Are you going to re-enforce that behaviour?

I was sitting beside a college while he was reading his email. He nudges me with his elbow to get me to look at a message from one of his managers and with pride says, "Look at that quick response!" He was proud of the quick reaction of his manager and wanted to brag a little about it. It is a natural tendency to feel good when our people perform well and to want others to know about it.

He seemed to be moving on to other messages, so I asked him how he was going to re-enforce that behaviour.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"You are clearly happy with what he has done, so don't you want to recognize it so that it is repeated?" I clarified.

He immediately started to type an enthusiastic reply to the original message while reading aloud his positive, complimentary words as he typed.

I realize that this is really quite basic, but at the same time, it is often overlooked. The premise of the book "Whale Done!," (Authors: Ken Blanchard, Thad Lacinak, Chuck Tompkins, Jim Ballard) is that we will achieve desired performance more rapidly if we only reward good performance and completely ignore bad or negative behaviour.

I'll bring it home for illustration. If my daughter helps around the house, I provide positive recognition. If she does not, I say nothing and do not show any disapproval. I focus my attention on her subjects with good marks, and completely ignore those that are not satisfactory.

I have to admit that this is hard, primarily because of the way we are taught. The world generally does not work like this. You aren't pulled over by a police officer and rewarded because they were driving the speed limit.

If . . . when, we spend the majority of our time catching people doing things right, I believe that we will achieve performance and results beyond what we even thought was possible.

Which behaviours have you been re-enforcing?

Are you going to re-enforce that behaviour?

Go-around managers

They are focused! They find a way to get it done. Obtaining results is the only thing that matters. At first glance this may seem desirable and sound like someone you might want to have on your team and in your organization. It could and it may, but it also describes the "Go-around manager."

Go-around managers, go around. They skip one, two, three and sometimes more levels of hierarchy to get something done. They live by the motto "if you want something done right - you have to do it yourself." Go-around managers deal with symptoms and use band-aids vs. working at the root with permanent solutions.

It looks like:

• Senior executive sending communication directly to the front line with a specific request rather than communicating vision through their direct reports and encouraging innovation and ingenuity.
  
• Managers continuously going around supervisors to get things done out of frustration because the supervisors are not getting them done.
  

This approach may get results, in the short term. However, it does nothing to solve problems long term and counteracts leadership development. Leaders inspire and influence others to obtain the desired results.

Your go-around managers may be getting good results, but when they leave, and everybody eventually leaves, those results stop.

Leaders develop leaders. Go-around managers do not.

Go-around managers