Manage-Wise

Creating excitement for the leader’s initiatives

Most organizations have few jobs that could be considered exciting, but think of the kind of organization you would have if everyone had a job that they considered valuable and exciting! Such a workplace is possible to attain independent of the actual tasks involved in the job. Whether a job is exciting is not a function of what you do, but what happens to you when you do it. If you look at the behavior of a typical executive, you see that she talks, writes, and reads. Not much more. What is exciting about that? If, on the other hand, you look at what happens to her when she does those things, you get an idea of why she loves her job. She asks an employee about a project and he gives her better than expected results. She holds a meeting to introduce a new initiative and gets and enthusiastic response. She reads a research article and gets an idea for a new product. These are the things that make a job exciting—the consequences.

The leader must make the behaviors of any job related to the organization’s vision. How do you make annual objectives exciting? The question more formally asked should be, “How do you make the accomplishment of annual objectives a positive reinforcer?” The answer lies in the leader establishing himself as a reinforcer to the followers. When he does, things that are important to the leader become important to the followers.

How positive reinforcement works

Franklin D Roosevelt established himself as a positive reinforcer to millions of Americans very early in his presidency because he delivered on his campaign promises and as such he rallied people to causes he desired. During his candidacy, he promised people a new deal and delivered it in the first hundred day of his presidency.

The week following his inauguration in 1933, he called the Congress into a special session to enact legislation to help overcome the Depression. The legislation included emergency banking laws, new regulations for the securities and insurance industries, establishment of a civilian conservation corps to put a quarter of a million young unemployed workers to work on public projects, and the Agriculture Adjustment Act that gave the federal government extraordinary powers to assist farmers.

During his presidency, Roosevelt’s many achievements included unemployment insurance, the National Recovery Administration (formed to enforce codes of conduct within industry while relaxing antitrust laws in order to promote business growth); the Tennessee Valley Authority (the first publicly held utility corporation); the Public Works Administration (which provided funding for infrastructures such as dams, thus creating more jobs), and the National Housing Act (which provided insurance for mortgages).

His accomplishments produced something for almost everyone. He enjoyed tremendous popular support even though he was often opposed by certain segments of the business and industrial community. His fireside chats on the radio were listened to religiously by millions of people. As a result, he is the only President to be elected for four consecutive terms. Even though he made a campaign promise not to send American troops to fight any foreign wars, he committed American troops to fight the German Navy in the Atlantic Ocean less than one year later. Because he thought it was the right thing to do, people rallied behind him in a way unparalleled in American history.

Excitement resides in behavioral consequences

Whether in sports or entertainment, it is not behaviors that create excitement, but the things that happen to the athletes or movie stars that determine continued excitement for the work. Movie stars often arise at 4:00 a.m., sit for several hours in the makeup department, often wearing hot and cramped costumes, and then spend the day in the heat or cold. Athletes spend much time engaging in very repetitive behavior such as drills and calisthenics. But when you begin to look at what happens to performers and athletes when interacting with fellow actors, directors, coaches, players, and fans you can understand why their jobs are so exciting.

As you know by now, there is only one way to create excitement on the job. You guessed it—positive reinforcement. You certainly cannot punish, penalize, or use negative reinforcement to excite someone. While you may talk someone into excitement, it will evaporate quickly if some form of positive reinforcement is not forthcoming.

In many jobs, positive reinforcement isn’t present if you don’t plan it. As we have mentioned, one of the best ways to do this is to build positive reinforcement into your work process.

Almost every video game has a system for continuous tracking of performance during the game. Any time you create a task where people can se some graphic display of progress, you are on the way to creating an exciting jobs. The most effective cycle of performance feedback is continuous. Many jobs don’t allow for continuous feedback, so strive to give feedback in the shortest time possible following performance.

While feedback makes excitement possible, feedback alone doesn’t create excitement. Feed-back sets up opportunities for frequent positive reinforcement. Just a number or a line on a graph has little motivational value unless it represents progress toward some-thing that is important to the performer.

Thus the leader has to establish a relationship between the feedback, the accomplishment, and the reinforcers that are available both for the effort and for the success of the followers. One of the best ways a leader can achieve this is by creating themes for significant initiatives.

Excerpt from ‘Measure of a Leader’ by Aubrey C Daniels and James E Daniels. Reproduced with permission © 2007, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited. Price: Rs 450. Vishwanath_Ghanekar@mcgraw-hill.com