Encouraging Behavior That Gets Results

You’re 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 clearly defined procedures for every part of business. 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 you wake up at 2 a.m. worrying about.

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

Sound familiar?

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

A powerful tool for encouraging these behaviors is use of targeted positive reinforcement within a well defined performance management system. Much has been written about use of positive reinforcement in recent years, but many managers and business owners still struggle with how to apply it appropriately. One reason many people do not hoped for results is a misunderstanding of how reinforcement strategies really work.

Much more than “pats on back”, “atta-boys”, and “warm fuzzies”, effective use of positive reinforcement strategies in a structured performance management system relies on knowledge of your business systems, understanding effect of specific employee behaviors on business results, and precisely targeted behavioral reinforcements.

Creating a strong performance management system starts with understanding why people do what they do.

One model of explaining human behavior says that an individual’s behavior results from consistent pairing of antecedents (situations or events just prior to our behaviors) and consequences (situations or events created by our behaviors).

11 Great Ways to be Positive about Change

1. Personal Growth Change gives us great moments for self-development and personal growth. It is in times where there is a lot going on, where we have to get out of our box to think, even when change is imposed, that we move forward.

2. Involving Others During change periods we can create relationships that are new - and we, as managers, have a great chance to bring others into our confidence and into our network.

3. Adventure There is something about change, large or small which creates 'something different' from our routine day. This is pretty cool really. We are being provided with stimulating mental exercise to make best of things happening differently. It might not look that way, but change brings adventure!

4. Building it in Learning about big changes, means that we can closely observe why those changes are necessary. We have to make radical changes because we have strayed well off course. So as we learn, we can make provision to have some minor course corrections rather than completely wrng destination.

5. Challenge In his great book, 'The Inner Game of Work', Timothy Gallwey talks about fine balance between security and challenge being whatgets people motivated. By creating new things to learn, to do, we stretch our people - and ourselves.

6. Opportunity Change brings new opportunity. For learning; for understanding ourselves better; for new perspectives; for different roles. These can be grasped personally or they can be dwelt on miserably. The better choice is to go for it!

7. Team Bonding Change exercises, big and small can be great to develop a team. Where there is opportunity to work together, manager with their closest people there are often places, moments where team spirit; trust and shared commitment - 'Dunkirk spirit' even, enables future potential of a team to be loosened.