Yet, it never fails that senior leaders, hoping to maintain this momentum, decide that the best course of action is to create a standard procedure for doing projects.  Because nothing says, “let’s give this all we can!” like an 8-page procedure.

To illustrate why this won’t work, let me provide an example from one of our client sites.  A woman who recently took my course decided her project would be reducing unnecessary and redundant paperwork and was going through each set of paperwork on the site and creating a leaner, and more useful solution.  She had eliminated a lot of stuff already, saving them time and money, and she was everyone’s hero for doing so.  After all, no one wants to enter in the same expense three times.  One of the site leaders said that they had never seen her so motivated.  I would hate to see that spark of enthusiasm squashed by trying to make her fit what she was doing to step-by-step a procedure.

Procedures don’t motivate people, consequences do.

They didn’t need a procedure, they needed champions who would continue to encourage and support their efforts.  They needed a little time each week to work on making improvements.  They needed to create a community of people at their workplace who were highly committed to behavioral science and continued to talk and learn about it after I left.

A lot of times, people say, “that sounds too hard, wouldn’t a procedure be easier”.  It is hard to sustain BMT or any large-scale initiative, but it’s the only way to create a lasting shift in the culture of your organization.  Writing a procedure is easier, and it is also easy to file it away and never look at it again.

It’s what your people do and say everyday that matters, no matter what is written in your procedures.

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.

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?

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.

We call things that come before a behavior that are meant to prompt or spur behavior, antecedents.  Some antecedents are pretty effective and others, like the New Year’s Resolution, are often forgotten before too long.  Why do some work and some don’t?

Let’s think about antecedents that work well.  I believe most people would say the following antecedents are pretty good at influencing our behavior:  Mortgage payment deadline, plane flight information, fuel gauge, movie time listings, and driving directions.

Those that don’t work as well might include:  Prompts to read long agreements before installing software, complex standard operation procedures, motivational speeches, company values and, of course, New Year’s Resolutions.

What makes the first set of antecedents more likely to influence our behavior than the second?

The answer is consequences.  In the first set of antecedents, there are clear and immediate consequences for following or not following them.  For example, if you don’t look at your flight information you will probably miss your plane and if you don’t look at your fuel gauge you will likely run out of gas.

For the antecedents that aren’t as effective at influencing our behavior, the consequences aren’t as clear or immediate.  For example, if you have ever agreed to a policy without reading it when installing software, has anything negative happened to you?  Do you even know your company values?

So, if one of your resolutions for this year is to keep the rest of your resolutions, your best bet is to associate your desired behavior changes with some clear and immediate consequences.

When I first heard it, this story really resonated with me. What I took away was that we really should appreciate what we have. Others call this living in the moment.

I learned about this concept when I was in graduate school. Not through a meditation retreat, but by having the experience around every major deadline that, “after the deadline, things will be better.” The problem with this view is that it’s an illusion. How you behave during deadlines and crises is symptomatic of how you deal with things on an everyday basis (the same is true for people in organizations). The point of living in the moment is that you can’t put it on hold.

Two of my best friends right now have terrible cancers. Spending only 30% of your time feeling good has got to be a tough way to live. A good friend passed away on a moment’s notice this time last year. There are lots more stories like this, I’m sure we all have them. These sorts of things give one pause, and make you wonder if you’re using your time to the fullest.

In thinking about this topic, I jotted down some things you might consider:

Are you where you want to be, right now?

Are you on the right sigmoid curve, and at the right spot on the curve?

How much of what you are doing now is important to you? To your family and loved ones? To the company?

What do you have to be thankful for?

Does what you’re doing make you feel good?

This is the time of year for reflection.

You are in control of your life.

If you’re not happy, do something about it.

In other words, many of these so-called lazy employees have demonstrated higher levels of motivation in some other part of their life.  We are not destined to a predetermined amount of motivation in all situations.  Our motivation is dependent on the situation and the activities involved – the local environment.

If you think about it, you can probably relate.

Most of us can think of some tasks or activities that we aren’t motivated to do and others that we are highly motivated to engage in.  Ask yourself, what was it about those tasks that make you feel motivated or unmotivated?  Often times, it is related to the amount of reinforcement we get while engaging in those tasks.  We tend to like tasks that provide a lot of feedback, allow us to spend time with people we enjoy, or produce a positive outcome.

Here are some examples of activities many people are motivated to engage in:

Playing a musical instrument – produces a lot of feedback in terms of the sound, is often difficult to produce a nice sound, and may allow us to spend time with friends or receive admiration

Checking and sending email – there are almost always new emails that appear when you check, you get responses to emails you have sent, it feels like you have accomplished something when you send an email

Building stuff – produces a useful outcome, we get lots of feedback on how well we are doing based on appearance and function, and we may receive admiration for our effort

Now translate that to work.  Is your lazy employee suffering from  poor colleague relationships, a lack of feedback on their work tasks, or just a bad boss?  Is there an aspect of their job they really enjoy that they could spend more time on? What does the employee want out of their job? Do you even know?  Have you had that conversation?

I could quite honestly write several more pages about this but that wouldn’t be appropriate for a blog post, so I will leave you with this:

The next time you observe an “unmotivated” employee, instead of blaming it on genetics, look at the local environment for both the cause and the solution.

I work with great people. I’m not bragging about it or trying to make you feel bad (I am aware of the fact that most of the world doesn’t feel this way!). I’m just stating a fact. One of the reasons I can confidently say this is because every day the people I work with make me feel great about what I am doing and what I have done. They support me when I need help, but more importantly, they correct me when I’m headed off the rails and reinforce my behavior when I’m headed in the right direction.

Here’s one example. At our recent BMT conferences in Kalamazoo and Chicago, immediately after my presentation, several of my colleagues gave me what I would call “high‐impact”, insightful, and highly useful feedback about what I had just done. I’m not saying it’s all rosy; there are always things I am working on improving. No, what I mean is that instead of the typical mainstream response (perhaps we could call it a little lazy?) of “great job”, or even saying nothing (we’ve all heard the adage, “if you don’t have something good to say…”), or saying something laced with underlying and unstated aggression (passive aggressive feedback and ‘jabs’ implying, “I actually wish you hadn’t done as well as you did”), my colleagues gave me lists of bullet‐pointed behaviors that they observed during my presentation. Others told me a series of insightful things verbally.

 “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” –Maya Angelou

What if you don’t currently have a feedback‐rich environment? I suggest that you work to create one by giving others your insightful feedback and start to take responsibility for removing lazy feedback.

Creating an environment where we get useful and insightful feedback from our peers is how we improve, yes. But even more importantly, it’s how we thrive. It is reinforcing, yes, but reinforcement is so much more than changing behavior. When done right, it allows us to relive accomplishments, share successes, and well…feel great about it.