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Listen to the interview by Key Rayment of Better Process Podcast.com discussing how People Performance Solutions helps manufacturing companies solve some of their greatest people challenges. (6 minutes)
From my years of working as a consutant, trainer and coach I am a firm believer in positive reinforcement. I have guestimated many positive comments it would take for a manager to offset one negative or critical comment to be 5. I constantly encourage executives that I coach to keep this ratio in mind in their day to day interactions. This is not breaking news and we have all heard this all before. So why am I writing about something so obvious?
It hit me like a ton of bricks on page 51 of Tom Rath's bestselling book, How Full is Your Bucket. Here is a guy who is the grandson of the late Dr. Donald Clifton, Ph.D--cited by the American Psychological Association as the "Grandfather of Positive Psychology." Instead of studying what was wrong with people, Dr. Clifton studied what was right.
Anyways, back to the main point. Tom Rath's book, How Full is your Bucket, clearly quantifies the impact positive reinforcement has on people based on 50 years of Dr. Clifton's research. On pages 50-51 he reports on a study conducted by Dr. Elizabeth Hurlock with students in a 6th grade math class and how the students who were praised solved more math problems than the students who were criticized. Again, we have all heard this before....but here is where the story takes an unexpected turn...
The fact is, there were actually 3 groups of students in this study---the praised, the criticized, and the ignored! This graph from page 51 shows that students that were ignored actually showed the lowest level of improvement and solved the lowest number of problems--even lower than the criticized group.
This fact hit me like a ton of bricks. I have been told countless times by executives that they are not critical of their employees and are not able to understand why productivity is down. The truth is they are not praising, they are not criticizing---they are ignoring---which based on this study yields the lowest return.
I am not trying to send the message that if we are ignoring now we should kick it up a notch and start criticizing to yield a higher return. What I am saying is not critizing does not equal praise but rather it equals ignoring. Not praising does not equal criticizing but rather it equals ignoring. The only way to win here is to praise. I have never had one single person complain about an executive giving too much praise so it shows most of us have room to maximize our potential in this area.
I had a dentist tell me once that one of the secrets to the success of his practice is that he takes the time every day to make small talk with his staff. He explained that when he does this his staff is more happy and productive. He also looks for daily events to praise them for both individually and at staff meetings. When he gets busy or sidetracked from this habit he starts to realize it because his office productivity goes down and members of his staff start to beg for his attention in various ways. In the end, it costs him more time and wasted productivity not to take the few minutes a day to acknowledge and praise.
Let's all keep this in mind as we go throughout our day. If we notice a drop in productivity, we need to ask ourselves, has my lack of praise, too much critisizm or ignoring people contributed to this decline? For some of us this is a non-issue becuase we naturally praise. For others of us, it is not natural and more like sticking to a strict diet---it is easy to backslide. Let's make praising a habit and a natural part of our company's cuture.
It would be interesting for our readers to hear, what are some ways you acknowledge and show praise to people?
Go here to hear Tom Rath , an excellent communicator, talk more about interaction ratios or how every interaction counts
Sales Coach, Lori Richardson, discusses on her Summer Sales Effectiveness School blog how thinking big leads to success. She references our recent Times Square ad as an example.
I can still remember the sinking feeling as I walked out of the boardroom of the technology company. When I arrived and saw 18 people sitting in the room where I expected 3 panic started to set in. I started thinking at a rapid rate, "Why did she not tell me she invited the entire management team last minute." "I only have 4 handouts." "I want to die!"
As I was escorted into the room my panic already took a toll on my effectiveness in presenting and I had not uttered a single word. I muffled through the information focused the entire time on my being caught off guard and walked out of the room defeated.
What is the moral of this sad story? Make sure you find out from the person who invited you to present exactly how many people are coming. Not actually.
I already asked my contact and she said 2 or 3 tops. Due to last minute schedule changes more were available so they decided to come.
Where I really failed in this scenario is I let this affect me mentally because I had not prepared mentally for this scenario. I made a decision that day to let experience be the greatest teacher and to always prepare for the unexpected. I always ask myself today, "What will you do if more show up?"
The fact is, this and any number of possible catastrophes can occur right before we present. To prevent the panic, we need to have contingency plans so that we walk into that room our effectiveness does not decrease.
As a speaking coach, I work with my clients to help them create contingency plans based on what could possibly go wrong in their world. Here are my personal top three events that can and will happen that we can be ready for that I learned from the school of hard knocks. I am sure you all can add to this list based on your own experiences--I would love to hear your suggestions so I can avoid the SOHN in the future as much as possible:
1. Prepare for the number of people they tell you will be there, and mentally prepare a plan if more or less arrive.
We have already talked about what can happen if more arrive. What we can do is really rely on our slides or other means of communicating to a larger audience--white boards, blank note paper. We do not need to depend upon our handouts. If I don't have enough handouts I don't use them at all, or I ask someone to make some additional copies if a copy machine is available.
If we believe 30 are coming and only 3 show we scale down and move the chairs to make the setting more intimate. Don't appear to be disappointed that only 3 show up and give them your best. The worst thing we can do is talk the entire time about how we thought more were coming and so forth. Remember, no big deal to you---no big deal to them.
2. You think you have 1 hour and you arrive and they tell you the other person took your time and you only have 20 minutes.
It is more likely to be in a situation where you are told that you have less time versus more time than expected. Based on this, I always have 3 versions of my presentation ready. In this scenario where I am told I have 1 hour, I will have a 40 minute version and a 20 minute version. I will know and practice what content I will leave out if my time is reduced. Whether I deliver the 60, 40 or 20 minute version, they get will be complete with a proper opening and close and they will not be aware that content was left out.
3. Your technology fails.
Let's face it...there will be a day when we have prepared the most brilliant power point slides or demo of our new product---and the projector burns out. This happened to a friend of mine a few months back where he was asked to speak at a technology conference with a 1000 person audience and his demo would not work because the projector froze up. His solution to this was to juggle until they could swap out the projector and the audience loved it!
My solution is to practice the content before so if the unthinkable happens we can deliver a top notch presentation without slides. This will be more difficult for those of us who have to communicate more technical material---but we can use our creativity to bridge the gap. One time the room I was scheduled to speak in did not have the proper layout to use PowerPoint so I just delivered my talk and used analogies and word pictures to describe the more graphical slides that no longer existed.
Most of us who present feel a certain level of anxiety right before and even during our presentation. My philosophy is to do my best to prepare for the unexpected so we don't add to the normal level of anxiety and allow it to rise to a level where we can no longer deliver a top notch message. If we do this, we will always look like pros. It even works to our advantage when the audience is aware of our trouble and we show them we are not moved. They will walk out of our presentation feeling thankful it was not them and wondering if they would have maintained composure as well as we did. Oh what a great feeling it is to turn a potential defeat into a victory!
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