Catching people in the act of doing something right and naming precisely what they did well delivers a clear and lasting learning signal
Anastasiia Anufrieva / Getty Images
Catching people in the act of doing something right and naming precisely what they did well delivers a clear and lasting learning signal which helps them build better habits, quickens team learning, and when done fairly, creates a tighter, higher-performing culture.
This is how basketball coaching legend John Wooden got the most out of his dominant UCLA basketball squads. This is how some effective parents consciously raise their kids. And this is how great business leaders build high-performing teams at work.
“Catching people doing things right” is an idea popularized by author, consultant, and speaker Ken Blanchard, which he first shared in his 1982 bestseller “The One Minute Manager.”
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Our brains are wired to notice mistakes. To look for what’s wrong. To scan for “danger.” It’s how our ancestors avoided becoming something’s meal. It’s also why we tend to experience negative events with more intensity than positive ones. It’s really useful for survival and maybe not so great for optimizing relationships and fostering environments where people can be their best performing selves.
There’s a concept in neuroscience and reinforcement learning called reward prediction error, or RPE. The RPE is the discrepancy between the expected reward and the actual reward received. In other words, we tend to notice when our experience with something (a movie, a concert, a new restaurant, etc.) is either better or worse than we expected.
It’s a dopamine thing. When we’re pleasantly surprised, dopamine releases and we feel happy. When we’re disappointed, the opposite occurs.
And so when someone gets immediate, specific recognition for some just-completed task, it creates a positive RPE — they’re thinking That went even better than expected — then dopamine spikes and synapses strengthen, and all of it makes the behavior easier for the person to repeat moving forward, because our brains are thinking That behavior worked, so let’s do it again.
Doing this well requires paying attention to a few details.
All of this is central to reinforcement learning which has its roots in the famous work of Ivan Pavlov conditioning dogs to salivate upon hearing a bell, according to a 2020 National Institutes of Health study “Dopamine, Prediction Error and Beyond.”
The mission here is much less about compliance and much more so about helping your people to grow into their best selves.
As motivational speaker Jim Rohn put it in his book Twelve Pillars, “Managers help people see themselves as they are; Leaders help people see themselves better than they are.”
The late Aubrey Daniels, an organizational behavior expert who died in March, did a lot of work centered around getting the most out of people and maximizing team performance.
“Positive reinforcement generates more behavior than is minimally required,” Daniels wrote in Bringing Out the Best in People. “We call this discretionary effort, and its presence in the workplace is the only way an organization can maximize performance.”
Choosing praise over criticism is a leadership choice, and it’s one neuroscience research supports.
“If someone said to me, ‘Blanchard, if I were to take away everything that you have ever taught in over 40 years except for one thing, what would you hold on to?’ I would hold onto ‘catch people doing something right,’” Blanchard said in an interview with People Equation. “The key to developing relationships and creating [successful] organizations is to accentuate the positive.”
