Mike Lehr's Blog

Linda Hill and Kent Lineback write in their April 5, 2011 HBR Blog Network post, “Why Does Criticism Seem More Effective than Praise?”:

A lot of evidence suggests that positive reinforcement — identifying and building on strengths — will produce better results than a relentless focus on faults.

However, as post’s title suggests, this isn’t always apparent. They do briefly talk about focus on the long term. Related to this perspective, the challenge I find in strategically using compliments is primarily our expectations; we expect a compliment to work immediately. Criticisms and other negative reinforcements do much better here but over the long run they don’t do much to develop a strong working relationship.

Thus, in order to make complimenting work, here are six expectations I find very important to effect change:

1. Focus on the long-term
2. Apply regularly
3. Appreciate the importance of personalizing compliments
4. Be patient
5. Reward positive change with additional complimenting
6. Employ other relationship building techniques

Yes, this means complimenting is a long-term proposition, but we can integrate compliments into our daily work routines. The difficult part is disciplining us to follow through and adhere to a complimentary regimen.

Once we achieve this part, we can take complimenting to a more strategic level in which we consciously plan the employment of compliments. This comes about by knowing what we want to:

• Achieve with every person we manage
• Say to the person if we have a moment to interact

Thus, in our minds we visualize the interactions we might have with our people and determine how to position the right compliments to effect the desired change. The process is no different than that used in thinking about the numbers we reviewed, the plans we will right or the resources we need to maximize.

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.

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.

In the October 2011 issue of The Atlantic, I ran across Richard Florida’s article, “Where the Skills Are” and found myself rethinking the idea of a diverse workforce. The idea has two paradoxical forces playing on it:

1. Diversity improves a company’s adaptability, creativity and innovation
2. Employers tend to hire employees who are like them

For the moment, let’s imagine that employers can hire a diverse workforce. The next challenge is managing it. It’s difficult because personality conflicts are side-effects of diversity. Since everyone’s a people person until people are the problem, managers are more apt to “get rid of the problem” rather than incorporate it. Consequently, employers will not only tend to hire those “who fit in” but also dispose of those “who don’t.” This moves them ever faster toward a homogenous workforce lacking adaptability and innovation.

Even though Richard’s article focused on talented individuals adept at connecting with diverse people, there are applications from a managerial perspective. It will take a very talented person to manage diversity. That’s because personality conflicts manifest themselves in many ways as differences in approaches, organization, ideas, behaviors and others. A manager will need to be able to see through this, account for his own biases, creatively solve it, and have the discipline to pursue the solution. We do not solve personality conflicts overnight.

Moreover, the need for such managerial talent is only going to increase as technology continues to take over the more routine and predictable tasks of various jobs and as the marketplace becomes more dynamic. The need for diversity not only in demographics but also in personality is only going to increase too.

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.

As we saw with pigeonholing and tasting food, context influences us greatly. This extends to people’s inclinations to collaborate. In support of this, the July-August 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review has Yochai Benkler’s citing in his article “The Unselfish Gene” the work of Lee Ross from Stanford University. He found people being more inclined to collaborate if the context of the effort promotes it.

That’s why leadership that manages, operates and communicates with the implied assumption that employees are essentially motivated by “What’s in it for me” will tend to foster a less collaborative culture than leadership doing the same against a backdrop of collaboration. From an everyday perspective, this means the culture that heavily relies upon extrinsic rewards such as money, awards and perks for individual performances will tend to be less collaborative than the one relying upon intrinsic rewards such as the enjoyment of working with and helping others. Mastering morale builders that don’t cost a cent go a long way in helping here.

This doesn’t mean we eliminate monetary rewards for individuals, but it does mean we focus more on the culture we are promoting in our businesses; culture is context. However, the promotion of that culture must be real. If employees sense a divorce between words and actuality, then the context for collaboration falls, thus causing most employees to resort to self-interested behavior.

Using intrinsic rewards to buttress a collaborative context is involved. In addition to mastering morale builders, it means mastering compliments. Understanding and appreciating the different kinds will help us see how intrinsic rewards differ from extrinsic ones. It’s only by mastering these on an interpersonal level will we be able to extend it throughout our companies and organizations.

Other posts in this series:

• Cooperation vs. Self-interest: Which Reigns Supreme?

People often marvel that more managers don’t use inexpensive morale builders. Of course, many of the same also wonder, “How did that person become a manager in the first place?” It’s that we tend to feel negative power is more powerful than positive power is; thus, we will tend to feel the former would be a more powerful leader.

An article in the July-August 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review titled, “Why Fair Bosses Fall Behind” by  Batia M. Wiesenfeld, Naomi B. Rothman, Sara L. Wheeler-Smith, and Adam D. Galinsky provides research supporting this. In terms of powerfulness, they found that rude managers consistently scored higher than respectful managers did.

To illustrate this, I sometimes ask: Which dog would you prefer as a pet, a collie or a pit bull? Frequently, people select the collie. I then ask: If you lived in a high-murder neighborhood, which would you choose? People frequently switch to the pit bull. While the workplace isn’t that dangerous, evolution and the days of uncivilized life long ago still affect us. Then, we required leaders unencumbered by sensitivities to protect us. It’s why some of the world’s most ruthless, modern dictators (i.e. Stalin) are still admired today by significant portions of their native populations.

In everyday business life, we often experience this bias when people disqualify others as leaders because they “aren’t tough enough.” Negative power is very overt, easy to see. Contrast this to the positive, subtle power inherent in the inexpensive morale builders. That’s why we often see Darth Vader as a very powerful Star Wars figure even though he was the slave of the Emperor.

Thus, when we promote the rude, the Dark Side has successfully seduced us by triggering our insecurities and fears.

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.

The article, Now You Know, in the May 28, 2011 edition of The Economist discussed a study published in Cognition by Elizabeth Bonawitz of the University of California, Berkeley, and Patrick Shafto of the University of Louisville regarding the directing of children in their play. The conclusion is that prior explanation of how to play inhibits exploration and discovery.

Developmentally, businesses, through their everyday managerial practices, tend to instill a resistance to change in their people. They do this by excessively directing their people what to do. This direction not only comes via communications from managers but also procedures managers established. Consequently, employees don’t need to think; they just do as told.

As with any task, practice reduces anxiety of doing it. Uncertainty is no different. To become more accepting and adapting of change, employees need exposure to uncertainty. They need to explore and discover. Reiterated more pragmatically, they need to try and err. However, this requires time and money which is intolerable in most business cultures.

Therefore, managers need to look for tasks and projects that require thinking, exploring and discovering by their employees.  For example, assigning tasks requiring unique customer solutions would help. This could mean simply writing a letter to address a unique customer inquiry. Tasks involving working with people of different personality types work too. Creating a new process or set of procedures is good. Any task where the method or solution isn’t pre-defined or one of several works will help.

If you want to encourage your employees to have a change mentality, you need to give them experience in dealing with uncertainty. It means giving them time to explore and discover, to try and err. It means encouraging them to think for themselves rather than telling them what to do.