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MOTIVATE AND DEMOTIVATE

In the rat experiment I talked about last time, the manipulation of Consequences was designed to motivate the animal toward a particular Behavior. But you can also change the Consequences of a Behavior so that they "demotivate" the person away from the Behavior, and toward something more desirable. One famous example is Knute Rockne's supposed "short but sour" speech to the Notre Dame team one afternoon when they had played way below par the first half. Legend has it that, instead of a drawn-out tirade, he just walked into the locker room and said, "Oh, excuse me ladies, I thought this was the Notre Dame locker room." It got him peak performance the second half.
In this situation, Rockne was faced with a fundamental managerial question: How do you reverse a bad trend? How do you turn your people away from negative Behavior? Rockne solved the problem in a subtly behaviorist fashion. Responding to their miserable on-field performance in the first half, he offered his players a clearly demotivating Consequence: in this case, a snide insult. Because they didn't like that Consequence, they were demotivated away from the Behavior that had brought the Consequence about. And they played up to par in the second half.
Now, maybe the team had changed its "attitude" about the game, and maybe not. Maybe the players had adopted a collective "high norm Achievement motive" or a greater need for "psychic homeostasis" or an intensified "approbation-seeking quotient," and it was that changed mental construction that enabled them to win the game. I don't know. And, as somebody concerned with results, I feel about this question the way Rhett Butler felt about Scarlett O'Hara's broken heart: I don't really give a damn. In fact I don't see how anybody can really know what's going on in somebody else's mind: you can guess, but you can't really track it. What you can know, and observe, and track about this hypothetical situation is the change in the team's Behavior - and it's logical to assume that this came about as a result of the negative external Consequence: the coach's sardonic put-down.
What I'm saying here about motivation and demotivation has been understood for years by behavior scientists. In fact, my terms "motivating Consequence" and "demotivating Consequence" are variants on the old laboratory chestnuts "positive and negative reinforcement." The invaluable lesson that has come out of dozens of studies of reinforcement is that this "manipulation" of an external environment does something that no quick-fix program and no "Come on, boys, let's all pull together" speech ever can do: it makes that critical difference to people that enables them to improve their performance.
It also - and this is the funny part - enables them to change the way they evidently feel about that performance. There's a wonderful irony here. Attempts to change attitudes directly almost invariably fail, while attempts to change external behavior alone often result not only in external improvement, but in a visibly improved "attitude" as well.
We see this all the time in our business. If you're a sales manager and one of your field representatives is making half as many sales calls as his colleagues, you can yell all you want about him needing to show "greater responsibility" or "more hustle." Maybe he'll respond to this pressure and maybe he won't. But put him on straight commission for a while, and you'll get immediate results: his "attitude" and his work will improve. The lesson is the same: Change the Consequences, and you can alter the Behavior.
But, of course, there are Consequences and there are Consequences. One of the great challenges of any manager is being able to "psych out" individuals under his command, so that he delivers the appropriate Consequences to the appropriate people at the appropriate time. What may be music to Roger's ears could be just grating to Harry or Joan, and one of the worst mistakes a manager can make in attempting to improve performance is in assuming that the pat on the back or the snide remark or the "commission only" ploy will work for everybody the same way. Later on we'll talk about Consequences, and I'll go into some detail on this point. Now I just want to mention what is probably the single most common problem in getting managers to motivate and demotivate: the resistance on the part of many managers to accept the very concept of Consequences itself.

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