Science is said to be amoral. Science can be used to invent instruments of healing or weapons of destruction. Lasers can be used in healing and in killing. Likewise, the laws of behavior can be used to make someone an ISIS terrorist, or a humanitarian, a confident leader or a hostile recluse. Reinforcement can be used to get people to do immoral, unethical, and illegal things. What, then, does this say about its propagation?
Immoral, unethical, and illegal behaviors have been occurring since the beginning of time. It is only now that we have the knowledge to arrange our environment to be able to affect these behaviors in a constructive and meaningful way. Could someone use this knowledge for harm or to increase ill-gotten gain? Yes. Is its potential harm reason to restrict its systematic use? To paraphrase B. F. Skinner, the best defense against tyranny is the education of everybody in the (behavioral) technology so that the power of reinforcement will not be in the hands of a few.
The performance management approach is value laden. Values come from behavior. They are statements about desirable behavior patterns that a group seeks to promote. To the extent that values can be pinpointed, they are much more achievable in any group, whether at home, at work, or in society in general. Let’s examine some basic values and see how they relate to the concepts in this book.
Honesty means that everything is aboveboard. There are no hidden agendas. The stated purpose of asking for a certain behavior or performance should be clear to everyone.
In performance management, there are no secrets. There is nothing in this book that you would not want everybody in your organization to know and use with each other and with you. The techniques in this book are not some secret method of getting people to work harder and not know it. Attempts at deception are shortsighted and do not bring out the best in people.
Some people think that if the performers know that you are using reinforcement, the reinforcement will not work. This is wrong. If what you are doing is reinforcing, it will work whether people know what you are doing or not.
If someone thanks me for doing a good job or laughs at my jokes, he or she may not be doing it to deliberately influence my future behavior. But to the extent that laughing at my jokes is reinforcing to me, I will respond like everybody else. I will do a good job again or tell more jokes.
Performance management teaches that a manager should carefully follow up to make sure that the consequences match the antecedents. This is the basis for trust. The follow-up is to make sure that what the company says will happen after a certain behavior or performance does happen. This might be a positive consequence following good performance, or it might be a negative consequence following a poor performance. Either way, the credibility and integrity of the company are on the line. Trust is measured by the extent that management does what it says it is going to do.
Obviously, if a company has announced that bonuses will be paid for a certain goal attainment and then doesn’t do it, it is teaching its employees not to trust it. Such a company need not be surprised when people are slow to give discretionary effort in the future.
Employees will be thinking, “Why put extra effort into the job? They don’t mean what they say anyway! Remember when they promised us those bonuses? They didn’t do what they promised. Why should we think this time is any different?” For that company’s employees, the company will have demonstrated that it has no integrity and can’t be trusted.
While trust is about predictability, integrity is more about living one’s values. The integrity issue most often surfaces in less obvious ways. Often a company will announce, “We are committed to quality. Please tell us when there is a quality problem in your job because we want to make it right.” Then, when someone points out a quality problem that necessitates stopping a production line or reworking a deficient product, that employee is told, “Oh, let that go. It will be okay. We are behind in our production today.” This type of integrity problem can devastate a company and create a workforce for which integrity holds no meaning.
As you can see, integrity and trust are intertwined, and today, with the exponential increase in the ability of employees to know (and document) what is promised and what organizational values the company is committed to operate by, it is impossible to bring out the best without both.
The performance management approach implies a certain equality and respect in the way we approach another human being. The basic assumption in the approach is that most behavior is learned from consequences in the environment. Therefore, we conclude that there are logical reasons for the behavior of others: they act the way they do because they have learned to act that way.
Looking at behavior from this perspective, we are less likely to be judgmental in our estimation of others. Furthermore, we can begin to see that in many cases, we are part of the environment that taught our employees how to act that way! So, if we want to change the way they act, we must change their environment. While we may not be able to change much or the person’s total environment, we can change the way we act when with the person.
Recognizing the universality of the laws of behavior also helps us to realize that we are as much a product of our environment as they are. We can understand the true meaning of the old saying, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
We realize that if we had been punished for telling the truth, we might have become compulsive liars. If our work experience had come in a company where cheating the customer was common, we might be distrustful of others. If the consequences and events we had experienced in our family life had been different, we would also be different. This knowledge tends to make us a little more humble and a little more willing to take people as they are, without judging and condemning them.
This is not to say that we are satisfied to accept people as they are, only that we accept them as they are as a starting point, without trying to make them feel guilty about it. We learn to say, “Okay, this is where you are. Let’s see what we can do to help you get better.”
Whether we are addressing a poor performer or a good performer we say, “Let’s see how we can help you get better.” The only presumption we make is that anyone, no matter where he or she is now, can be better, including you and me.
Beyond the realization of equality is respect for what the other person brings to the party. Everybody has a unique perspective on life. It is unlike any other. It remains for us to capture it and enhance its value.
In a larger sense, the value of justice is also implied and promoted by performance management. Justice means that each person gets what he or she deserves. This is certainly what justice means in the courtroom sense. In performance management, this is what we say about managing people: those who perform well and add value to the organization should get more reinforcement and rewards than those who perform poorly.
In case after case in business and industry, low performers receive exactly the same compensation and recognition as high performers. The question higher performers ask, then, is a question of justice. “If we high performers are treated exactly the same as low performers, where is the fairness (justice) in that?” And, of course, after a while, they will stop performing at high levels (extinction). Thus the employer also ultimately gets what he or she deserves—low performance. Justice is served.
Further, giving poor performers the same reinforcement and rewards as better performers is not fair to the poor performers. Undeserved reinforcement and rewards maintain the poor performance. When management provides equal consequences for unequal performance, it actually robs the poor performers of the opportunity to improve.
Reinforcement and rewards that are earned lead to higher self-esteem and personal growth. Earned recognition and rewards increase performers’ feelings of confidence and competence. These performers have visible evidence that they add value to the organization. Confidence leads to an increase in initiative and a willingness to try new ideas. What organization can’t profit from that?
By pinpointing for people exactly which behaviors are wanted and the nature of the consequences of those behaviors, you encourage calm, well-thought-out decisions, and stress is reduced. When the relationship between behaviors and consequences is not clear, when people do not know how to earn positive consequences or how to avoid negative consequences, mental confusion and stress are the result.
Extensive studies have shown how noncontingent, random use of rewards and punishment produces “psychoses.” The inconsistent, inexplicable application of consequences “drives people crazy.” They never know which behaviors will be reinforced and which will be punished.
A client of mine described her boss’s style as “jungle fighter.” “You don’t know exactly what he wants,” she said, “and you never know when he is going to drop from the trees and surprise you.” This is not good management, and it produces physical and mental stress.
When we are secure in knowing that right is rewarded and wrong is punished and we know which behaviors define each, we feel secure, calm, and confident because we are in control of our own consequences! Rewards come because we earn them, not through chance. Rather than wiggling helplessly in the clutch of fate, we can do something to help ourselves.
You can reduce the stress in your work environment simply by increasing positive reinforcement. You can increase security simply by letting people know through word and deed what will be reinforced and punished. The organizational benefits of a low-stress, secure workplace are well documented.
When positive reinforcement becomes a way of life in an organization, with reinforcement going from boss to subordinate, peer to peer, and peer to boss, adversarial relationships begin to disappear. People begin to treat each other as they would like to be treated.
When management believes that the way to get results is to threaten and punish, the counter-response from employees is to threaten and punish in return—often via unionization, sabotage, or reduced effort. Thus the classic theory X adversarial relationship is created. In contrast, when management demonstrates that the way to get the best results is to reinforce and reward improvement and to use punishment only to help poor performers improve, the counter-response from employees is to perform better and to seek more ways to get more reinforcement. In this way, a mutually reliant partnership is formed.
In this atmosphere, people learn that they can earn bigger rewards by working together than by resisting each other. This is what the various conflict-resolution and negotiation books call a win-win situation. When people are not operating out of the suspicion and fear generated by punishment and negative reinforcement, then they are better able to realize the benefits of working together. Remember what Sherman Roberts said: “The best way to run an organization is also the best way to treat people.”
Performance management focuses on the here and now. It is not an abstract, convoluted management principle with limited applications. It is a precise, scientific approach that works! There are no tricks or gimmicks. Unlike motivational theories, you don’t need to delve into your workers’ deep-seated feelings, anxieties, or motives. Performance management requires no psychoanalysis or role-playing. You don’t need to find out what kind of childhood your performers had, what their birth orders were, or how they were raised. This approach accepts people as they are and deals with the behaviors in the present as a starting point. Because everyone operates under the same laws of behavior, applying these universal laws in a positive, effective way will bring about the behavior changes you are seeking in employees—whether you manage two people or 20,000.