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PUNISHMENT AND CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM

I guess there aren't too many people in the world who actually like to get negative criticism, but I am one of those weird souls. I've got a good reason for it, too. As I used to tell one of my coaches - a smart man who was just a little too gentle for the team's own good - "If you don't give me negative feedback, if you don't give me good, hard
Constructive criticism of my performance, you rob me of the chance to improve." And improvement is what it's all about. As a manager, if you really want your people to improve, if you want to motivate them toward the most productive Behaviors that they're capable of, you've got to use the stick as well as the carrot. Without it, everybody on your team is going to be driving at 125 miles an hour, and getting nowhere fast.

I'll be the first to admit that this is easier said than done. Even though more managers are used to giving out criticism than praise, very few of them know how to do it well, and that's not because they're mean or insensitive people. The fact is that it's hard to knock somebody's performance - at least if you're a reasonably decent person yourself and care about your people as people and not just cogs in the machine. It would be a lot simpler to hand out negative Consequences if we all had the sensitivity of Atilla the Hun.

For one thing, people who are hearing negative things about themselves tend not to be the most accommodating or cooperative individuals themselves. The operator that you tell to improve in terms of his attendance may make an effort to do that, but he's not likely to say, "Thanks a lot for pointing out that defect; I appreciate your giving me a chance to do better." Maybe that's what he ought to say. But realistically speaking, he's likely to be not rational but defensive. Whenever you give negative Consequences, you run the risk of setting up what we call the Punishment Effect: a reaction to criticism that includes evasiveness, excuses, refusal of responsibility, and in some cases outright aggression. All of which, of course, tends to decrease, not increase, the level of performance you want.

Unfortunately, the Punishment Effect often comes with the territory, which is why managers have to use caution and more than a little sensitivity when delivering negative Consequences. That's not easy, but I can give you one piece of advice that might lighten this particular load: you always make punishment more acceptable when it's not seen as the only game in town. When it's used not as an end in itself but as part of a total "performance improvement package" - that is, if your people understand that you're not out to get them but to make everybody's life smoother - they're less likely to resist or deny your negative Consequences. I'll go into this a little more in a moment.

A second reason that punishment is difficult to deliver is that, to be effective as a motivator to better performance, it has to be severe enough to hurt. You don't get the Doberman away from your throat by tapping him lightly on the muzzle, and you don't get the absence-prone manager back on track by frowning at him and saying, "You're not pulling your weight." The kinds of negative Consequences that are likely to be effective in the workplace - docking of pay, removal of worksite privileges - are also precisely the kind of Consequences that can lead your union people to call their shop steward and middle managers to have their resumes retyped. Again, that's a built-in hazard that only a "broader scope" approach to motivation can address.

Finally, the use of punishment as a corrective technique can set up a company atmosphere where this most severe kind of negative Consequence is seen as the appropriate one in all situations - and where, as a result, people tend to perform at that minimum level which will ensure that the whip does not fall on their backs. You see this dangerous effect occurring all the time in military organizations, and while it may have a provisional value in such situations, it has almost no value at all in the modern, increasingly democratized workplace. I go back to what I said previously about the Extinction Effect. In the absence of positive reinforcement, people who are under the gun from supervisors will tend to revert to the lowest acceptable level of performance - that is, to a level just barely above what the organization needs to get by. So you get the manager who realizes that skipping one day every two weeks will not get him docked any pay. Or the soldier who does exactly the minimum number of pushups that can earn him an overnight pass.

In order to guard against the negative results of using punishing Consequences, our consultants give our clients a number of general guidelines to apply in selecting punishments. Here are the most important of these guidelines:

1. Give a warning before applying punishment. This is another way of saying that, before you give Consequences for an action, you should already have given an Antecedent that let the individual know exactly what Behavior you wanted. I remember a situation in a small Midwest factory where spoilage on one shift was very high because line operators' hairs were falling into a lubrication system that was extremely sensitive to foreign matter. Before our consultants got there, the shift supervisor typically blew a gasket every time hairs were found in the oil - but made no suggestion to the operators about what they could do about it in the future. We advised him to give them hair nets, and to tell them, "If you don't wear these nets on this line, we're going to have to stop the line to retrieve hairs, and you'll be docked for the lost time." That was a combination of Pinpointing a Behavior and of giving an exact Antecedent (a precise warning) to ensure that the Behavior changed. It did change, too. And it wasn't just because of the nets. It was because every person on that line understood that, unless they adopted a new Behavior, they would suffer a punishing Consequence (the loss of time-down pay).

2. Make the punishment timely. This is just common sense. If you want the dog off your throat, you don't threaten to Mace him for twenty minutes while he's working his way toward your jugular vein. You Mace him now. It's the same in industry. If you have Pinpointed an ineffective Behavior, and everyone understands that it has to change, then the first time it occurs again, you've got to deliver the bad Consequences. Otherwise you're a paper tiger. And the hairs are going to stay in the oil. I don't mean that you can't give "preliminary warnings" or give somebody who's really trying to improve another chance. But carry that on too long, and your entire team is going to suffer. Which is unfair to everybody - including the person who's falling behind.

The head coach of the Vikings, Bud Grant, was very exact and exacting about this. He knew he was in business as well as in sports, and he wasn't about to waste everybody's time and money giving people who just couldn't (or wouldn't) perform a hundred chances. A rookie came on to Bud's team and he was told precisely what he was expected to do (that was Pinpointing). If he didn't manage to do it the first time, Bud would take him aside and explain - again, precisely - what it was he was doing wrong. Maybe Bud or his coaches would do that three times, if the rookie was really busting his gut, but that was it. After repeated failures, you were out. And I truly believe that was kinder than allowing the kid to hang on, dropping hairs in everybody's oil, until he brought everybody's chances of success down along with his own. I have no doubt at all that it was a more efficient style of management. If somebody needs a kick in the ass, do it now.

3. Make it appropriate. The more intense the punishment, the more effect it has in cutting down unwanted Behaviors. I've already noted that, in today's workplace, you can't use really punishing Consequences (peremptory firings, for example) for structural and legal reasons - and it's a good thing you can't. But wishy-washy punishments are often worse than no punishments at all, because they give people the idea that your threats are empty. It's not a giant step from that realization to the suspicion that your promises of good Consequences are probably empty, too. And once your people believe that there is no solid connection between what they do and what happens to them as a result, you're sunk.

I can't tell you what would be appropriate negative Consequences for your industry or your particular site of operation. I guess that a ground rule would be the simple one of justice (which is not really all that simple). I mean that you look at the "crime" - whether it's absenteeism or falling asleep on the job or letting hairs drop in the oil - and you try to devise negative Consequences that "suit the crime," and that are neither too soft nor too hard. You don't fire somebody for being five minutes late a few times a month, and if your secretary takes two weeks to hand you a letter marked, "Urgent," you don't let her off with a "Gee, be more careful, OK?" Since punishment is so hard to deliver - for both the person delivering it and the person taking it - I advise our clients to concentrate on devising "punishment schedules" that will accomplish the desired Behavior change with the least hurt possible that will still do the job. And I remind them to think of Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda's sage comment. In aiming for a balance between the "hard" and "soft" schools of control, he said you should remember that managing is "like holding a dove in your hand. Squeeze to hard and you kill it; not hard enough and if flies way."

4. Be consistent. The only way that you can, in the long run, reduce ineffective Behaviors in a team is to apply your punishment schedules consistently, whatever the overall work picture and whoever is involved. This means that you've got to be very suspicious of what somebody caught in the act is liable to call "mitigating circumstances." I don't mean you should always consider them irrelevant. Only that, if you're being asked to suspend the rules in an individual circumstance, you'd better make damn sure that the circumstances are more important than the rules. Not just for the guy who left the wrench in the engine, but for the entire organization.

Peter Drucker has a great definition of the purpose of an executive. He says it's "to make sensible exceptions to general rules." Very true, but there's a world of questions left open in that little word "sensible." If you want to find out whether or not an exception is sensible, ask yourself this question: "What's going to be the long-term effect on the motivation of my people if everybody finds out I've made this exception?" If the long-term effect is to generate a sense of innovation and openness and possibility, fine: it makes sense to bend the punishment schedule. But if the long-term effect is to let everybody know that you can be bought (or wheedled into submission), you won't need a Doberman to tear you apart. You'll be doing it to yourself.

5. Correct the Behavior, not the person. Getting anything done in a large organization involves the intelligent management of various Pinpointed activities just as much as it does the management of the people doing those activities. And it's a lot easier to focus on the activities - the Behaviors - being performed than to correct the "deviant" or "defiant" personalities of the actors. It's not only more humane to concentrate on the specific unwanted Behaviors; it also gets better results.

One example: the worst single case of coaching I ever saw in my eighteen-year NFL career. It happened after we had lost a close game two minutes from the final buzzer because the blocking had been a little fuzzy, causing me to eat the old Astroturf before getting the pass off. Back in the film room the following day, a veteran line coach was going over why we had blown it. When he came to the critical play where I had been sacked, he turned to a young teammate of mine - an all-Pro lineman who had been playing well for us all season - and said, "You see that, where you missed that block? You cost us the football game. And you know why? You didn't want to block him enough. He wanted to get to the quarterback more than you wanted to stop him. I guess he just had more character than you, that's all."

More character! This was the 1970s, in the Big Time, with a room full of adult professionals! Hearing that was one of the most embarrassing moments I ever experienced in my career, and I wasn't the one being chewed out. And you know what great results came out of that sensitive application of negative Consequences? The Punishment Effect in spades: that young lineman never played another good game for us all season, and at the end of the season we had to trade him. He went to a team where the handbook on coaching apparently didn't talk about "character," and he played just great for them.

What our line coach should have done was to focus on the Behavior, not the person. He should have said, "Look, you see where you missed that block? The guy got you turned around. You didn't have your feet planted square enough, and you were off balance. That's why he got by you. Let's work on that this week." That would have been sound coaching. It would have Pinpointed specific Behaviors that needed work, and focused on correcting those Behaviors. I guess that's the approach that the young lineman's new coaching staff must have taken, because he sure tore up the track with them. And it was our loss.

The bottom line? You want to change a person's Behavior, focus on that Behavior. You don't know squat about his character anyway, so forget about the armchair psychoanalysis. Just work on what you can control.

6. Reinforce the change. Finally, a lesson that the supervisor I spoke about before failed to remember, and that is essential to the long-term use of negative Consequences. Whatever you consider "normal" and whatever your employee considers "normal," be sure to follow up on the criticism by identifying any improvement, and by giving positive reinforcement for that. Remember that when negative reinforcement is the only type of Consequences you hear, you're going to fall prey to the old "Muddle in the Middle," and perform "just above" the punishment level. If you want to motivate peak performance, not just adequate performance, you've got to link your negative Consequences with positive ones. If somebody on your team is handing in reports four days late, and you express your disapproval, he might start handing them in three days late. If you want to get them in on time, you have to say at that point, "Jeff, thanks for trying to cut down on the lag time on these reports; I really appreciate your effort. But I've still got a problem here, so I'd like you to get them in on time." If all you say is "Thanks," or (worse yet) if you say nothing, the report-delivery is going to stay at three days late - and eventually drift back to four.

In fact, when you're devising your punishment schedules, it's always a good idea to keep the old 4:1 Syndrome in mind. Remember that most people behave "at least adequately" about 80 percent of the time (four times to one). But most managers - whether they're on a football staff or in a manufacturing concern - tend to reinforce Behavior in exactly the opposite proportion: they give four slaps for every stroke, even when their folks are doing fine. Effective management of motivation reverses that tendency. The best managers understand that, as the old bird hunter might have observed, you need both honey and salt to get the birds to come to your hand. But while a diet of constant honey might not be your idea of nutrition, it's much more important for the motivator to remember that nobody - bird, Doberman, or human - will live on salt alone.

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