Be Careful What You Reinforce

In our courses, we often say, “punish the behavior, not the person.”

So, instead of saying, “Jim, you are such a downer,” you could say, “Jim, whenever I bring you a new idea, you tend to list all of the reasons it won’t work rather than thinking about what value it could bring and ways it could work.  It makes me not want to bring you ideas.”

The first one sounds like a trait that can’t be changed and such a sweeping statement might produce a serious blow to the ego and maybe even retaliation.  The second one, while still probably difficult to hear, describes a behavior, the consequence of that behavior, and what you’d like to see instead.  It’s actionable and less likely to make Jim want to throw his coke in your face.

However, I have rarely, until recently, heard people articulate that we should be careful to reinforce behavior, not people.  Some recent research highlights why it’s important.

Researcher Carol Dweck and her colleagues at Columbia University conducted a study with children who completed IQ tests and praised one group for their intelligence and the other group for their hard work.  When asked if, for the next problem set, the kids would prefer an easy or hard test, most of those praised for their intelligence chose the easy test and most of those praised for their effort chose the hard test.

Why would this be?  The kids praised for their intelligence may have wanted to continue to appear capable while those praised for their hard work may have wanted to continue to demonstrate how hard they work.

When given another round of tests that were equally as hard as the first test, those praised for effort improved and those praised for smarts got worse.  You can read more about this study here:  http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

Think about this study the next time you give a performance review and ask yourself if you are reinforcing or punishing behaviors or traits.

Frame Your Feedback To Increase Impact

When delivering feedback that may be tough to hear or that you really want someone to listen to and follow, it can be helpful to frame your feedback.  In other words, the goal is to create an environment where the person knows the piece of feedback you are about to deliver is important and requires action.  Creating dialog about the feedback you will deliver can increase the impact of that feedback.

For example, you could ask questions that force the person to agree that they want to hear the feedback.  This includes questions like, “Are you sure you want to hear this?”,  “Are you sure you are really ready for it?”, “Is there any reason I should be holding back the feedback I have for you?”  This creates demand-pull and forces the other person to request the feedback.

Another strategy is to connect disagreeing with the feedback to harming your relationship.  I would only suggest that you use this strategy if the other person not listening and responding to your feedback would indeed harm how you feel about them.  To do this, you could say, “I am not sure if our relationship can withstand this feedback I am about to give but I think it is so essential to your performance that I am going to give it to you anyway.”

You could also ask the person to write down the feedback you are about to give because it is that important.  If it is unusual for you to suggest writing something down, than this small request for increased effort around the feedback will make it seem more valuable.  Asking someone to write the feedback down has the added benefit of creating a record.

Another way to create some demand-pull around feedback is to overload the person with positive feedback.  Once you have gotten to about 10 pieces of positive feedback, most people will ask if there is anything they can do better.

There are probably other ways to create some demand-pull around the feedback you are planning to deliver.  If it’s really important, than it’s worth taking the time to think about how you will deliver it to produce maximum impact.

What do you do to frame your feedback?

How To Speak Up In Meetings

Do you find yourself wishing you would have said something that you didn’t after a meeting?  Here are a few tips for mustering the courage to speak up.

Make a plan

If you anticipate that a specific situation might arise, think about what you could say in advance and write it down.  If you find yourself not speaking up because you are worried about how it will come out, you can preempt that by scripting out some things you could say before the meeting.

If you get stuck, write down everything you could possibly say in response to something specific, no matter how ridiculous it might seem, and then narrow down the options to things that might work and won’t get you in too much trouble.  We call this the Response Continuum.

Break the stimulus control

When we are in the same situation over and over again, our patterns of behavior tend to become stable and we get locked in by the sameness of the situation.  This is called stimulus control – when stimuli or elements of a situation encourage the same behaviors.  If we want to do something different, we can give ourselves a little momentum by doing some easy things to make the situation feel different (and therefore alter the stimulus control in that situation).

For example, you probably do a similar routine each morning in your home, but if you stay in a hotel your routine probably changes because the situation has changed.  You can harness this knowledge by changing elements of your meeting.  For example, you could arrive extra early, sit somewhere different than your usual seat, add something to the agenda, bring a water instead of a coffee, etc.  Make the meeting feel as different as possible and before you know it you will be blurting out all kinds of new things.

Get support

Before you go to the meeting, you could talk about the potential issues that might arise with a trusted work colleague who will also be at the meeting.  If your friend is in agreement, you could ask him/her if they are willing to show support during the meeting.  This will provide you with some immediate back up and reinforcement when you express your opinion or ideas. Immediate reinforcement is often necessary to get new behaviors started.

Practice

If you rarely speak up, there is a chance the first time you do it won’t come out perfectly.  That’s okay, the fact that you actually said something means you are one step closer to being able to say the exact right thing.  You aren’t going to go from 0 to 60 in one step, this kind of thing requires shaping.

After the meeting, if there was a situation where you wished you would have said something, take a few minutes to think about what you could have said and even write those ideas down.  Over time, you will get better at formulating your responses more quickly.