The Six Boxes Model for performance management is both simple and powerful – usable by anyone in an organization for producing dramatic cost-effective improvements in individual and group performance, yet applicable at multiple levels of complexity with increasing leverage and sophistication.

The model evolved from the Behavior Engineering Model, originally formulated by Thomas F. Gilbert, the “Father of Human Performance Technology.” It is a plain English classification of all factors or influences that can affect performance, and easy to understand and remember because of improvements we have made based on over 25 years of research, application and user testing with senior executives, managers, and performance improvement professionals.

BOX 1
Expectations and Feedback: information provided to the performer that specifies desired outcomes, how to produce them, and how performers are doing with respect to expectations. Feedback loops are often among the weakest components of performance systems. Likewise, individuals and groups are often unclear about how their particular performance expectations link to the organization’s strategic objectives. Senior executives and middle managers can often improve performance by clarifying that connection.

BOX 2
Tools and Resources: the job designs, organizational processes, environmental and ergonomic factors, tools of various types, people, and other resources needed for tasks to produce the desired outputs. These are the “enablers” of desired behavior and offer great leverage for improving individual and group productivity, all the way from the individual performer to the level of cross-functional processes.

BOX 3
Consequences and Incentives: the explicit compensation and incentives, as well as informal consequences, which can either increase or decrease performance. This category includes perceived “reasons” for people to behave as they do. Answers questions such as “Why care?” and “Why bother?” or “What would make it worth doing?” It also includes impediments in workflow that sometimes punish performance.

BOX 4
Skills and Knowledge: what individuals must learn to perform effectively. This box prompts us to consider the means designed to produce those abilities to behave (e.g., job aids, training, coaching, practice), and is the traditional domain of training. However, there are other (often more cost-effective) means of providing skills and knowledge to consider before assuming that traditional training is a solution or a necessity.

BOX 5
Selection and Assignment (“Individual Capacity”): includes the personal and professional characteristics and behaviors that the individual brings to the job, those that the Company expects to be present when they hire the employee – often as recruitment or selection criteria. Characteristics such as “intelligence” and “social skills” fit into this category, as well as physical features such as height or strength that qualify people for certain job functions.

BOX 6
Motives and Preferences (“Attitude”): includes factors that reflect positive or negative feelings about the job, its compensation, etc. In general, if factors in the first five boxes are well managed, this one is positive. If factors in the first five boxes are not well-managed, there may be little an organization can do directly to affect “attitude” other than to select people who are motivated to do a good job and then support them with factors in the first four boxes. Within Box 6, the Energy/Attitude matrix (originally developed by the late Claude Lineberry) enables managers and executives to understand what might account for “Players” becoming “Spectators” or (worse) “Cynics,” and what can be done to reverse these negative outcomes.

We use the Six Boxes Model in an increasing number of different ways. Some of the more important applications include:

Organizational Alignment: By discussing and agreeing on what factors actually exist and/or are needed in each “box” in the model, groups of executives, managers, and individual contributors can achieve greater alignment and partnership or team work. We often see alignment as an additional benefit when we conduct Six Boxes Workshops or projects with groups in organizations. We have often used The Six Boxes to bring individuals and groups into greater alignment in project work, system or program implementation, professional development within departments, and even integration of functional organizations in mergers and acquisitions.

Implementation Planning: The Six Boxes provides a powerful framework at the start of important strategic initiatives, programs, process changes, or installations to plan for changes in behavior that will be required and eliminate obstacles that could prevent successful implementation. By treating implementation as a performance management opportunity in its own right, we optimize ROI and reduce the likelihood of failure.

Best Practices and Continuous Performance Improvement: Starting with the critical job outputs or accomplishments needed to produce business results, a Best Practices Study then identifies behavior that distinguishes the best performers (individuals or groups) from average. The Six Boxes then allows us to determine the behavior influences that account for exemplary behavior and that can be leveraged to increase the productivity and performance quality of others in the organization.

Performance Needs / Opportunity Analysis: We use the Six Boxes to guide needs analysis and gap analysis – what most trainers and HR professionals know they should do before designing training or performance improvement programs. An advantage of using the Six Boxes is that it considers all components of the performance system, not merely those aspects that performers or managers might think they need or have seen in operation before. The Six Boxes, because it is based in research-based principles, enables us to be complete and unbiased rather than driven by the particular vantage points of those whom we might survey or interview.

Performance Problem-solving: For executives, managers, supervisors and coaches, the Six Boxes offers unparalleled power for figuring out how to address specific performance challenges or inadequacies. For example, we can quickly teach sales managers to do a better job by applying the model in their work with sales representatives.

Performance Design: When designing a new process or function, starting from scratch to develop a management system, or otherwise “engineer” a new hunk of performance in the organization, the Six Boxes Model ensures that managers, executives, or others will consider all the relevant variables, trade-offs in cost-effectiveness, and integration among all the components of the new “performance ecology.”

To learn about Six Boxes Workshops for these and other applications, click here.

Build Performance Improvement Into Your Organization's DNA

By teaching everyone how to apply the Six Boxes, we can “build performance into the DNA” of an organization and enable everyone to contribute their insights, experiences, and observations with the benefit of a shared performance management framework.

Imagine making The Six Boxes part of your organization’s culture and operational assumptions so that everyone becomes a proactive performance designer and an effective performance problem-solver!

Top

On countless occasions we’ve introduced the Six Boxes to managers or human resources professionals over coffee or as an after-thought in a consulting engagement, only to discover weeks or months later that they have been enthusiastically using and speaking with others about the model. This speaks to the conceptual simplicity and practical power of the model.

A very important feature of the model, which makes it so powerful is that anyone at any level can gain tremendous benefit from adopting it, and that synergy among users only multiplies its value.

Executives use the Six Boxes to communicate with everyone in the organization about the causes of poor and great performance and to lead efforts at improving performance and addressing performance challenges throughout the organization.

Middle Managers benefit by using the Six Boxes as a communication and problem-solving tool, for helping to understand and address motivational and attitude problems in their organizations, and to continuously improve the functions, processes, or departments that they manage. The Six Boxes can become one of their most powerful and frequently used management tools, day-to-day.

Front Line Managers, Supervisors and Team Leaders use Six Boxes performance management to objectively analyze and quickly identify the causes of poor performance and to build the performance of their teams by continuously improving the work conditions and characteristics of the people they manage. Six Boxes performance management has the benefit, in these times of tight budgets, of helping to improve productivity by enabling managers to identify disconnects between the expectations they set and the feedback or recognition they provide, skills that can be taught through supervisory or peer coaching, and other relatively inexpensive “glitches” in performance systems that can be remedied without expensive new programs or initiatives. On the other hand, Six Boxes analysis helps managers decide with some confidence where and whether to invest in programs, based on how they will affect performance by serving one or more of the Six Boxes categories of behavior influence.

Performance Improvement, Human Resources, and Training Professionals use the Six Boxes Model to drive everything they do with a model of the variables that affect performance. Needs analysis, performance design, program implementation, best practices and competence studies, management and supervisory training – these and many more functions served by human performance specialists benefit greatly from the model. We teach our colleagues in Human Performance Technology, Training, and Human Resources to use the model to improve their overall effectiveness in analysis, design, development, and implementation of programs and interventions.

Individual Contributors (Everyone!) can use The Six Boxes both at work and at home. We encourage individual contributors at work to use the Six Boxes analysis for career development, identifying the factors that in each category are likely to help them perform better and advance their carreers, and either developing their own self-improvement interventions or asking their managers to help provide clearer expectations, better tools, new skills, and so on. It’s perhaps worth sharing that on the home front, we’ve used Six Boxes performance management to help our children get the most of summer camping trips and help ourselves manage our own hectic lifestyles. Truly, the Six Boxes model is good for anything that involves behavior intended to produce valuable results!

To learn about Six Boxes Workshops designed for each of these users, click here.

Top

There are many models and processes in the management development and performance improvement marketplace for helping to improve individual and organizational results. Many of them are not intuitive at first reading, are hard to remember, or complicated to apply without extensive training. In contrast, the Six Boxes Model is:

• simple yet powerful: We are constantly amazed by how easy it is to begin making an impact with The Six Boxes because of its simplicity. Yet it’s underlying research-based model is sufficiently powerful to drive complex, enterprise-wide applications as well as daily performance problem-solving
  
  
• comprehensive: The Six Boxes comprise all possible influences on behavior and interactions among them so that no significant performance variable need be missed, ignored or left out
  
  
• easy to understand: Most people immediately comprehend and apply the categories correctly – the result of our user-testing and refinement of the plain English descriptions for each category and the easy-to-apply job aids and tools that accompany the model, and
  
  
• easy to remember: With only six intuitively labeled categories (one less than the “chunking limit” of 7 plus or minus 2), most people can learn to recall the model with little effort, and thus apply it with ease from the beginning.

Top

History of The Model

When Carl Binder met and studied with Thomas F. Gilbert, sometimes called “The Father of Human Performance Technology,” he immediately learned the Behavior Engineering Model, a six-category framework built by Gilbert and his colleagues in groundbreaking work with companies and government agencies.

During the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Carl attempted to use the model in communication with executives, managers, and human resource professionals who comprised his client base. While the model itself was powerful, it’s language and certain details of its description seemed to get in the way of effective transmission of the model to many business managers and ordinary people.

For the next ten years, Carl revised the language, adapted the core of the model, and finally arrived at The Six Boxes™ based on field-based user testing with ordinary managers and individual contributors in corporatioins and human services agencies.

Finally, at the suggestion of another Tom, a streetwise Vice President in the sales organization of a Fortune 50 company, we decided to call our model "The Six Boxes" and trademarked it to distinguish its details from the many other available models.

Our work with the Six Boxes has followed two different but intertwined paths: development of Six Boxes technology for use in a wide variety of applications, and refinement of Six Boxes communication as a powerful facilitator of individual and group thinking about performance in organizations.

We have reached the next stage in this process, where our mission is to communicate The Six Boxes as widely as possible to have as great an impact as possible on organizational management, performance improvement, and individual development.

Top

References

Binder, C. (1995). Promoting Human Performance Technology Innovation: A Return to Our Natural Science Roots. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 8(2), 95-113. While this article might be a bit scholarly for some, it lays out our rationale for strengthening the foundation of performance improvement methodology based on results measurement and behavior science.

Binder C. (1998). The Six Boxes™: A Descendent of Gilbert's Behavior Engineering Model. Performance Improvement, 37(6), 48-52. This is a summary of the model, with a focus on how it can help human resources and performance improvement professionals.

Gilbert, T. F. (1978, 1996). Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance. Washington, DC: International Society for Performance Improvement. The key publication of our great friend and mentor, this book contains more ideas at more different levels than most books twice its size.

Teodorescu, T.M., and Binder, C. (2004). Competence is what matters. Performance Improvement, 43(8), 8-12. This joint article with Tina Teodorescu, Carl's former employee and colleague, contrasts the accomplishment-based performance analysis methods that accompany the Six Boxes Model with the current-day fad of “competency modeling.” It describes an application characterized as a Best Practices Study by Carl and a Competence Model by Tina. Great antidote for shallow thinking about what it takes to build and sustain competent performance.

Top