Most of us learn how to read and write, add and subtract simple numbers, and even drive a car by the age of 17. How is it that learning to be a good leader can be missed in all of this? The truth is it’s rare for anyone, including parents or business leaders to have any formal training in behavior.  A basic understanding would likely increase the chances of having a meaningful impact on the people we care most about. As parents and leaders, we are the consequence providers. We manage the environments that others live and work in and we have more influence than we think.  People who have success influencing others aren’t innately better leaders, they’ve just learned to be.

To me, being passive-aggressive means you want something, but you aren’t saying so; it’s dishonest. It’s also about causing harm rather than making improvements. Passive-aggressive behaviors usually deliver subtle forms of punishment or extinction. For example:

• Purposely delaying in a decision
• Not providing all of the necessary information
• Making excuses for not doing things that would be helpful
• Being chronically late in order to cause harm
• Being chronically forgetful in order to cause harm
• Loud sighs during meetings
• Saying, “do whatever you want” when you actually want something specific

Passive-aggressiveness seems to be born out of fear and lack of skill. It’s easier and less scary to be passive-aggressive and makes us feel a tiny bit better in the moment. It’s not the behavior of a real leader, though. Doing the right thing takes courage.

The result of passive-aggressive behavior is that it creates negative feelings and resentment and the underlying issue doesn’t get addressed. It won’t move the relationship or the situation along in a positive direction; it often does the opposite.

The Alternative
When we find ourselves in a scary and frustrating situation, there are other options to move it in a positive direction, including subtle changes to improve the environment. These kinds of techniques should be based on positive reinforcement and feedback strategies. Some examples of more positive change strategies include:

• Asking a question
• Stating the time at the end of a meeting about to run over
• Providing an example of someone doing something really well
• Sitting in a different chair
• Offering a gentle suggestion
• Role-modeling the desired behavior

More subtle forms of feedback call attention to the current environment without having to make direct, scary statements about it. Even something small like sitting in a different seat than you normally would in a meeting can make people notice the current environment more, because something in it changed.

Sometimes more subtle approaches to shifting the environment are not enough, but it’s best to start off with something small and easy that may impact behavior in a gentle way and then slowly move up the continuum of potential responses if the previous ones don’t work. This kind of progression gives you increased confidence to try something more direct and it also gives the other person the opportunity to make a change without feeling like you are being confrontational.

Most importantly, the end goal is to help others and to improve the current environment. The next time you respond to a frustrating situation, ask yourself: will this just make me feel better or could it improve the environment for everyone? If the answer is the former, rethink your strategy.

Being a curious behavioral psychologist, when the worker left our house I asked my son why he brought the guy water.  Pushing him a little bit, I said, “Isn’t he paid to do this work?  Shouldn’t he bring his own water?”  My son said, “He’s doing a lot of work for us and he might get thirsty for some water.”

That exchange got me thinking a bit about the inverse actions that we sometimes see in business.

The argument goes something like this:  An employee is not meeting expectations on the job.  We suggest that perhaps the business hasn’t created the right conditions for success.  A manager stands up and says, “All of this hand holding is getting to be too much for me.  When does it end?  Do you have to reward every person for every little thing they do?  Their paycheck ought to be enough!”

Let’s stop, take a deep breath, and think this one through a little more carefully.  What if you used the same logic for:

• your children?   …They ought to go to bed on time because I said so…
• your spouse? …She ought to do the laundry because it’s always been that way…
• your friends? …They ought to accept me because that’s what friends are for…
• your boss?  …She ought to want me to work on those valued projects because I’ve been here so long…

What these scenarios do not take into account is your role in creating an environment in which the other person (or persons) would ever want to do what you’re asking them to do.  We’ve all seen people in businesses treat their vendors, employees, customers, and even families, carelessly.  Behavioral science would predict these kinds of patterns in some situations, especially when we become too busy.  However, it seems to defy logic: These are the very people we rely on to deliver our key results at work and in our personal life and yet we sometimes don’t treat them with the care and attention they deserve.  We sometimes rely on people to simply do what they ought to do, without thinking about what it feels like to be them.

In most cases, a little bit of forethought on your part is all that is needed to make others feel good about what you hope they’ll do for you or the business.  This is perhaps why being too busy is a principle cause in the lack of prudence I am describing – when we’re too busy, we often go on ‘autopilot’ and stop thinking about things carefully.

A paycheck, contract, agreement, formal power or job role is usually not enough to bring out the best in people – these are just some threatening ways to keep people in line.  We all know that threats tend to bring out compliance more so than excellence.   Your job as a leader, spouse, parent, etc. is to try to arrange things so that the people who interact with you are happy to be doing so.

Perhaps you can take a few minutes to think about some of your key relationships and consider how well you’ve set yourself and your partners up for success and happiness?

When is the last time you “brought someone a bottle of water”?

The problems came in translating it through the levels of the business.  It’s one thing for an executive to publicize an audacious goal, but it’s another thing for middle managers to execute on it.  One impact that the goal had was to put immense pressure on managers to eliminate injuries at the location they manage.  The pressure was so intense that people feared for their jobs when injuries were reported.  At the very least, people get more focused on the goal than on doing the right things every day to make it more likely that people will be safe.

This is what we mean by ‘downstream impact”. Putting pressure on a middle manager can have the downstream impact of pressuring general managers to pressure operations managers, who then pressure their staff, who pressure supervisors and the workforce.  At some sites, the workforce gets so invested in reducing injuries that people injured on the job are afraid of reporting the injury, for fear of retribution from coworkers.  This is for real injuries, not to mention property damage, equipment-related incidents, or close calls.  Those can become even more elusive in this environment.

It’s true getting overly focused on the goal can drive reporting and honest dialogue underground.  If any of you have seen something like this happen, I’d love to hear from you about it. Behavioral science would suggest that it’s something that occurs more often than we might hope.

Negative reinforcement is one of the most misunderstood concepts in behavioral science, and also one of the most common ways of managing people in organizations.  Negative reinforcement is also responsible for generating unhappy, anxious, and unmotivated employees.  The first step to minimizing its use is understanding what it is.

Negative reinforcement increases behavior.  Someone has experienced negative reinforcement whenever they have engaged in a behavior in order to avoid or escape an aversive situation.  An example might be consistently delivering a report just before it is due.  The behavior of ‘delivering reports’ is likely to occur because the employee will be reprimanded otherwise.  An indication that someone is guilty of this type of management involves the timing of report submission.  If your people are consistently submitting work just before the deadline, you’re likely providing negative reinforcement for work completion.  Another way to test this is to make a few tasks optional and see how many people complete them.  If nobody does, you can bet you manage people with negative reinforcement.

Another example is giving in to a child’s request for something (say, a toy at the toy store).  The child kicking and screaming on the floor might just prompt you to give in.  This behavior, giving in, ends the embarrassing situation happening in front of amused onlookers.  Remember, negative reinforcement increases behavior.  Agreeing to purchase the toy resulted in shutting the little squirt up and increased the chances that you’ll give in next time because your giving-in was reinforced.  Negative reinforcement is why we take aspirin when we have a headache, or scratch a mosquito bite.  Those behaviors all eliminate aversive conditions.

The good news is there are ways to get results (and manage behavior) that don’t require negative reinforcement.  Create an environment where people want to add value not because they have to, but because they want to.  Start by recognizing achievement when appropriate.  When you must provide constructive feedback, be sure it’s pinpointed.  People tend to accept feedback much better when it is specific.  Count the number of punishers (face to face comments, remarks in e-mails and so on) you deliver in a day and work to reduce that number.  Find opportunities to tell people what you like about what they’re doing to increase the chance you’re seen as a deliverer of positive reinforcement, instead of negative reinforcement.

There will always be some situations that require a bit of negative reinforcement.  It’s not that we should never use negative reinforcement; it’s that we should learn to use it in the right time and place.  If your employees are confessing to crimes they didn’t commit or doing everything just before the deadline, you’re probably using too much.

Behaviorally speaking, there are three components of perspective taking.

1)   Understanding the reinforcers and punishers of others

2)   Knowing something about the learning history of others

3)   Understanding the impact of environment on behavior

Research suggests that people who rate themselves as excellent at perspective taking tend to be poor at it.  People who are good at perspective taking question whether they have truly considered all of the factors necessary to understand the situation and behavior.

Benefits of Perspective Taking

The better people get at perspective taking the harder it becomes to make decisions that negatively impact employees.  We generally try to avoid harming ourselves and so when we get good at perspective taking and can imagine ourselves in someone else’s shoes, we will probably try to avoid harming them, too.

Research suggests that transformational leaders are better at perspective taking.  Because of this, they often manage using relationships.  They understand their people and know how to subtly shift the environment to create change.  Transactional leaders, on the other hand, rely more on tangible leadership tools like incentive and punishment systems.  Stronger consequences that are likely to shift most people’s behavior are used indiscriminately.  It’s less personalized and means that while they might overall get the kind of behavior they want, they are probably not getting the best from their people.

Perspective Taking is a Learned Skill

It turns out, we aren’t born with a natural ability to take perspective.  As children, after a certain age, we get better at it and it can be taught.  In fact, research suggests that our ability to take the perspectives of others doesn’t generalize all that well to new situations, as children or as adults.  So, it takes practice and effort.

In fact, as people move up in leadership ranks, they tend to regress in perspective taking and start to assume that people around them agree with their perspective.  This is because the environment starts to shift as power increases.  People become more timid about expressing dissenting opinions because the perceived, and maybe the real, negative consequences get larger.  As leaders move up in rank, they have to work harder to hear different viewpoints.  For many, it’s just too easy to get comfortable with people around them agreeing.  This means we should start teaching leaders this skill early on to avoid problems later.

How can we improve our perspective taking skills?

1. Learn more about behavioral principles and the impact of the environment on behavior
2. Ask good questions
3. Get good at observing behavior

I am a firm believer that as people learn and practice behavioral science they become more effective.  And more empathetic.  And more likely to act in accordance with their values.  So, in 2013, consider working on your perspective taking skills through practicing behavioral science.

Defining Punishment
First, let’s define punishment from a behavioral science perspective. Punishment is something that follows behavior and results in a decrease in the likelihood of that behavior in the future. So, is getting a warning in your employee file punishment? Only if it decreases behavior.

In general, questions about punishing for injuries tend to come up for employees who violated a policy or procedure, took a shortcut, or made an error. For example, if using the wrong tool for the job to keep production going resulted in an injury, some organizations would resort to punishment. I’m going to talk about these more common situations rather than malicious acts, for which I think using punishment is questioned less often. Punishment techniques range from getting a warning, fine, time off, demotion or job transfer, to getting fired.

The Injury is the Punisher
The first thing that we need to realize is that the moment an injury occurs, punishment has most likely already occurred. You’d have to be a complete psychopath to not feel embarrassed and ashamed if you did something you shouldn’t have that injured yourself or a colleague. Most of the time, when we screw up, we know it, we feel bad, and we relive the awful thing that happened in our mind. No external punishment will match that and the external stuff probably isn’t necessary to influence our behavior. Often times, a person associated with an injury becomes the safest person at the site because of their experience. The additional punishment delivered probably doesn’t compare to the punishment the person already feels about the injury. Therefore, the science would say that disciplinary action is not necessary, in many cases, to change the behavior of the injured person.

Changing Behavior
If the goal of punishment is to change behavior in the current context, then we should probably use a more temporary punisher instead of one that lasts for a career, like a job transfer or demotion. Behavioral science says that soon after we punish behavior, we need to give people the opportunity to do the right thing and then reinforce it. Without reinforcement, lasting change is unlikely. Career-changing punishers often lead to frustrated, less productive employees.

Punishing Behavior Instead of Results
Even though it may have been the first time that particular injury occurred, it probably wasn’t the first time someone engaged in the risky behavior that led to the injury. Most of the time, many people will admit that they took the same shortcut or violated the same procedure but nothing bad happened. Most workplaces aren’t set up to punish the behavior, they are set up to punish the unlucky result. If we want to use punishment, we should deliver it to everyone who violates the procedure, regardless of the result. If we can’t do that, it really isn’t fair to punish someone only when an unwanted result occurs.

Punishing Up The Consequence Chain
I once reviewed an incident investigation that said the employee, “failed to learn from previous injuries in the unit” because he had repeated a similar short cut taken by another employee that had resulted in an injury 5 years before. Was the employee the only person who failed to learn from the previous injury? If that is going to be used as a reason to punish, should that same logic not also be applied to the managers? Many other employees in the unit admitted to using the same shortcut, so clearly the causes of the previous injury had not been properly addressed.

Punishment Discourages Honesty
Behavioral science tells us that people will avoid you or alter the truth if they fear punishment. I’ve seen many workplaces where people avoid talking about unsafe conditions that encourage risky behaviors because they are afraid of punishment. In these cases, the punishment could be direct and obvious or it could be more covert, such as corrective actions that make doing a job more difficult. This is likely to makes the workplace less safe, which is counterproductive.

Are You Saying We Should Never Use Punishment?
The best leaders I know agonize over delivering punishment. It hurts them, they have to think a lot about whether it is the right thing to do, and they have an adult conversation with the person in question. They care about their people, they empathize, and they take the time to try to understand what factors in the environment influenced the person to have done what they did.

Before using one of the typical punishment techniques listed above, much consideration is necessary. We should seek to fully understand the situation – the unwanted behavior was occurring for a reason and that reason resides in the current environment.

We should also assess whether using punishment will make things better or worse in the future.

For many years, proponents of yoga have touted the physical, mental and spiritual benefits of a strong yoga practice. This was enough to motivate me to try it out a few years ago. I found it incredibly relaxing, but also surprisingly good at building muscle and strength. I don’t practice nearly enough to be any good at it, but I still like to go.

Just the other day I was at a class and the teacher said, “You have 5 layers to your heart.  Feel them all now, as you relax.” Wait a minute, I thought to myself.  Is there any science to back that up? “Now breathe like you have gils” …okay, I’m pretty sure I can’t do that one, I thought. “Your heart is encased in a box, now feel the back side of that box, this is where you can do the most good” …hmmm, I’m thinking there’s definitely no science to back that one up.

While my mind was chattering away, I finally realized that I didn’t have to believe every word the instructor said in order to reap the benefits of the class. In fact, I didn’t have to believe any of what the instructor was saying; I’m sure that the imagery helps, but following her movements and motions will produce the desired results.  My beliefs and the benefits may seem tied together, but they are actually independent.

In our company, we teach lots of people courses on behavioral science techniques.  On occasion, I encounter people who simply can’t believe what we’re teaching. They simply must doubt every word that comes out of my mouth.  Probably there’s reinforcement in it for them to do this, perhaps behavioral science clashes with their closely held beliefs, perhaps the doubting allows them to escape the hard work of actually learning something new.

No matter the source of the doubt, the outcome is the same. Your thoughts and the science are mutually exclusive. You can doubt the science, but that does not make it any less effective or less true. Gravity works whether you believe in it or not!

• Reply to my emails
• Find opportunities instead of pinching pennies
• Spend more time with their direct reports
• Develop their direct reports
• Ask more questions and make fewer statements

Why don’t they just do what they’re supposed to do?

Ferdinand Fournies wrote a really good book on this topic, Why Employees Don’t Do What They’re Supposed To Do… we recommend it all the time.  Fournies examines all of the logical reasons that employees might underperform.  Some of these include:

• They don’t know what’s expected of them (this accounts for a surprising 40-50% of cases)
• They don’t know how to do the requested task
• There are barriers preventing them from doing the requested task
• There are more alluring consequences for doing something else

The process in this case is simple; figure out what is causing the problem and fix it by taking care of the deficiency.

In Analyzing Performance Problems: Or, You Really Oughta Wanna, Mager and Pipe say that some problems are can’t do problems and some are won’t do problems.  The former set deals with antecedents (the top 3 bullets in the Fournies book above), and the latter set deals with consequences (the last bullet in the Fournies book above).  You should determine if a problem is a can’t do or a won’t do problem, and deal with it accordingly.

There’s another option that is not immediately obvious from the books listed above: The problem is you.

One bit of feedback we routinely get in our BMT courses is, “When I started the course, I thought it was about them. However, part of the way through, I realized it was about me.”  One cannot underestimate the power of this small insight in the life of a business leader.  For the avoidance of doubt, let me connect the dots for you.

If you’re having trouble getting people to:

• Reply to your emails
• Find opportunities instead of pinching pennies
• Spend more time with their direct reports
• Develop their direct reports
• Ask more questions and make fewer statements

…or just about anything else, perhaps you should consider taking a closer look at the environment you’ve created for them.  Sorry, but there’s a good chance your behavior is a root cause.

In just the same way as we are hard-wired to seek out harmful foods, psychologists have found that we’re psychologically prone to seek out information that corresponds with our beliefs and to discount contrary evidence.  Companies like Google are now capitalizing on this by delivering custom-built searches based on your internet usage history – all so that you don’t have to experience anything that is inconsistent with your current views.  When you conduct a search, you get just what you were expecting to get.

This may be convenient in an internet search engine, but I’d argue it’s a fundamental problem when it becomes part of your work life.  Specifically, I’m thinking of how leaders get feedback about their business practices.  The methods I’ve seen people using can lead to an insular environment, or worse – complete delusion.

Delusional thinking is so widespread in business and in life these days that Psychologists have a name for it: Confirmation bias.  Confirmation bias occurs when you pay attention to and seek out information that agrees with your previously held views.  Meanwhile, you downplay, discount, or ignore evidence that contradicts your views.

Studies have shown that this exists at universities:

• 94% of University Professors believe they are better at their jobs than their colleagues.
• 25% of college students think their social skills rank in the top 1%.
• 70% of 1 million college students surveyed think they are above average in leadership ability, and 2% think they are below average. (See Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So.)

Okay, I agree that saying delusional thinking exists at universities is something like shooting fish in a barrel.  But, we have similar evidence from business:

• When we use anonymous polling to ask a room full of leaders “I am above average compared to the others in this room”, 80% or more agree.

Here are some other practices we’ve heard people say that might also lead to head-in-the-sand management:

• “I have an open door policy – no news is good news.”
• “We run surveys regularly to ask for our employees’ input.  If people don’t bring up things that need improving, this means that things are going well.”
• “My results are good, so I must be doing the right things.”

So, what can you do differently?

There are at least two factors that promote confirmation bias:

Use of subjective data.  Experience tells us that many 360-reviews, personality tests, performance reviews, and engagement surveys give you data but not solutions.  Using subjective data give a license to interpret the findings any way you like.  And, as discussed above, you can’t be trusted to do the right thing and see constructive data for what it is – a need to change.

A behavioral science approach would have you getting very detailed and pinpointed data instead of the subjective stuff.  It’s much harder to ignore or re-jig the cold, hard facts.

A feedback-scarce environment.  When feedback is limited, it’s easy to believe you’re in the top 1% – everyone’s a winner in that world.  This was the case when I worked at a university – no one ever knew how they compared to others’ performance, so it was easy to believe you were great – even if you weren’t.  This happens in business too: when leaders are too busy doing other things to do what it takes to get good, insightful feedback (both positive and constructive) from their people, it is easy to believe that there are no frustrations and that everything is just grand.

A behavioral science approach to this situation would suggest that you create an environment in which your people understand the type of feedback that you want from them.  This means spending lots of time discussing what insightful feedback looks like, and just how valuable it is to you and the business.