Mike Lehr's Blog

It’s generally easier to understand what positive and negative reinforcements are than it is to understand their advantages and disadvantages. Tradeoffs exist. Generally, in terms of getting action positive reinforcements are better over the long run, negative over the short run. The table below explains:

Now, it’s important for us to understand and appreciate how these work together. After all, managers are likely to use both, not just one or the other. Therefore, here are two important ratios to remember:

Results Ratio: It generally takes five (5) positive reinforcements to do the work of one (1) negative one.

5:1

Relationship Ratio: It generally takes ten (10) positive reinforcements to overcome the negative feelings of one (1) negative one.

10:1

For instance, one could hold a gun to someone’s head and change his behavior very quickly, but the relational damage is immense. We don’t want to become overdrawn on our relational accounts because overreliance on negative reinforcements will reduce the effect of positive reinforcements. This will necessitate greater use of negative reinforcements and produce a synergistic spiral downward resulting in a compliant, uninspired workforce.

Many companies are finalizing their 2012 strategies by planning their roll out to their employees. To this effort, Nilofer Merchant’s March 22, 2011 post on the HBR Blog Network, “Culture Trumps Strategy, Every Time,” is very apropos and relates to my “Best Decision as Myth” post: we often spend more time trying to make the best decision than we do trying to ensure we can implement it. A vital aspect of that implementation is a healthy company culture.

Taking Merchant’s themes further, an important part of a healthy company culture is the relationship between management and employees. That is more than just having a great vision, definable roles and enforcing accountability. It’s about doing the sublime relational techniques that mean so much even though they don’t seem to serve a direct business purpose. For instance, it’s important for managers to spell their people’s names correctly. Yes, unfortunately, this isn’t an automatic.

I’ve called this placebo management. If there is scientific evidence supporting the positive effect of placebos in medicine, they can work in business too. While managers are taught around the world in business schools about the more concrete aspects of visions, goals, compensation, information and credentials in developing relationships, they rarely learn the more intuitive aspects of relationships. Consequently, they never learn how to change the message without changing anything about it. Conversely, they don’t learn that even the best message can be ruined by a lousy messenger.

The holiday season is approaching and many companies and teams get together in celebration and camaraderie. It’s often a time to develop business relationships on a more human level. Good interpersonal relationships we develop with employees ensure a company culture that can implement strategy. Let’s make every month the holiday season in this regard.

In a previous post, I briefly mentioned the work of Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology as reported by Elizabeth Kolbert in her article, “Sleeping With The Enemy,” which appeared in the August 15/22, 2011 issue of the The New Yorker. At the time, I cited Tomasello’s work to emphasize the natural orientation humans have toward cooperation. In this post, I am suggesting that cooperation is a higher form of intelligent behavior than self-interest.

Here are two quotes from the article indirectly suggesting this:

1. Apes seem to lack the impulse toward collective problem-solving that’s so central to human society.
2. If you were at the zoo today, you would never have seen two chimps carry something heavy together. They don’t have this kind of collaborative project.

Only thinking and working towards your self-interest without consideration for others is definitely easier to accomplish than cooperation is. Additionally, when you add the importance of context, empathy and intrinsic rewards – all ingredients we’ve discussed earlier – to encourage natural cooperative tendencies, the achievement of cooperation is difficult, demanding and warrants a higher form of talent, aptitude and skill.

Furthermore, we can even take cooperation to a higher level when it comes to encouraging it within a diverse workforce. Such a workforce is more likely to be creative, innovative and adaptable. It’s much easier to gain cooperation within an homogeneous workforce than a diverse one. Moreover, creating the context, empathy and intrinsic rewards to appeal to such diversity requires special talents.

Again, all of this is to suggest that the desire and ability to cooperate belongs in the realm of a higher life form, humans rather than apes. Seen more simply, whereas self-interest puts our behavior more in line with those of apes, cooperation elevates us above them.

Other links in this series:

• Cooperation vs. Competition on the Business-to-Business Level
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest: Which Reigns Supreme?
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 2): Context – The Great Influencer
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 3): Empathy
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 4): Intrinsic Rewards

So, the boss walks in and harshly reprimands an employee. Unknowingly, she probably just shot his productivity down for the day. A while ago I worked with a company in which it was fairly common practice for the owner to come in late Monday morning and severely reprimand his employees. I witnessed what that did to their productivity for the week.

What we often don’t realize is how much words, phrasing and general conversation can affect people. In the November/December 2011 issue of Scientific American Mind, Tori Rodriguez in her article, “What Just Happened?”, cites several studies including ones in which:

• “. . . people who were unconsciously exposed to images of fast-food logos became more impatient . . .”
• “ . . . when participants recalled an illness-related memory, their pain tolerance decreased.”
• Participants were “unknowingly primed toward goal pursuit” simply by reading something “that included words such as ‘success’ and ‘achieve.’”

While Rodriguez recommends that we become more aware of this “priming” as she calls it by recalling what we “saw, heard and thought about in the past few minutes,” we can also raise our awareness concerning how we negatively influence people accidentally. Moreover, we could use this priming for good. For instance, simply wishing people luck can improve their productivity and performance.

That means we need to beware of that “constructive criticism” we offer. If it really is that constructive and helpful, we should position it as advice, assistance or simply help. Consider too, if we never compliment an employee. It’s as though we never watered a plant.

Next time you want to motivate someone, it might be as simple as talking about something positive, enjoyable and yes, even humorous.

Intrinsic rewards are important aspects of creating a cooperative work culture. However, such rewards are difficult to understand and teach. Moreover, many, many people just don’t believe they are that powerful. Yochai Benkler in his article “The Unselfish Gene” of the July-August 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review endorses the importance of intrinsic rewards in cooperative cultures.

Essentially, as we saw in the second post of this series, most people enjoy being cooperative, enjoy helping others; but, this enjoyment will dissipate if we ignore, discount or unreinforce it. Using effective, intrinsic, morale building techniques and compliments while working to minimize selfish extrinsic motivations such as money will ensure this won’t happen.

Since intrinsic rewards by nature are less tangible, it’s often difficult for managers and leaders to understand and appreciate the internal motivations of others, especially if they by nature don’t receive tremendous enjoyment from helping others. Nevertheless, here are a few tips for encouraging a cooperative workforce:

• Thank employees when they help others (letting them know it’s important to you)
• Demonstrate how they have helped you or others (it’s not always apparent to them)
• Recognize that they naturally enjoy helping others (reinforcing their internal motivation for helping others)
• Show how their job helps others to do theirs when performed well (creating a personal connection between their job and others)
• Hire and promote people who enjoy helping others (the desire to help others is a function of personality)
• Believe that people enjoy helping people (we cannot promote cooperation if we don’t believe it’s a motivation)

These tips will be uncomfortable at first but regularly applied they will produce positive effects over the long run. Thus, they require relentlessness, discipline and almost a fanatical belief in the power of cooperation.

Other links in this series:

• Cooperation vs. Competition on the Business-to-Business Level
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest: Which Reigns Supreme?
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 2): Context – The Great Influencer
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 3): Empathy

When I’ve written about the illusion of free will, I’ve focused on the advancement of technology and research methodologies to uncover subconscious thought patterns. However, these advancements are also discovering a connection between chemical reactions and some of our emotions.

In the September 24, 2011 issue of The Economist, the article, “Rogue Hormones,” reports on the research of John Coates, a  neuroscientist from Cambridge University. His research of derivative traders showed that when they “are on a winning streak their testosterone levels surge, sparking such euphoria that they underestimate risk.” This biochemical process produces extremely “powerful emotions” encouraging traders to “go crazy.”

This helps to explain why we often learn more from our failures than our successes and why success can deliver us to a state of hubris, an exalted arrogance that can corrupt our decision-making processes. Such biochemical processes help explain why such exuberance can infect many people to think and act similarly without communicating with each other while each is believing he is responding of his own free will. Thus, such events as financial bubbles and housing bubbles can occur on a broad scale.

A way to mitigate this effect is to diversify your workforce to include many types of personalities in decision-making positions. For instance, the article concluded that hiring women, who generally have about 10% as much testosterone as men, could help offset “irrational exuberance.” Experience can also help especially if it contains crises brought about by excessive risk taking. Moreover, even from strictly a gender perspective, not all men will experience the same increases in testosterone levels from success making them prone to erroneous risk assessments.

Of course, it’s not easy to manage a diverse workforce.

Beauty’s power often influences us without our knowledge and thus distorts our decisions. In other words, we think we are making them based upon objective criteria, but we’re not. In order to understand this better, it helps to see beauty beyond something feminine and physical.

In the August 27, 2011 issue of The Economist, “The Line of Beauty” reviews three books examining the “economics of good looks.” While it focuses on physical attractiveness and implies it’s somewhat the same as beauty, it includes a masculine aspect to the concept. For instance, it cites:

• Homely NFL quarterbacks earn less than their comelier counterparts, despite identical yards passed and years in the league.
• Attractive people also have an easier time getting a loan than plain folks, even as they are less likely to pay it back.
• [Attractive people] receive milder prison sentences and higher damages in simulated legal proceedings.
• . . . looks have a bigger impact on earnings than education . . .

However, the real point is that beauty applies much of this power below our consciousness. For example, in none of the citations above did anyone think these:

• Quarterbacks are attractive so we should pay them more.
• Loan applicants are attractive so we should give them a loan.
• Prisoners are attractive so they should get milder sentences.
• Plaintiffs are attractive so they should get higher damages.
• Employees are attractive so they should get paid more than those with better educations.

Moreover, the overwhelming number of folks making these decisions didn’t feel that people’s attractiveness was influencing them. Now, if this can happen with physical attractiveness, imagine the impact beauty can have. Disciplines such as advertising, marketing, merchandising and retailing contain many examples of beauty’s sublime power.

Other links in this series:

• Beauty as Power
• Beauty as Power (Part II): Attraction vs. Beauty
• Beauty as Power (Part III): Appreciation

Business drastically discounts the interpersonal interaction in favor of group ones. Saying the same thing to ten people simultaneously is more efficient than saying it ten different times to each person. However, this efficiency overlooks two important qualitative, interpersonal aspects:

1. People prefer to interact with their leaders one-on-one.
2. People enjoy talking about their leaders to others.

In a business setting, presidents, executives and managers, can influence the company’s internal grapevine through dynamic, interpersonal interactions with their employees. The right-hand figure illustrates the reverberation these interactions can create. A leader (blue sphere) interacts with an employee (red sphere) causing him to share his experience (red rings) with the leader with others (green spheres). The challenge is making the reverberation a positive one. Leaders accomplish this by taking advantage of opportunities to employ their personalities.

For example, in a thousand-person, five-floor regional office, a sales representative sold the largest single order for a particular type of product in the fifteen-year history of the office. The Regional President sent the sales representative a congratulatory note.

While a satisfactory response, it demonstrates the dynamic, grapevine opportunity he missed. He could have gone done to the sales representative’s floor and congratulated her personally. Even if she weren’t there, the mere sight of him on the floor would have created positive reverberations. Moreover, while he was there, he would have had the opportunity to interact with other employees creating other reverberations.

Every day, business leaders miss these kinds of opportunities to seize control of the grapevine, to make dynamic gestures. The effort is very similar to a public relations campaign except it’s internal. Instead, business leaders moan and complain about gossip, believing it’s beyond their control, when in actuality they actively make the grapevine work for them.

Related post: Tapping the Power of Personality for Executives and Senior Managers 1.0

The article, “Think Yourself Better,” in the May 21, 2011 edition of The Economist discussed the placebo effect: belief in a medical treatment increases its effectiveness. Research is also showing that this effect continues even if patients know a placebo was used. So, if belief helps doctors treat patients, why can’t it help managers manage employees?

The connection becomes more pragmatic when we consider that placebos work better when the drama around administering them is intensified. For example, the more enthusiastic the doctor is in administering it, the more likely it will have a greater effect. Additionally, giving an injection works better than a pill and a sham surgery works better yet.

The application to management is this: you can improve employees’ performances by telling them you believe they will become better. By connecting this belief to various new tools, initiatives and training, you will make the tools, initiative and training work better.

Presentation is a large part of what makes placebos work. A previous post talked about two identical bonus plans that were presented differently to employees. One motivated them more than the other did. This held true even when employees learned later that they earned the same bonus under both plans.

In pragmatic terms, this means that the more enthusiastic you are, the more attention you pay to employees and the more important you believe they are, the better they will do. This will occur even if you don’t show them one single technique to do their jobs better.

To make employees better, help them believe they can become better by showing sincerely and enthusiastically that you believe they can become better. If you want good employees, treat them like good employees.

I read two articles related to the impact positive feelings can have on performance. One concerns positive feelings from comments (Harvard Business Review) and the other from superstitions (Psychological Science). Both reference research from Dr. Lysann Damisch of the University of Cologne.

They reminded me of the commentary from the Top Gun DVD (Widescreen Special Collector’s Edition). A Top Gun instructor who was a technical advisor for the movie emphasized the importance of pilots’ confidence; they need to feel invincible. Thus, the crisis of confidence that Tom Cruise’s character, Maverick, had after his partner’s death is very real and dangerous.

Paradoxically, the modern workplace seems more concerned with telling employees what they are doing wrong rather than right. How successful can we be then in nurturing positive feelings to enhance the performance of employees? How much better would employees do if we took the same care as a Top Gun instructor? The research suggests, “They would certainly do much better.”

Part of the problem is psychological. We often see managers who regularly point out employee errors as being much tougher than those who regularly point out their successes. We tend to associate toughness with criticism and gentleness with compliments. Consequently, it’s extremely difficult for managers to convey strength when they’re complimentary. Moreover, complimentary actions can trigger sensitive emotions encouraging managers to feel “soft.” This can be a fearsome personal event for managers in companies that even have a small amount of machismo in their culture.

However, what studies like this demonstrate, and there will be more in the future, is that the emotional state of our employees is far more important than their mental state. Nurturing this will take extremely disciplined and emotionally secure managers to overcome their own feelings of being a “softy,” not a trait that has normally been in managerial talent.