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THE REINFORCING MEMO: A CHECKLIST

One of the easiest - and cheapest - of these reinforcers is the simple Reinforcing Memo. Because you get so much back in motivation from this simple device, it's worthwhile tying up the chapter by explaining briefly how to write one.  As my story about my note to Max Winter illustrates, everybody (no matter what his position) likes to see in print that he or she is appreciated, and the Reinforcing Memo is one of the best ways I know of getting that critical motivational task done.

A memo designed to reinforce a good Behavior is a somewhat more formal way of saying "Thanks, keep up the good work" than a personal, face-to-face comment would be.  For that reason the Reinforcement Memo is a good tool to use when you have relatively little contact with the person whose Behavior you're reinforcing. It's also valuable when you're trying to reinforce exceptional or continuously high Behavior; when you want a record of the Behavior for publicity or performance appraisal use; when you want to include graph-based Recording data to indicate specifically why you value the person's contribution; when you're reinforcing a series of complex, interrelated Behaviors; and when you just want to vary your verbal reinforcements, and let your people know that this is not just another simple "Thank you."

The actual content and style of a Reinforcing Memo, of course, will depend on the situation and people involved. As an example, here's a sample memo that might be written from a production manager to a line worker who had contributed exceptional performance in an emergency situation:

From: Art Davis, Production Manager

To:   Jim Ryan

Jim, on Friday, March 30, when the #3 presser broke down and we asked shop people for assistance, you responded by working through the night and into Saturday when the problem was fixed.

I wanted to write this memo to express my sincere appreciation for a job well done.  Your energetic response to the plant emergency made everybody's job (especially mine) a lot easier last week.  As you've shown many times in the past, your dedication and dependability have made an outstanding contribution to the high performance standards of our plant.

My thanks for a super job.

Cc:            Personnel file

Florence Moore, assistant plant supervisor
You can vary the presentation suggested here depending on your particular situations, but I'd keep a number of guidelines in mind. In our productivity seminars we suggest the following guidelines:

1.  Keep it short.  The three paragraphs indicated in the sample are probably optimum.  A good Reinforcing Memo should never run on effusively, but should come on as a slightly expanded "Thanks."  The longer the memo, we've found, the lower the degree of credibility.

2.   Be precise.  In other words, Pinpoint the Behavior that you're praising. It's never sufficient to call a person "cooperative" or "dependable."  Make it clear why those adjectives apply in the specific instance you're referring to: "Thanks for your cooperation in agreeing to work overtime last Friday."  The more Pinpointed the memo, the less chance the person will see it as insincere - and the greater chance that you will effectively reinforce the specific Behavior you found desirable.

3.   Say why you're writing the memo.  Explain specifically why it's important - both to the company and to you personally - that Behaviors like his be repeated. In the sample above, the production manager highlighted Jim's contribution to "high production." "Thanks a lot for coming in," means nothing.  A memo that effectively reinforces Jim's coming in will identify his value to the plant ("high production") and to the writer of the memo ("You made my job a lot easier last week").  The point is that people want to know not only that they are helping the team, but also how.

4.  Quantify it wherever possible.  If Jim's overtime work on Friday saved the Production Department six hours of down time, say so.  Refer to your Recording graphs if they are relevant to the problem at hand.  People want to know as specifically as possible how they have contributed to team success.  Figures won't always be relevant in a Reinforcement Memo, but where they are relevant, use them.

5.  Keep it personal.  Not mushy, just personal.  You don't need to send Jim roses, but you do have to let him know that you're talking to him, person to person.  Excessive formality ("Management appreciates the diligence with which you continue to perform your job functions") is always going to be less effective as a motivating style than the use of "I" and "we" and of such conversational kudos as "great work" and "super job."

6.   Make it timely.  To reiterate what I said earlier about the need for immediate Consequences: make sure a Reinforcing Memo follows by no more than a couple of days the Behavior you're trying to reinforce. The farther away from the event, the less power it's going to have to motivate.  You wait two weeks to tell somebody you appreciate his exceptional performance, and you're just setting yourself up for the Extinction Effect.

7.   Make and/or post copies. Notice that in the sample given here, the manager sends a copy of the Reinforcement Memo to the personnel department and to the assistant plant manager.  It's always useful to let the highly motivated worker's superiors know that he's performing well - and to let him know that you've done so.  If those people can be encouraged to write brief comments on their copies (or simply to initial them) and return them to the person being praised, so much the better: using this technique of "synergistic reinforcement," you can get triple or quadruple the recognition benefit with the same amount of initial work.  And you can't tell me that a person who receives three or four positive comments for doing one good Behavior is not going to perform that Behavior again.

Those are the positive guidelines that we use to strengthen the impact of Reinforcement Memos.  One negative guideline also should be mentioned.  One of the common errors in using positive reinforcement is that managers will confuse their own rewards with the ones that they're giving their employees, and offer as a reward something that the employee really sees as a punishment.  In a typical Reinforcement Memo scenario, this means that the bottom line of the memo will read, "You wrote that report so well that you can do them all from now on."   Fine if the writer of the report really wants to keep writing them.  Not so good if he sees report-writing as a burden he will take on to help out, but one that he actually despises.

There was a great Business Week cartoon a couple of years ago that illustrates what I mean.  An executive is "praising" a subordinate who seems less than pleased with the situation.  Why isn't he pleased?  Because his boss is saying, "I'm so happy with the way you handled that lousy, thankless job I gave you that I'm going to give you another one."

Hence the negative guideline:  In writing a Reinforcement Memo - and indeed in delivering any kind of positive reinforcement - do not ask for additional Behavior unless you are absolutely certain that the Behavior is something that the person eagerly wants to take on.  In "rewarding" a motivated employee by giving him more work to perform, you're playing the part of the Indian giver - and demotivating him in the long run.

One final word on reinforcement.  Although both negative and positive reinforcement are valuable in motivating teamwork, you should always keep sight of the fact that honey does work better than salt.  And it's generally more appropriate, too.  If you're in business for the long run, you've got to keep the 4:1 Syndrome constantly in mind.  You've got to give people positive encouragement even when they're doing "average" work.  Because that is the only way to avoid extinction.

It's a lesson that's long in the learning, but one that even the hardest of managerial taskmasters can learn, if they put their minds to it.  I saw that down in South Carolina, when I was sitting in the office of a textile plant manager where the 4:1 Syndrome was just being introduced as part of our overall performance-improvement package.  This was one of Roger Millikan's plants, and because Roger was fully committed to our P.R.I.C.E. motivation system - and had the P&L; figures to prove it - I knew we'd get the management here on board eventually.  It was slow going with this particular manager, though. He had been a galley master style of manager for so long he thought that "ability to yell" was part of a plant manager's job description.

But he was learning, and as I sat there I saw that even a galley master can be taught to change his ways, if he knows his people will row faster for it.  The manager was on the phone for about three minutes, yelling at a foreman for some production slowdown, and he was making Vince Lombardi look like a lamb.  After a couple of minutes he slammed the phone down, took a deep breath, and turned to me. "Well, I guess I owe him four," he said.

That's a lesson we all could learn.  I've never said a good manager shouldn't correct people when they deserve it.  But just remember, every time you throw somebody down the stairs, you owe him four trips back up.

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