Bringing Out the Best in People

by Aubrey C. Daniels

Management’s role in the motivational process, according to the majority of these authors, seems to be to remind employees in a variety of ways that, “They can do it if they really want to.”

And why do executives delegate the design and delivery of motivational programs to staff with little or no expertise in human behavior? There are at least three reasons.

“Being a chemist by profession, I often wondered why there is only one chemistry, one biology, one physics, and there are 10,000 psychologies.”

all managers will tell you that “Correlation is not causation,” their decision making belies that fact. If company X does something that was associated with improvement, that is all the data many executives need to try that same approach in their company. One of the biggest problems in industry today is “fad chasing.”

In 1971, Professor Joe Bailey of the University of Texas said that “… the half-life of all panaceas in the educational and business worlds is seven years, plus or minus two.” (Training Magazine, April 1993.) I believe that in the last half of the 1990s the time frame has shrunk to about 18 months.

Human performance is not a factor in a complicated equation for business success; it is the answer to the equation.

Quality circles. Americans copycatted the quality circle approach from the Japanese because of their tremendous advances in manufacturing quality, but Americans made little attempt to understand why it worked in Japan.

Corporate culture. Business professors and consultants have succeeded in making corporate culture change into a complicated and expensive process.

“Intrapreneuring.” Advancing the entrepreneurial

spirit within a large corporation is a good idea if handled carefully.

Employee participation. Years ago, when People’s Express and its innovative job rotation system prospered, many companies decided that “self-actualization,” or “create your own job title” was the route to success.

Strategic alliances. Characterized by the notion, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” such efforts are creating scores of strange bedfellows.

“Management by Wandering Around.” This concept was popularized by Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence.

“Change Management.” The concept of managing change was presented to business as though change was something new

If managers don’t understand behavior management methods, and can’t apply them consciously and correctly, they are almost certainly decreasing some behaviors that they want and increasing others that they don’t want.

That is, the cause of the behavior lies, not in the conditions prior to the behavior, but in what happens immediately after the behavior.

You have everything you need to understand people when you witness the behavior and observe the consequences of the behavior.

Using scientific methods to manage behavior includes: precise specification of what we want to improve; the development of a baseline of current performance against which we can measure progress; and then a precise intervention and the

evaluation of its impact on performance.

A more modern equivalent was stated by W. Edwards Deming, the well-known quality guru. He said, “Experience teaches us nothing. If experience teaches us something, why are we in such a mess?”

When someone asks, “Why didn’t you use your common sense?” he or she is really asking, “Why didn’t you do what I would have done?”

Three years after In Search of Excellence became world renowned, Business Week magazine revisited the so-called excellent companies highlighted in the book and found that 14 of 43 companies no longer met the author’s criteria for excellence.

Not knowing why things get better or worse is always a problem for a business. If it gets better “for no reason,” later it will probably get worse “for no reason.”

The point is, it’s not enough to know that something works. It is vitally important to know why it works.

There Are More Wrong Answers than Right Ones Of all the many solutions that are proposed for solving the problems of business and industry today, how do you know what is right? “Form self-directed teams.” “Empower the work force.” “Encourage participation.”

“Change the culture.” “Create a learning organization.” “Set up a gainsharing program.” “Use the 7-habits of effective people.”

In most organizations we attempt to manage performance by telling people what to do. We tell them to work harder; we tell them to work better; we tell them to work smarter. We tell them to show more initiative, be more creative, be self-directed, be empowered.

There are two ways to change behavior. Do something before the behavior occurs or do something after the behavior occurs. In the science of behavior analysis, the technical word for what comes before a behavior is antecedent. The word for what comes after a behavior is consequence.

Since antecedents always come before the behavior of interest, they are referred to as setting events. In other words, an antecedent sets the stage for a behavior to occur; it does not cause the behavior to occur.

Consequences follow the behavior and alter the probability that the behavior will reoccur. That is, the consequence causes the behavior to occur more or less often in the future. While this sounds elementary, it is frequently violated in managing organizational performance.

It is the role of an antecedent to get a behavior to occur once. It is the role of a consequen...

Yet, as I’ve just described, business invests heavily in antecedent activity such as memos, training, policies, mission statements, slogans, posters, and buttons. Since antecedents get the behavior to occur once or a few times, it’s apparent why businesses must continually repeat t...

Effective antecedents are necessary to initiate performance, but are not sufficien...

This practice is considered effective because the organization sponsoring the seminar builds the inefficiency of the antecedent (eight responses per 1000 pieces of mail; two attendees per 1000) into the price of the seminar.

but I suggest that what really changed smoking behavior was the change of consequences: no smoking on planes, in restaurants, or in public buildings. These changes and the negative social reactions to people who smoke have had more impact on smoking behavior than all the warnings ever printed.

The only thing that makes an antecedent effective is its consistent pairing with a consequence.

Most people think of a threat as a consequence, since it implies punishment. But because the threat comes before the behavior you want, it is only an antecedent.

Antecedents Get Us Going; Consequences Keep Us Going.

At the end of every working day people leave either more motivated to come back and do their jobs again tomorrow or less motivated as a result of what happens to them that day. Performance is about what happens every day.

Technically defined, behavioral consequences are those things and events that follow a behavior and change the probability that the behavior will be repeated in the future.

There are only four behavioral consequences. Two increase behavior and two decrease it. The two that increase behavior are called positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. The two that decrease behavior are called punishment and penalty. (See Figure 4-1.)

Think about your organization for a moment. Are only value-added behaviors being strengthened by consequences in the work environment? Or are off-task behaviors reinforced in some manner? Is it possible that some of the behaviors you want punished or penalized are actually strengthened?

I tell people that I can go into their organization and immediately see what is being reinforced. All I have to do is observe what people are doing. What they do during the work day is what is being reinforced.

Vic Dingus, technical associate at Eastman Chemical Co, points out that a company is always perfectly designed to produce what it is producing. If it has quality problems, cost problems, productivity problems, then the behaviors as...

This is good news because it means that all we have to do to get the performance we want is to identify behaviors that are producing the poor outcome and arrange consequences that will stop them. Then identify the behaviors that will produce the desirable o...

For example, you are talking on your cell phone and you lose your connection (penalty). When you tried to use a computer for the first time, you probably inadvertently deleted a document after working on it for hours (punishment). Now, you talk about how writing memos by hand for your secretary to type is still the best way for you to get your correspondence done. You stay late on Thursday night to revise a presentation because you know that if the first draft isn’t letter-perfect, the boss will chew you out (negative reinforcement). You bought one of your staff members a cup of coffee while discussing the improved quality of his or her work, and the staff member’s quality indicators went even higher the following week (positive reinforcement). Each type of consequence has a different influence on the behavior it follows. A significant part of every manager’s job is to identify those behaviors that are necessary and sufficient to accomplish the company’s objectives, then plan and deliver consequences that support them.

Positive reinforcement causes a behavior to increase because a desired, meaningful consequence follows the behavior. Negative reinforcement causes a behavior to increase in order to escape or avoid some unpleasant consequence. It is important to know the difference, because the characteristics of the performance generated by each are very different.

Negative reinforcement generates enough behavior to escape or avoid punishment. The improvement is usually described as “just enough to get by.”

Positive reinforcement generates more behavior than is minimally required. We call this discretionary effort, and its presence in the workplace is the only w...