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FINE TUNING THE REINFORCEMENT

The two biggest mistakes of the Differentiating Motivator are to come down too hard on the "mules" and to ignore the high-performing "eagles."

Actually, these two mistakes derive from the same misperception: the erroneous notion that the point, of building a team is to get everybody performing at the some level. When you start off with that notion, it's easy to slight the eagles (because they're already doing well) and to hassle the mules right into quitting (because they're not performing as well as the eagles).  

The truth is that you're never going to get everybody on a work team to perform at the same level of competence, ingenuity, or diligence. People don't have the same capacities, and if you try to cut them all to the same length, you're going to end up with what Procrustes ended up with: a bunch of dead workers. What you can do is to get all of them equally fired up, so that each of your team members does the very best he can do.

This means you've got to learn to read your people just as closely as you read the Wall Street Journal. Johnny Byers may be just another mule to you. He seems intimidated by the rest of the group, he seldom contributes, he's not giving it all he's got. Once in a while he comes up with a half-good idea, though - and that's when you want to pounce. That's when you want to praise the hell out of him, because he's done something that, for him, deserves that extra reinforcement. Ignoring the run-of-the-mill worker just because his contribution is not extraordinary is one of the worst misuses of the Differential Reinforcement tool. It will get you nothing but an even more demotivated worker,

But it's just as dangerous to ignore the high flyers, and in my experience this is the most common error among managers who are trying to build teams. We're frightened, it seems, of superior achievement. We resent the people who stand out. As a result we suffocate the extraordinary energies that we have to work with in the first place, and end up with teams that are not teams at all - that are only collections of featherbedders trying just to get by.

If you want to raise the average motivation of your team members, if you want to transform a collection of individuals into a solid, forward looking team, you've got to use your eagles, by reinforcing them constantly and publicly. If you want more Thomas Edisons and more Larry Birds, you've got to let them take risks - and constantly let them know that you appreciate the work they're doing. Doing that not only keeps that work coming. It also lets your hardworking, non-superstar mules know that doing your best on this team gets you noticed and rewarded. Whether your best is C- or A+, that's important to know.

There are always going to be some people who will resent the A+ performers. I don't know of any way to get rid of that kind of resentment, since it's been around since the days of Cain and Abel.  Maybe the best you can hope to do, as a team builder, is to keep giving the Consequences that matter to your individual players, and let the personal gripes fall where they may. As long as they don't interfere with the work and productivity of your team, it's not your job anyway to deal with them. And if they do interfere, then you approach such personal antagonisms in the same way you would deal with any other difficulty in communication: you educate and facilitate, so that everybody, including the griper, gets to contribute to the team solution.

Differential Reinforcement, in other words, is a way of realizing Rockne's ideal of "sparking" each member of the team.  I'll admit it. Sometimes the spark won't take. Sometimes you're going to find a dud. Some times, when that happens, you've got to scrap it and buy another plug. That's never a pleasant task, but sometimes it has to be done. Knowing when to do it is a matter of reading your people. Committing to doing it when it's obviously necessary is what makes the difference between the host of an encounter session and a manager who is building a team.

Don't fire the slacker yet, though. If you're faced with this kind of situation now, where one team member is slowing down the group by noninvolvement, you'll want to read the next chapter. It's about involving everybody's ideas - even the "idiot" ideas of the slackers - in forging a group identity and in reaching toward common goals.

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