If you ever watch a youth soccer or basketball game, it is interesting to observe how the coaches choose to motivate the kids. Some coaches seem to focus on the positive, motivating them by pointing out what they have done right and cheering when they do something well. Other coaches seem to focus on the negative, yelling at kids when they do something wrong, berating their playing ability.
Both of these coaches are hoping for the same outcome: they want the kids to win the game. They are also likely hoping that the kids will learn skills like perseverance, dedication, sportsmanship, and leadership along the way. What some coaches do not always seem to realize is that the kids are not just learning from their teammates and the actual playing of the game, but they are very in tune to what the coach is doing and how the coach leads and motivates the team.
In reading an interview with Mike Rice Jr., who was fired as Rutgers’ men’s basketball coach after a video surfaced of him verbally and physically abusing his players during practice, I noticed that Rice referred to the fact that his style of coaching was the only style that he knew, that it was what had been modeled for him. While Rice had a fairly good record as a coach, it came at the tremendous cost of the collateral damage on the players themselves.
This is also something that happens inside business. There are thousands of managers who have somehow come to the conclusion that negative reinforcement works, perhaps based on experiencing their parents, coaches, and previous managers behaving in the same way. But time and time again, negative reinforcement is shown to not be the most effective way to motivate people.
There is a fascinating story at the beginning of Liz Wiseman’s book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter about a military instructor who took an extremely high performing military tank operational team and demoralized them so much through negative feedback that they went from being one of the best teams to being one of the worst. They lost any belief in their ability thanks to someone who only focused on the negative and ripped them apart for any little mistake.
Making people feel like they are incapable can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If what you are really after as a manager or a coach is a team that wins, learns, and achieves success, then they cannot be made to feel like losers all of the time.
This is not to say that mistakes do not need to be corrected or that employees do not have areas of improvement, but many times employees are able to identify those areas themselves. They know if they were a bit short when they talked to a customer or if they rushed to finish a project and made a few mistakes. You can ask them what they would like to do better next time or what they would like to work on improving over the next year, and they will most likely have already thought about it.
If, as a manager, you do have to point out a mistake, it does not have to come out in a berating way – it can come from a place in which the employee clearly feels that you are on their team and that you are interested in helping them get better.
Even though the negative approach to motivation does not work, it does not mean that you will never see a successful business that has a horrible leader. Often that business is successful not because of the leader’s leadership style, but in spite of it. It is strong enough to not crumble under poor leadership, but under great leadership it – and its employees – could actually thrive.