Encouraging Behavior That Gets Results

You’re the boss, and you have every reason to feel good about your organization.

You’ve built a great team.

You’ve put strong players in every spot.

You have incentive, safety recognition, and bonus programs.

But something doesn’t seem quite right. 

Somehow, there seems to be a sense of unease. You can’t put your finger on it exactly, but you know it’s there. It’s what wakes you up at 2 a.m. with worry.

What are the symptoms? 

Well, it’s not that precise. It’s the little things. Like, well, you spend too much time monitoring your workers – checking time sheets, correcting behavior, and dealing with attitude problems. People seem to be “doing their own thing” instead of being part of a team.

Sound familiar?

It should, because getting optimal team performance is a common problem for business owners. Building a strong team provides the foundation for good performance, but that is only part of the process. As the leader, you need to encourage behaviors that create positive business results. 

A powerful tool for encouraging these behaviors is targeted positive reinforcement within a well defined performance management system. Much has been written about the use of positive reinforcement, but many business leaders still struggle with application. Many people do not understand how reinforcement strategies really work, so they do not get the results they desire.

In this issue, we will cover a few key ideas to help you develop effective behavior reinforcement strategies in your business.

What Drives Our Behavior?

An effective performance management system, requires us to know why people do what they do.

One behavioral model taught by noted behavioral analyst Aubrey C. Daniels says that an individual’s behavior results from consistent pairing of antecedents (situations prior to behaviors) and consequences (situations created by behaviors).

For example, we enter a dark room and flip the light switch to “ON”. We do this because we expect light as the result. Darkness is the antecedent. Light is the consequence.

So, we do what we do because of what happens, or what we expect to happen, after we do it.

Note this key concept, it is the consistent  pairing of antecedents with consequences that drives our behaviors every day.

What drives behavior in the workplace is no different from what drives behavior in other parts of our lives. We do things in anticipation of future consequences based on the consequences we experienced in the past for the same or similar action(s).

How can we make use of this knowledge? Let’s go back to the light-switch example.

What happens if we consistently get no light by flipping the switch? We resort to some other behavior (light a candle, carry a flashlight, etc). 

The lesson here demonstrates that we modify our behavior to get desired results—in this case light is the desired result.

In the workplace it may be more subtle, but the underlying principle won’t change. People will act to either get what they want or to avoid what they don’t want.

As leaders, we must carefully evaluate every situation where we want to influence employee behavior.

First determine what employees either gain or avoid by the current behavior. If the behavior yields positive results, reinforce it. If not, alter the consequences to reinforce more desirable behaviors

“We do what we do because of what happens, or what we expect to happen, after we do it.”