|
What no on told you about positive reinforcement – and what it has to do
with accountability!
We
have all seen the chicken that can play the little piano – learned to do
it because someone used positive reinforcement to train it, and now when
you drop your quarter in a slot, it will play the piano once more in
exchange for the food pellet. Positive reinforcement works.
If
someone can teach a chicken to play a piano, obviously there is no limit
to what you can teach people if you used the same techniques. Since you
can apparently accomplish anything you want to using positive
reinforcement, anyone who chooses to “motivate” people with the threat
of punishment (instead of the kinder, gentler positive reinforcement) is
uninformed, lazy, stupid, or just plain mean…or maybe all of that!
Think
about it – positive reinforcement works – so, how can we say anything
good about someone who chooses to use something as primitive as
punishment?
This
sort of thinking, the power of positive reinforcement and the disdain
for the use of punishment, is the foundation of a lot of contemporary
management theory. That’s a shame, because it overlooks a very
important fact…..hunger.
Hunger? Yep, positive reinforcement works when the animal is hungry.
Do you think that chicken would be pecking at those little piano keys
for a food pellet if it had a choice? Do you think it would have
learned the piano trick in the first place if it had food laying around
during the training period? Not likely.
Skip
past the articles about positive reinforcement written in the psychology
and management magazines you see on the bookstore shelves, and drive out
to your local university library. Get to the psychology periodicals and
look for one with articles on animal learning using positive
reinforcement. You will notice that they all have a paragraph in
common. The paragraph describes how the animal was prepared for the
experiment. Quite simply, the animals were allowed to eat ass much as
they wanted, then they were weighed. After weighing, they got put on a
crash diet, and quickly brought to a weight that was 80% to 85%
(depending on the experimenter) before the positive reinforcement
training began.
Picture it – you weigh 170 pounds on the first of the month – a week or
two later you have dropped to 136 pounds, and someone asks you to do
something in exchange for a slice of pizza – they have definitely got
your attention! That is the equivalent to the typical positive
reinforcement experiment, but it is the part most writers fail to
mention in their articles most folks have the opportunity to read.
So,
are your employees that hungry? Not likely. They have alternative
sources for money, affection, praise and all of those other good things
– they simply aren’t hungry enough for anything you have to make
positive reinforcement as effective as most people think it is.
Does
this mean that you should quit being nice and initiate regular
floggings? Not at all….but it does mean that part of what you “knew”
about motivation and managing people was at least partially inaccurate.
Do you believe that this is the only case where something that everyone
“knows” about running a business is untrue? Neither do I. Perhaps we
should chat about this some time… |
