sophisticated. I'm having to go into places and build things from the ground up a lot of times. I mean, they're a mess. Yeah, a lot of things I'm seeing. So where's the focus? You have to build it or you have to tweak the feedback processes. You know they just always seem delayed where I go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, typically the leading indicators are already there. The question is, what's the quality of the behaviors going into those leading indicators? And that's really our area, which is is there a whole lot of checking the box? So what is the quality of their near miss reporting, for instance? What is the quality of their near-miss reporting, for instance? What is the quality of their hazard recommendations, if that's a leading indicator? And so it isn't. So much on helping them build leading indicators, although we can and we have Most of the time. These companies already have a battery of leading indicators. The question is, how are they using them? And also, what is the quality of the behaviors going into those numbers? Are these numbers indicative of actually what people are doing out in the field? Going back to the point that we talked about earlier, the more that leadership is relying on discipline and you better do it or else in order to produce compliance then the less trustworthy that those leading indicators are, because people are doing it just to avoid discipline, not because they see the value in the safety process.
Speaker 2:And that information so the area that we help Go ahead, go ahead.
Speaker 1:Well, the area that we help them with is making sure that leaders are engaging in the right type of behaviors to motivate the right type of performance. That will then generate more legitimate data sources or leading indicators In the right way.
Speaker 2:I'm assuming you're going to get all this information up front with your initial assessment. That's where you have to come in, and then yeah, yeah, okay Well man, that's exactly right. So we're up here on this hour. Man, Is there anything else you want to leave our listeners with? Like, hey, if you're ever going to an organization, definitely do this or definitely don't do that. I don't know. Some wisdom, some nugget.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions, if you want to chat about any of this, if you're interested in hearing more about ADI, I'll be more than happy to make myself available to chat with your audience. It's been a pleasure to talk with you, Pauly, as always.
Speaker 2:And I'll drop in the show notes, man. But what would be the best place for people to reach out to you, francisco?
Speaker 1:I think through ADI, they'll be able to connect with my email through LinkedIn as well. I have a pretty lively LinkedIn network and so they can connect with us via ADI. Has a profile on LinkedIn, but also just me individually I have my own and then just reaching out to aubreydanielscom they can connect with us that way as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'll drop everything in the show notes, man. Well, thanks, brother. It's been fascinating, man. I love stepping in your world to see what's going on there. And, who knows man, maybe one day we'll be able to work together.
Speaker 1:That'd be great, Pauly. It's always great to chat with you and we'll talk soon.
