Mark Murphy explains word pictures, a three-part framework that defines performance expectations as Needs Work, Good Work, and Great Work. He walks through a real example: helping a CEO set clear behavioral standards during an ERP rollout, then identifying high-performers to use as models for what great work actually looks like.
A word picture is simply a 3-part definition of anything you want your people to do, whatever expectations you have for them, defining it in 3 levels: needs work, good work, and great work. Needs work is not good. This is— would be, you know, failing to meet expectations. Good work is good. That would be like meeting expectations. And then great work is obviously great. That's exceeding expectations. Now, we prefer the language— I prefer the language needs work, good work, great work, because it sounds a lot nicer than meets expectations. If you don't believe me, take your life partner, spouse, even a good friend out to dinner one night, and at the end of the dinner, look deeply into their eyes and say, "Well, that met expectations," and see how well the rest of your night goes. It's not a great compliment, right? So I want to focus on good work, great work, or needs work. Okay, now What I'm going to do is I'm going to take any expectation I have for my team, whether we need to be more accountable, whether we need clear communication, whether we need better customer service, whether we need a positive attitude, whatever it is, doesn't matter. And I'm just going to define it in these 3 parts as clearly as I possibly can. So let me give an example, and I'm going to use this one right here as an example. A CEO calls me up and he says, Mark, I want you to come teach my people how to be more accountable. So cool, great. Um, I don't know what you want me to teach them. Well, you know, I need you to teach them how to take more ownership of things. Okay, cool. Ownership of what? Like, again, well, you know, you, you're in 100 Percenters— is one of my books— you wrote that chapter about accountability. I want you to teach that. I said, yeah, if you read the book, you remember that I said first you got to define what accountability actually means. And so he's getting super angry with me, and so I finally, I 'All right, timeout here. I don't know what you mean by accountability, and this conversation is getting us nowhere, so we're going to do a little exercise. Do you have people in your organization right now that you think are not accountable?' He goes, 'Yes, that's why I called you.' I said, 'Cool. What are they doing that is driving you nuts?' He said, 'Okay, here's the thing. We've just implemented a big new ERP system.' You know, millions of dollars on some new technology. And I— and that's the system they for. They were complaining about the old system, saying it didn't work. And now that we're— we spent all the money and we're implementing this new system, they're griping about it. So, okay, well, not sure that's exactly accountability. It sounds more like change. But I— it doesn't matter, you call it whatever you want. I said, okay, fair enough. What are they doing and saying that is driving you nuts? They said, we'll sit in meetings and they will literally say things like, you know, we've never been good at implementing new software, even though they wanted new software. Or they'll say things like, which really drives me nuts, you know, the old system 'Works so well, why do we need to change it?' 'Well, you asked for us to change it.' Or, you know, there's 'this won't work,' or they just roll their eyes, or, you know, they'll say nothing in a meeting, but then when they leave the meeting, they walk out and they, you know, start talking smack about this new system we're implementing. All right, that I understand. So all of these behaviors, I'm going to write them all down, and I'm going to put them in a box called 'needs work.' And we're going to say these are all of the things, or at least a lot of the things, that you consider not being accountable. This is bad accountability in your company. Fair enough, that I understand. Now, do you have people that are doing a good job at accountability, people that are accountable? Well, yeah, of course we do. I said, awesome, tell me what they're doing and saying that is different than the needs work people. He said, well, you know, they'll actually sit in the meeting and they'll say things like, I'd like to volunteer to be on one of the pilot groups, or I agree we need to do this. Or, you know what, maybe I'll actually learn some new skills when we implement the new software. Awesome, great. I'm just going to write down everything you tell me and we're going to call that good accountability. Then I said, now, do you have any clone people? He goes, I have no idea what that means. I said, have you ever uttered the phrase, I wish I could clone Mary, I wish I could clone Bob, I wish I could clone Pat? He goes, yeah, oh yeah, we have clone people. Awesome, great, those are your great work people. What do they do that is even better than the good work people? He goes, here's the single biggest thing they do. When the meetings we have about the software start to go haywire, they will actually jump in and they'll say to the negative people, hey, let's not waste our time going down these negative rabbit holes. Let's not spend all day griping. Let's just find a way to try and make this work. They jump in. They don't just fix themselves. That's the big difference between good and great for this company. They don't just fix themselves. That's good. Great is they actually jump in and go talk to the needs work people and try and get the meetings back on track. I said, awesome. Now that we can teach to your folks. Once we have this defined, it is not hard to figure out what it is you need to teach people to do, right? It's once you've set the expectations, teaching the expectations is, it's actually pretty darn easy. And I'll get into specifically some cool techniques to do that. But once you've defined it, well, now we can all get on the same page as to this is what accountability looks like.
