The Place Of Praise In Business Leadership
Whenever there is conflict between employers and employees the causes can usually be tracked back to a few basic omissions – nearly all of which are an employer’s responsibility.
Most of the avoidable employment disputes centre around:
- Lack of clarity in the Statement of Responsibilities, and in the process by which performance of those will be measured.
- Lack of formal timely monitoring – and an almost complete absence of praise for positive outcomes.
Responsibilities
These days, when it comes to agreeing the terms under which we will work together, there are several options available to us:
For starters, employees can be covered by a formal Letter Of Employment laying out all the terms and conditions of their employment, and referring to the Responsibility Statement (or Job Description) for that position or role, which should then be an attachment. If the offer embodied in the Letter is accepted, that fact should be formalised with the employee signing a file copy of the Letter.
Whenever it is proposed that that employee’s role change within the company, that proposal should take the form of a new Letter (or contract), to be signed on acceptance. This is essential where the new role includes greater responsibility, and/or a change of pay rates.
Praise
For some people, it is just the name of a margarine! For others, it’s the secret of why their staff excel. These days business leadership and people management takes a multi-level approach, from grass-roots old school business practices to new-age psycho-holistic people skills. (Thats less touchy more feelings).
In the hierarchy of what humans need and want, once our basic needs are met, we look next for security, then belonging, and then for recognition. In the work environment there is no source of recognition with the same clout as “the boss’s”.
Good business leaders praise their staff – often. Good leaders make sure they catch their staff “doing things right”, and praise them – loudly – and within the hearing of others. That way they multiply the impact and set other staff looking for ways to earn the same recognition!
Counting
Most bosses will tell you that they do praise their staff – often – but when we asked them to keep a daily log by jotting down the names of their “praisees” a quite different picture emerges. They barely praise at all, and are often quite shocked to discover this fact. Great! That’s recognition of the problem. Fixing it is easy. A discipline, but easy, and one that soon grows into a habit.
Multiplication
Want to multiply the power of your praise? Write it down! A simple note of appreciation for a job well done jotted on a cheery card will carry twice the impact of the spoken words and will persist well into the future – fuelling more good deeds from its persistence alone.
(We have seen enough instances of a “Well Done!” note sitting atop an employee’s workstation for months after the fact that earned it, to appreciate just how much weight our employees give to well-placed words of praise.)
What to Praise
Here’s a simple rule: Always praise the “desirable behavior” rather than the person performing it.
Firstly, this is less confronting and less embarrassing for the praisee, and secondly, it focuses precisely upon what it is you want more of (the desired behavior), thus making it clear to other staff that anyone can gain similar praise; they just need to do “that” (the desired behavior) to get it!
Target Praise
Target and scale your praise to raise standards.
In other words, don’t always praise people for doing their jobs, but always praise people for doing their jobs well – a little praise for a little above average, a lot of praise for a lot above average. Make it clear to everyone that there is a clear relationship between your praise and the quality of their effort.
Mix to Fix
B.F. Skinner was known as the father of “operant conditioning” and that’s what we’re talking about here. Though Skinner worked with pigeons, and we’re talking people, the rules are the same.
Skinner noted that if he trained a pigeon to peck a bar by always rewarding it with a pellet of food every time it did that, he rapidly established a strong association in the pigeon’s brain between the action and the reward. In fact too strong an association! It was costing a fortune to keep that pigeon pecking and if he stopped rewarding, pretty soon the old pigeon stopped pecking!
But Skinner also discovered that if you did not reward every instance of the desirable behavior, but did so slightly randomly, the pigeon would keep on pecking between “instances of reward” therefore cutting the cost of reinforcement!
In human terms, you don’t want to be praising your staff so rigidly that they come to expect praise as a “right”. After all, you pay them all of the time to do their job to the best of their ability, but you want to be praising them always for the next level up – and “the next level up” can be a continually escalating scale.
To test your own praising score, ask me for a free Profitune Praise Log . Maintain your copy of the Log for a week; study your performance; then re-read the above article to see if you have been allowing some of the gold in your business to slip beneath the floorboards!
