Trying to find a way to raise employee morale that gets positive feedback? Practice catching somebody doing something right.
ConfidenceCenter.com’s Weekly Newsletter – July 2, 2013
Word and Quote of the Week
*** Teamwork ***
*** Snowflakes are one of nature’s most fragile things, but just look what they can do when they stick together.
– Vista M. Kelly
Trivia Question of the Week
Q. What superstar pitcher’s career ended in 1966 because of arthritis? (Answer at the end of this newsletter.)
Employee Morale Activity:
Five to One
Submitted by Arthur Lerner
Your newsletters are great in concept and in concrete suggestions. I’ve learned a lot, and have little to add in terms of specific things I have seen or helped implement. However, if I go back about 30 years, and my prior learning as a manager, I am reminded of something. While it’s likely not news to anyone reading here, I offer it here as a reminder and a slightly different perspective.
As a manager of an information center, I saw one of my employees do a stellar “above and beyond the call of duty” job of helping some confused people. When they left, I asked her, “Can I give you some feedback?” She braced in her chair. I gave her very positive, detailed feedback on how well she’d done and how I felt about it. Then I asked her why she went rigid.
“Because,” she said, “usually when you start a sentence with ‘I want to give you some feedback’ it means you’re going to tell me something I did wrong.”
Well, despite my giving a variety of forms of recognition to my staff, I realized she was right about this one.
I had recently read the “new” book ‘One Minute Manager’ by Blanchard. One of the points he makes in an early section has to do with how employees usually get noticed by managers, to the point that the most common answer to the questions “How do you know you’re doing a good job?” was most typically, “Nobody’s chewed me out lately.”
It felt like a “gotcha.”
So it was not just recognition, it was ratio. He devoted one page to one sentence: Catch somebody doing something right.
I immediately gave myself that assignment: No negative/corrective comments to anyone until I had given at least 10 that caught someone doing something right. It worked well for me, but when I was training supervisors elsewhere (mostly nurse supervisors in healthcare) I found remarkable resistance to their working to give even a 5:1 positive to negative comment ratio, and it took a while for it to sink in, much less become a habit.
Answer to This Week’s Trivia Question
Q. What superstar pitcher’s career ended in 1966 because of arthritis?
A. Sandy Koufax
Joke of the Week
Max the little camel walks into his parents’ room at 3 a.m. and asks for a glass of water.
“Another one?” says his father. “That’s the second glass this month.”
Free Employee Morale Video Series
See free videos on how to create employee spirit teams: Get Instant Access to the Employee Spirit Team Magic Video Series
(c) Copyright 2013 Harriet Meyerson.
