Page 116 - Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles

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Recognition

So What if I Don’t Recognize?

Nearly everyone knows that reinforcing behavior through praise
makes it more likely to occur again. Whether you’re praising
an employee, child, or pet, it works. What most people don’t
understand is that failing to reinforce behavior actually makes
it less likely to happen in the future. For example, imagine ask-
ing an employee to stay late to help with a project. He does so
and you don’t bother saying thanks. The next time that you ask
him to stay late, he will be less likely to do so because he feels
unappreciated.
The same principle applies to correcting problem behaviors.
Imagine that you have an employee who is chronically five min-
utes late to work. You decide to speak with her to discuss the
impact that being late has on team members, to explain that it
doesn’t fit with the company’s culture and values, and to clearly
set the expectation that she will be on time. The next few days
the employee is on time and you say nothing. In the absence of
praise for being on time, the employee will be at much greater
risk for slipping back into her old habit of being late. When do
most supervisors say something? Yep, the next time she is late!
Here’s what you need to know: you will never get the behavior
you want by focusing on the behavior you don’t want. For
example, you don’t get team members to take initiative by focus-
ing on their lack of initiative. Focusing on problematic behaviors
is called nagging and, while annoying, it is ineffective. To funda-
mentally change behavior, you must use positive reinforcement
and focus on the behavior that you do want, not the behavior
that you don’t want. Later in this chapter I’ll describe in detail
about how to do just that.
Employees come to us in a state of readiness to engage, and
it is the behavior and decisions of managers and organizational
leaders that can result in even the best employees becoming