While discipline is important under the right conditions, it can also be overused and misused. In this video blog, Dr. Judy Agnew describes the potential problems discipline can cause if not used properly and the side effects that may result. She also discusses why organizations shouldn’t jump to conclusions and what they should do first instead.
Understanding human behavior scientifically is critical in safety, particularly when it comes to investigating when something has gone wrong. In this video blog, Dr. Judy Agnew and Dr. Aubrey Daniels explain how a scientific approach can lead to a safer workplace and why consequences are the most important thing in determining whether or not someone will do something again.
I want to start by saying ‘thank you’ to those who sent me stories of how you applied the tools and principles of behavioral science to your parenting challenges. I wish I could recall all of the stories I’ve heard through the years but in the end what is most satisfying to me is seeing people light up about how well the behavioral technology worked and how it leads to positive behavior where previously it had been problematic, and in their view, unresolvable.
With that, I share the following stories, from real parents, about the positive impact the science of behavior has had on their personal lives:
Learning to Drive
When my son, Sam, was learning how to drive, even though I knew better, I found myself only calling out the things he did wrong. Once I realized what I was doing wrong; I had to force myself to pay attention and identify the things he did right, and then specifically tell him about it. The first behavior I made a point to notice was following the speed limit. After watching him drive across town for a little while, I told him I noticed how well he did in following the speed limit. He was so happy and proud that I noticed, and said “I know! I do it all the time!” His response reinforced me to start noticing more of what he does right. I then made a list of specific driving behaviors to remind myself to observe them such as, maintaining 3 second following distance, making complete stops, or stopping with enough space to see the bottom of the tires of the car in front of you. I only picked one at a time so that I wouldn’t overdo it. It really made me realize the strong tendency to fall back into the pattern of only noticing the things he does wrong. Without a deliberate effort to watch for specific behaviors (that I had to write down and look for), I would have fallen back into the old ways.
Household Chores
Pinpointing seemed overwhelming to me when I thought about my work environment but it became more manageable after I first applied it at home. I learned its importance when working to teach my son John to wash the dishes when he was about 7 or 8. It was his task at night to wash and my task to dry. When we first started, I was confused when he left the kitchen with several dirty pots and pans in the sink and went to play. I said “Wait a minute, you’re not done!” He said “Yes I am!” I said “What about these?,” pointing to the dirty pots and pans. He looked at me begrudgingly saying “You said I only had to do the dishes!”
What Makes Them Happy
My daughter used an approach to identify things that were reinforcing to her twin daughters when they were 18 months old. She wanted to determine effective reinforcers for behaviors associated with toilet training and also for other toddler behaviors. Individually, she placed several objects in front of the first child and whatever item the daughter picked first was identified as a reinforcer. She then placed the remaining items in front of the child and repeated the process until 3 items were identified. She then went through the same process with the second child. Once she did this with both girls, she had effective reinforcers. It’s worth noting that reinforcers do change so the process, or a modified version, will need to be repeated over time. By the way, the twins picked different objects.
Seeing Eye to Eye with Your Teenager
While I thought I had tried everything to improve my relationship with my teenage daughter, our relationship still felt strained. After learning about the 4:1 Rule (four positive comments to one negative), I thought it was worth a try. Over a one week period, I consciously worked at applying this rule, and did so as genuinely as possible. I saw improvement in the first day and kept at it. By weeks end, our conversations had significantly improved, and were even enjoyable. This not only taught me how to improve my personal relationships but it also taught me that when you focus on the positives, you see more things you would have otherwise not seen.
School bells may be ringing across the country but I am convinced now more than ever that we are not prepared to provide the best education possible for our kids.
I was disheartened to learn of the cheating scandal that is rocking the Atlanta Public Schools. And to further hear of the reoccurring issues with the government’s No Child Left Behind program. More than half the nation’s schools are in jeopardy of failing to meet reading and math adequacy standards. More than half! Monetary implications aside, what are we doing to today’s youth? And to our nation’s future?
It is clear, as was evident in the Atlanta Public Schools fiasco, that what was well-intended when the No Child Left Behind program was initiated has set up a culture of penalty and punishment if targets are not achieved. It can be said based on past history that the federal government spends little time when it designs regulations to consider how to create student success through policy. Little thought of how such a policy, if designed thoughtfully, can shape educational cultures of delight where students learn at high and steady rates. What we see instead are policies that often set a goal—and attach a penalty if the school does not do it.
What No Child has done is create threat and fear, in the administration, with the teachers, and even down to the students themselves. Teachers and administrators who participated in the Atlanta scandal, it’s fair to surmise, were doing what they thought ‘best’ in the name of avoiding the loss of funding they would be awarded by meeting government-set standards.
A major overhaul needs to be undertaken in Atlanta and across the country; and we must look to the context—the requirements that are naïve at best!
Much of what is wrong with these programs can be fixed and the yield will be outstanding and effective teachers and students that reach higher levels of learning. The solution is an understanding of behavior, not from a common sense perspective but a scientific one.
I believe the Atlanta Public School has done the right thing in firing school personnel who have been caught changing test scores. Not that cheaters cannot be changed but in my experience, lying, cheating and stealing have always been firing offenses. The problem in changing such behavior is that it is very difficult to put immediate consequences on the negative behavior (i.e. changing test scores) and therefore it makes the delivery of effective consequences necessary to change the bad habits difficult to manage.
Although I am sure that the problem was produced by ineffective leadership at the highest level that deliberately or accidentally created a system that tempted wrongdoing, it is better to eliminate those who folded under the pressure to produce false results.
The incident reminds me of when I was a lieutenant in the Army. If I heard it one time, I must have heard it one hundred, “I don’t care how you get it, just get it. And by the way I don’t want to know how you get it…” Although I am sure this was never said by school administration, the pervasiveness of the behavior indicates that the pressure was there.
Until there is an administration where leaders understand the direct and indirect impact of their policies, procedures and management and supervisory behaviors on the behavior of teachers, the problem will not go away. When you award a bonus for increasing test scores, you can hardly claim lack of culpability in the scandal as there are people who will lie, cheat and steal to get it. They may think they are working for the greater good—the survival of the school system, the obtaining of needed resources for the children, and of course, their own self-interest—continued employment.
When you only look at results and not behaviors, people often find “more than one way to skin a cat.” Taking the test for the student is one. That slippery slope of how we reach incredibly wrong decisions often starts with subtle or visible threat and fear, not from the ‘bad character’ of a few. In spite of the bonus, I am confident that most people who were caught did not do it for the bonus but because of the negative consequences around failing to produce the required progress.
I submit that all staff in the system is there for one reason – to help children learn. By doing some reverse behavioral engineering (RBE), the criticality of those jobs can be determined fairly quickly. By RBE, I mean start with the student and ask how a job helps the student learn. Of course the main responsibility falls on the teacher. Therefore most staff positions should exist to support the teacher in being effective in the class room. In my experience, most staff positions make it more difficult rather than easier to do the job.
As far as testing goes, the teacher should be evaluated on the number of children who perform to some standard or show significant improvement – not an average for the class but the number who are successful. The teacher’s success metric is ‘number of individual students making progress above their baseline’. Dr. Fred Keller, a pioneer researcher and teacher said, “If the student doesn’t learn, he wasn’t taught.” Local administrators should be measured on the number of successful teachers, and so on up the line. Rewards and punishment should not be delivered on results without factoring in how the results were obtained. This means that teachers should be observed so that inefficient and ineffective practices can be determined and corrected when they happen. The measure of observer (coach) effectiveness is whether teachers ask for the help. Artists want people to see their work; athletes want people watch them play; musicians want people to listen to them play. Why would teachers who are good at what they do not want people to see how they do what they do. They will when they are successful. If coaches (i.e. administration) help teachers teach more effectively, they want people to know and will welcome observers in their classrooms. What this means is that results will never be a surprise as problems will be identified and corrected in real time. Over time most of the observations will be positive as the students will be achieving at high rates.
In 1983, Dr. B.F.Skinner wrote in “The Shame of American Education” that the data showed that the technology of teaching existed to teach twice as much in half the time. That was almost 30 years ago. It has been done in only a very few places. It has been verified and documented in the toughest of schools and with a wide variety of students, some who are labeled as hyperactive, from poor homes, without qualities of persistence, without learning being a value in their home environments, all the things that have been said about why teaching is so hard. These processes have created eager learners, wanting to go to school, teachers who find joy in their impact, parents who are amazed and delighted with new found love of learning in their children and our society that benefits as these students go on to make a difference in our world. What better time than now to do it in the Atlanta City Schools and throughout the country.
With all of the hype surrounding the new movie release “Horrible Bosses,” it forces those of us that have had a horrible boss in the past to relive our own experiences.
In an article I read this week on the topic, How to handle a bad boss (without killing them), a few anonymous people spoke up about their own dreadful experiences. I was surprised, although knowing what I know about positive reinforcement I’m not sure why, that in each example, they put up with the bad boss behavior rather than do something to combat it. I realize it’s normal to have ‘fantasies’ of bad bosses getting their just desserts but why not do what you can to redirect bad boss behavior?
Unfortunately most executives, looking only at results, don’t see the organizational costs of bad boss behavior. You certainly don’t get discretionary behavior but you almost always get reduced personal output that spreads to other employees not directly affected by the “bad boss”. It is not infrequent that employees resort to some form of sabotage.
Just as your boss changes your behavior (attitude, motivation, etc.) you also change hers. Although most people don’t realize the impact their behavior has on the boss, it can be significant and can turn a bad boss into a good one. The problem is that most employees do not see it as their responsibility to train the boss. However, if your life is made miserable by living with a boss 40 hours a week, it will benefit you to take on the task.
It bears repeating, as I say this quite often, that if you think that you get too little recognition or positive reinforcement for what you do at work; think of your boss because he/she gets less. Before you act (if even just in fantasy) on ousting your boss, try any or all of the following. Knowing what I know about the science of behavior and positive reinforcement, your work environment, and your relationship with your boss, is bound to improve.
A little positive reinforcement goes a long way to improving bad boss behavior. All people need positive reinforcement to do their best – bosses included. You have the ability to strengthen your boss’s good habits and improve other behaviors by how you respond to the boss’s behavior. Positive reinforcement will do the trick. Learn as much about it as you can. Doing it at the wrong time, in the wrong way or the wrong place will make things worse, but if you do it right and do it often, you and your boss will be the better for it.
It’s probably a fair statement to say that companies are interested in supporting a safe work environment in their organizations. But it is all too apparent through today’s news headlines that organizations gamble with safety, including Sky Express, a bus company that had a recent deadly crash in Virginia. While bus companies and other government regulated industries have legislation in place to protect the public, private organizations are on their own to ensure that their safety practices yield safety by design.
In this latest video blog, Judy Agnew, co-author of Safe by Accident?, discusses the misnomer of incident rate as a predominant indicator of a company’s safety level and why companies need to invest in the science of behavior in order to manage all aspects of safety.
Guest post by Bart Sevin, Ph.D.
Maureen Dowd recently wrote an Op Ed piece in the New York Times entitled Giving Doctors Orders, in which she discusses the importance of speaking up and asking your doctor to wash his or her hands in front of you prior to beginning an examination. She cited CNN reports and book authors who all recommend saying something to your physician if you don’t see them wash their hands with your own eyes. Sounds like a good idea, right? So what’s the problem? Well there are actually two problems: 1) getting people to start speaking up, and then 2) getting them to keep doing it. I have seen this all too often in working with clients, particularly on the safety side (but also on the non-safety side). Dowd’s article echoes one of the biggest challenges employees at all levels face, speaking up and giving feedback to others about their behavior, particularly those in authority.
Why is it so important for people to speak up in the moment when they see someone either engaging in a desired behavior (e.g., doctors washing their hands in front of patients) or an undesired behavior? And, why do people sometimes remain quiet even when they observe someone engaging in behavior that could (or will) negatively impact others or themselves? Why won’t they speak up more often, and what will it take to get them to start speaking up and doing so on an ongoing basis? The answer to all these questions is consequences.
First and foremost, it’s important to speak up in the moment (rather than saying something to the doctor later as you’re leaving the office) because the immediacy of the feedback increases its effectiveness. By interrupting the at-risk behavior and helping the person begin practicing the correct behavior now, it also holds the performer personally accountable for doing the correct behavior. Unfortunately the consequence history of people who typically say nothing when they should is one of being punished or penalized when they have given feedback in the past or they have ‘rules of conduct’ about respecting authority learned at an early age. The rule might be “respecting doctors means not questioning them about their practices”. In Dowd’s example, for instance, the negative consequences for asking your doctor to wash his or her hands might have been the doctor dismissively telling you his or her hands are already clean and even anticipating a sideways look that screams, ‘You dare to challenge me?”
What is needed to get people to speak up more often and keep doing so, is more positive reinforcement (R+). There are strategies that help to build in more R+ for speaking up and giving feedback. The first is to make sure that the person giving the feedback focuses on giving positive feedback for desired behavior, not just correcting undesired behavior. Dowd’s article focuses on correcting doctors when they fail to wash in front of you, but she doesn’t mention what patients should do when doctors do wash their hands in front of you. I’m sure we all can think of a number of times we’ve witnessed physicians washing their hands in the examination room just before beginning the examination. That’s an opportunity to speak up and strengthen that behavior!
Secondly, when giving constructive or negative feedback, plan before you do it. By doing this you help build in positive reinforcement for the giver. A very common strategy in sales is to anticipate the objections you’ll get from customers and plan what you’ll say to overcome the objections so you move one step closer to closing the sale. In my experience coaching frontline workers, I use the same approach: anticipate the push-back a co-worker (or your doctor) will give when you speak up about their undesired behavior, plan what you’ll say to overcome their resistance and move them closer to beginning to practice the desired behavior now.
Successfully overcoming resistance and getting people to demonstrate the correct behavior are usually very reinforcing to the person giving the feedback. In fact, many sales people begin to see objections as reinforcers because they represent an immediate opportunity for them to address any concerns and move the customer closer to saying yes.
Finally, it’s possible to build in more R+ for the person giving feedback by coaching the person receiving feedback on how to accept feedback well, such as thanking the person giving it and demonstrating strong listening skills by attempting the correct behavior. Apply these lessons to yourself as well. Learning to speak up about others’ behavior may require that you look at your own at-risk behaviors, addressing the feedback you get from co-workers, reinforcing them for providing you corrective feedback, and inviting feedback in the first place.
We have many opportunities in our everyday environment to speak up when we see both desired and undesired behavior. By understanding the science behind reinforcement, you can positively impact your own behavior and the behavior of those with whom you interact.
Just recently I was asked to comment for an article that was published on Mainstreet.com, Famous Sports Wisdom to Use at Work. This was no far stretch for me as I have collected various quotes delivered by coaches and players alike through the years. With the start of MLB a day away, I shamelessly feel the need to share my outtakes that didn’t get published in the piece. There is much we can take from sports coaches, players and executives to use in understanding your business environment. Enjoy.
Believe it or not, Coach K is wrong. Effective teamwork in business, as in sports, begins when each player is positively reinforced for helping a teammate be successful.
In the final analysis, in business and in sports everything is personal. If you don’t think so, do something to upset your star performer and watch what happens.
Organizations create the future by the behavior they positively reinforce today. It used to be that only hard work and accomplishments were rewarded but today we tend to reinforce everything that moves. Therefore the future ain’t what it used to be as Yogi correctly asserted.
The average person has been punished more for doing something wrong than praised for doing it correctly.
When pay is based on performance the organization wants you to make a lot. Salaries are a high price to pay when doing just enough to get by will keep you on the payroll.
Stay out of politics. It is bad for business.
Negative emotions almost always lead to poor decision-making.
As the former Governor of Georgia once said, “If you see a turtle on the fence post, you know he didn’t get there by himself.” In business, as in any team sport, very little is accomplished by an individual acting alone.
Those who accomplish the most got good by working hard on the details.
Workplace Safety will not improve until OSHA learns the basics of behavior changeI couldn’t help but be amused about an article in the New York Times reporting the latest citation by Federal regulators for safety violations in the Broadway production of Spider-man: Turn off the Dark. OSHA “regulators” have been “citing” the play for over a year. Why they call them “regulators” I don’t know because their citations change no behavior, they regulate nothing. One thing they do is keep the play in the public eye, a plus for the production company. The total sum fined over the past year is $12,600, considerably small in terms of the value the play received in free publicity.
When will “regulators” learn that the citations don’t work? Massey Mine had 1300 citations, BP had 360, and the company involved in the egg recall also had a long history of citations over the years. OSHA keeps giving citations, but in many, many cases nothing changes. As the New York Time article points out, the Spider-man production was in violation last year and they are still in violation today.
Let me put it this way. The closest thing we have to a behavioral law, as gravity is a law of physics, is that behavior is a function of its consequences. Consequences change behavior not citations. Telling them they are unsafe, although meant to be a punisher, is apparently a reinforcer- the behavior continues. Although OSHA attempts to punish violators with citations and fines, they are not punishers since punishment stops behavior. If OSHA invested the small amount of time it would take regulators to become fluent and develop skills in behavior change, workplace safety, or in this case the safety of everyone associated with the production of Spiderman, would be significantly improved.
I believe that OSHA should focus on increasing safety compliance. (I’ll bet they think they do that now.) Only reinforcement increases behavior. If companies experience with OSHA was to help them improve safety while decreasing cost and improving the quality of their products and services, the agency would be inundated with requests for help. As it is, when OSHA regulators appear on site, employees don’t rush to show them items of concern, they hide them or try to steer regulators away from them.
There is a better way to improve safety. Punishment or attempts at punishment won’t. Because of that, OSHA’s efforts are of little help to Spider-man. Nevertheless, as they say in the business, citation or no citation, the show must go on.
The Senate, this week, approved a bill that will require food manufacturers and farmers to use scientific techniques to prevent contaminated food from reaching our dinner tables. It also indicated that the Food and Drug Administration would take a bigger role in the prevention of outbreaks and that the government’s response to outbreaks would be accelerated. While these are all reasonable measures, inspections lead to penalties and punishment for those they find in violation. In an article I wrote for the Washington Post, I explain how penalties and punishment will NOT lead to safer food and offer some alternative approaches instead.
