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Thought Leaders
Industry Gurus Live
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Dear HR Professional,
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Thought Leader: Dick Grote on Turning Problem Employees Into Superior Performers
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Dick Grote is President of Grote Consulting Corporation in Dallas, Texas and is the author of several books. Discipline Without Punishment and The Complete Guide to Performance Appraisal were both major book club selections and have been translated into Chinese and Arabic.
Discipline Without Punishment has become a management classic and has just been issued in an updated second edition. Paramount Pictures bought the movie rights to Discipline Without Punishment and produced the video series Respect and Responsibility with Dick as host.
His highly popular book on performance appraisal, The Performance Appraisal Question and Answer Book, was published by the American Management Association, in 2002. He is also author of Forced Ranking: Making Performance Management Work, which was published by the Harvard Business School Press in November 2005. For five years, Dick Grote was a regular commentator on National Public Radio's Morning Edition program. For 20 years he was adjunct professor of management at the University of Dallas Graduate School. His articles have appeared in the Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal.
KE: Before we get into the heart of your material, I would love for you to tell us the story that you tell in your book about how an obscene message on a potato chip led you to develop your discipline without punishment approach.
DG: It's wonderful how the strangest things can end up in unexpected outcomes. In order to tell the story we have to go back about 30 years to the fall of 1973. I was the Manager of Training and Development for Frito-Lay, the snack food people, and at that time we had 39 plants around the country. In one of those plants we were having problems. In this plant with a total of 210 employees they had fired 58 employees in the first nine months of the year. Management's opinion was that it wasn't good, but as long as the potato chips were coming out the back door, it wasn't considered a problem. Well, it turned out that it did make a difference. At corporate headquarters in Dallas we started to get mailbags stuffed with angry letters, from angry customers, all telling the same bizarre story.
They had each bought a bag of potato chips, opened them up, pulled one out and there on the chip was written a message, how do I put this politely? It was a two-word love letter of sorts. So, I was told to get into that plant, and find out what was going on.
I went into that plant and I had never been into an environment that was so poisonous. The hourly employees hated the supervisors; the supervisors hated the hourly employees. You could feel it in the air. The more I looked at it and asked what was going on and why there was all this craziness, and all these terminations, the more I realized that the source of all the problems was the way disciplinary actions were being handled in that plant. It was the way that every single plant, not just Frito-Lay, but every single company in America handled disciplinarily action, using traditional progressive discipline. I will go into this in detail later, but basically it was the traditional system of an oral warning followed by a written warning, followed by three days off without pay, followed by being fired.
But in that plant they were using that process so much that the employees were very angry at the way they were being treated. The constant written warnings, the constant suspensions without pay, the constant terminations resulted in the employees looking for any way they could to strike back at management.
We never did find out who wrote the messages, but I surmised one day one guy came to work with a felt-tipped pen, figured out that he could walk up to the conveyer belt that runs between production where we made the chips, and packaging where we put them in the bags, pick up a potato chip and write a message with the felt-tip pen, and put the chip back on the line. There was no way it could be discovered until it was in the bag and in the consumer's hands.
It seemed to me that since the source of the problem -- the sabotage and the anger -- was the way we were handling disciplinary problems, the answer was to create a different kind of discipline system. And, that's what we did. Instead of the traditional system, which focuses on punishment, we changed it. What we came up with was an approach that focuses on personal responsibility.
We came up with the notion of a Decision Making Leave, a one-day disciplinary suspension with a twist. First of all, it was for one day and one day only. Also, the employee was paid for the day, but this was no free day at the beach, no extra vacation day; the employee was told that he had to use this day in both his best interest and in the company's. During this day he was to make a final decision, one that he could live up to, either to change and get back to doing a good job, solve the immediate problem and commit to fully acceptable performance in every area of this job, or decide to quit and find greener employment pastures somewhere else.
We implemented this responsibility-based discipline system and you know what happened? When you treat people like responsible adults, the great majority responds as responsible adults. This system required our supervisors not to be disciplinary, but to deal with people, in spite of their behavior, as responsible adults, and communicate with them in terms of decision-making.
After implementing this system in that plant where all the craziness was going on, the result was what you would predict: The plant transformed itself, the sabotage ended. Terminations went from 58 in the year before we put it in to 19 the next year, to only two the year after that.
Seeing these results and the fact that this plant had turned into a very good place to work, all the other Frito-Lay plants said even though we don't have these kinds of problems, this system makes sense to us. Finance and marketing wanted it too, even though they weren't in a factory environment.
So by 1977, I had implemented this throughout Frito-Lay and that's when I left to go into consulting. Ever since then, I have been focusing on performance management in general, but specifically I concentrate on helping companies implement a "discipline without punishment" system that was born when some guy wrote an obscene message on a potato chip.
KE: From this experience and all the work you did subsequently, you wrote a book called Discipline Without Punishment. I am just curious, why have you come out with a second edition?
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Karen Elmhirst is a Senior Analyst with HR.com focused on learning and leadership. She is also co-host of our weekly Thought Leader Live interviews delivered via webcast each week. For a complete listing of our Thought Leader interviews,
click here.
Karen has over a dozen years of experience as a sales and marketing executive in various industries including recruitment and training; work as a communication coach, a writer, and editor. Karen graduated with a business degree from the University of British Columbia. |
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