Cobbler's Children Case Study

The performance consultants at Amerigroup are tasked with the profession of consulting on outside businesses’ performance improvement. They are hired by these external customers, to evaluate and improve their customer’s bottom line. This article is about how they used the proverb of “The Cobbler’s Children”, and chose to put together a performance improvement team and evaluate themselves to pinpoint improvement opportunities within their own company. In the Cobbler’s proverb, the cobbler is so focused on making shoes for everyone else that he takes for granted the fact that his children are in need of shoes as well. The Amerigroup performance improvement team felt they needed to evaluate themselves in order to see where they could improve …show more content…
(Gilbert) They did this by implementing one of the approaches they commonly use for their clients, a QI Toolbox called the Six Boxes approach. This technique breaks down behaviors systematically to help identify behaviors which either impede or facilitate business goals and employee satisfaction. By breaking these areas down in this way, it is easier to identify areas in need of performance improvement. The six boxes are expectations and feedback, tools and resources, consequences and incentives, skills and knowledge, selection and assignment, and motives and preference. …show more content…
The main reasoning behind this initiative was that a company which offers performance improvement should be practicing what they preach and have a continual performance improving attitude. Amerigroup, most definitely, should be able and willing to apply their own practices, resources and tools to improve the quality of their business performance. I did however, feel that this article did not explain important factors such as data collection and reporting. The article left this part to interpretation. A Likert Scale may have been helpful in educating the reader as to whether or not the performance improvement team’s efforts had been successful when it came to satisfied customers. (Shaw, 48) Another thing that this article left out, or that may not have been completed in this performance improvement project, is the assigning of team roles. It is important to have roles such as the team leader, the team facilitator, team scribe, and team members. (Shaw,26) This article did not go into great detail as to how the performance improvement team was put together or how they held their meetings. Lastly, I feel as if the performance improvement team should have had a clearer mission statement or vision statement. Although the Six Boxes approach is intended to be very broad, I feel that if they had a vision or specific goal to start off at, and then had branched out with the