Giving compliments to manage behaviour

One way of giving positive reinforcement in behaviour modification is in providing compliments, approval, encouragement, and affirmation; a ratio of five compliments for every one complaint is generally seen as being effective in altering behavior in a desired manner^[18]

Behaviour modification is concerned with changing how people react and behave using positive and negative reinforcement.  It has its supporters and critics.

I’ve highlighted the quote above (from Wikipedia) as its something I’ve discussed with participants in training.  It fits with the idea of unconditional positive regard for a person you are supporting (although you might take exception to their behaviour).  The 5:1 principle is something that many of us find very difficult to achieve in practice.

If we apply this to leadership and management, we would get a very different environment to that which is found in many organisations.   My personal experience has been that belief in people, positive feedback and trust get people to give their best.  Mistrust, blame and negativity generally don’t.

Why is it so easy to be critical rather than positive?  Part of it is practice, but a big part is about how we feel about ourselves.  This morning I was not feeling great, and on the way to work caught myself having a jealous moment or two, thinking negatively about some of my colleagues.  A “not OK” moment as transactional analysis might term it.  As soon as my mood picked up that vanished.

Staying with transactional analysis, being in an “I’m OK, you’re OK” position would enable the positive compliment giving type of leadership that effective behaviour modification would require.  We come back to ourselves, and changing ourselves so that we might more positively manage others.

So tonight I’m going to bed, thinking, “I’m OK”….

Leadership and action logic

David Rooke and William Torbert wrote an article about the “Seven Transformations” of leadership.  Lots of people seem to like their ideas (e.g. another blog I read on this). It was originally published in the Harvard Business Review back in 2005.

Their basic premise was that the effectiveness of a leader depends on their “action logic” – how they interpret their surroundings and react when their power or safety is challenged.  They identified 7 stages in leadership development, each more effective than the next.

Their research and model is impressive.  However, I am always suspicious of models that show any sort of linear progression, and neatly divide things into stages.  I’m also suspicious of something based on top executives at big international Western businesses.  For someone like me working in the not for profit sector, it has to really ring true for me to feel it is relevant.

In the article the three middle categories, to which the majority of managers belong, were the most recognisable for me.  I could see how I went through the transformations myself.  I’ve given them below:

Expert	Rules by logic and expertise. Seeks rational efficiency.	Good as an individual contributor.
Achiever	Meets strategic goals. Effectively achieves   goals through teams; juggles managerial duties and   market demands.	Well suited to managerial roles; action and goal oriented.
Individualist	Interweaves competing personal and company action logics. Creates unique structures to resolve gaps   between strategy and performance.	Effective in venture and consulting roles.

I remember when I started to study an MBA that my learning was characterised by the idea that there was a right way to do things, the “expert” action logic. Its something I see often in organisations, who want solutions to problems, and want them fast.

The “achiever” makes me think of an organisation I worked for (and many I know) where the focus was on multiple targets, achieving goals, taking lots of action – and seldom ever reflecting.

As for being an individualist – I remember the step a couple of years back to asking the question, “why these targets?”.  “What is the assumption behind this?”  “Can we think differently?”.

The reason for my suspicion of the model is that, like most  linear models, a lot of it actually happens all at once and not in stages.  The action we take depends on how we are thinking at a particular moment.  One day I might reflect, think a lot, take into account lots of factors and people’s different realities.  Another time I might look for a solution without reflecting, or be pressured enough to go for a target whether I think its worthwhile or not.

To Rooke and Torbert’s credit, they recognise this, speaking about the “dominant” action logic for a leader and do not treat it as clear cut.  I suspect the simplicity of the model will help many people make sense of leadership development, but be a trap for “experts”.

Tired mistakes

Last week I discovered a mistake I made on the last day before I went on holiday.  It was a simple one, missing someone off an email address list, but caused a lot of disruption.  At the time I was really tired and badly in need of a holiday.

Comparing notes with a friend, she suffered from exactly the same sort of error, overlooking something when tired and under pressure just before going on holiday.   Tiredness contributes to more serious errors – something like 10% of road accidents or up to 20% of motorway accidents.  Its a subject worth taking seriously at work or elsewhere.

An article I found told me what not to do to combat tiredness – don’t rely on caffeine, don’t eat to boost energy, don’t try to sleep lots and lots – and as an alternative more water, healthy lifestyle, regular sleep.  Common sense things I know but don’t put into practice.

This made me wonder to what extent we self-sabotage.  Not just myself, but the others I see about me downing coffee, relying on the mid afternoon chocolate bar, or waiting for a lie in at the weekend.  The cultures I work within vary but tend to demand high levels of activity and generate stress.  People are always complaining of too much to do.

I can only speak about my own personal battle against “working too hard”, where I have discovered my greatest foe is myself.  I’m always obeying the shadow parent hovering at my back, saying I should work hard.  Simply doing nothing and enjoying myself generates guilt.  Letting go is difficult.

One of my favourite books is “The Tao of Pooh” by Benjamin Hoff.    Modern society is characterised as the “Bisy backson” (after a sign – busy back soon – misspelled by Christopher Robin).  On the other hand, the nicest of times is when you are going nowhere and doing nothing.

what I like doing best is nothing – Christopher Robin

Now if only I could get rid of that shadow….

Leaders and followers

In previous posts about transformational leadership and Singapore, I began to wonder about the leader and the led.  In Singapore I perceived a leadership focused on the material and secular, whom people were willing to follow because it delivered success.  This appeared to produce a sameness that I found stifling.

Should leadership also be about the spiritual in government and secular organisations?  In the UK church and state have been kept largely separate, but I’d like to apply the question to leading organisations.  Singapore also kept these things separate, and a wonderful diversity of religion existed – Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Chinese.  Yet outside this strict rules and materialistic sameness were backed by a culture of conformity.

Lee Kuan Yew’s (former Prime Minister) leadership might be termed transformational – he inspired people with a vision of a materially better future and led them to it.  However, this also created conformity and sameness that carries a risk for the future, one where the reliance of the people on good leaders is a weakness.

An alternative for a leader, be they a business or political leader (and are the 2 different?) is to lead not through inspiration, but by creating the conditions for people to question.  The Internet (self organising and changing like a living entity) is an argument that you don’t even need the leader, and that leadership distributed amongst participants is equally strong in the right circumstances.

Whether you need the leader or not, I’d suggest that a leader’s job must always be spiritual as well as material.  How we think and feel is linked critically to how we act and so to the business of business.  This is normally expressed as motivation, but I believe it is more than that and that a truly transformational leader would inspire people to examine their own beliefs and ways of being.

I’d like to suggest that its important for all of us to move from followership to discovery, and that the key to this is how we go about learning.  I’ll end with a quote I find important:

Learning to become an effective self-directed learner is probably the greatest intellectual and psychological challenge that an individual can face in a lifetime……  Some people never attempt to acquire the competencies of serious learning to learn as they are addicted to the deferential prescriptive approach.

- Dealtry, R. (2004), “The savvy learner”, Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 16