← Build with Leila Hormozi
Build with Leila Hormozi
Throwback: Why Positive Reinforcement Works Better Than Punishment | Ep 312
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The reason that so many people have a hard time giving feedback and holding people accountable is because they've been taught wrong. And to be honest, most people do it wrong. So the fact is, giving feedback is providing someone with information that will change their behavior. If it has not changed their behavior, then it is not feedback. How do you create an unshakable business? I crossed $100 million in net worth by the age of 28. Now I'm growing acquisition.com into a billion dollar portfolio. In this podcast, I share the lessons I've learned in scaling big businesses and helping our portfolio companies do the same. Buckle up and let's build. There's actually two types of accountability that I think exist in a business. Okay? There is tactical accountability and there is developmental accountability. Tactical accountability is much more of reinforcing somebody for the behaviors that have more to do with the hard skills of the job. So like, did you do this thing in the proper order at the proper time according to the job description? And so this might be like, did you turn in your end of week report on time? Did you fill out your rubric the way that it's supposed to be filled out? And so all of those things are tactical accountability, which are, I would say, like where more people do well is holding people accountable to these things, which is like, hey, you know, so saw you did this, thank you so much for filling that out. And next time when you fill it out, even could you do this as well? You know, it's just always like encouraging them towards the future vision. I think people can get that one down pretty easily. Developmental accountability is much more of reinforcing soft skills that I would say are like the underlying skills needed to execute the hard ones. Right? And so examples of this would be reinforcing when they positively reinforce their team. Reinforcing when they are transparent, honest. Reinforcing when they express a problem problem they see. Reinforcing when they are kind to another employee. Reinforcing when they don't complain. Reinforcing when they take on a lot of work and you know, it's a lot to juggle. So it's reinforcing the much broader behaviors that are far less tactical that you watch them exhibit in the organization. So the key for that piece with the developmental is you want to know ahead of time, like when someone enters the organization, what have they been doing in their past roles that has been considered successful, they that would not be considered successful in the current role they're coming into. And then once you have that, it's so much Easier to go from there because a lot of times what happens is that you can see something during the interview process or even during the first 90 days, but you don't bring it up because you're scared. You're like, oh, I don't want to tell them that this thing. And then what happens is that over time it gets worse and it starts to conflict with more and more areas in the business and you continue to avoid it because you've reinforced yourself for avoiding it. And the more we avoid something, the more scary it becomes. And then eventually what you end up doing is just firing the person because you're like, they can't change this thing. But the reality is that you never address the thing that they couldn't change and then never talked about a plan to reinforce them for the new thing. And if you can teach somebody something, which I would hope if you're running a business, you can, then that is a huge advantage for you. Because a lot of people have behaviors that can be extinguished after one or two months if you teach them properly. And so if somebody, for example, came into my organization and they said, layla, I really want to understand how you build and manage and scale teams. But I've been in places where honestly they've just told me I can yell at people, I'd say, great. So what we're going to work on is instead of yelling at people, you're going to do this instead. You're going to message me every time you want to yell at somebody and I'm going to help you script out what you're going to do instead. It's funny, this could apply to your personal life as well. Say you just broke up with an ex boyfriend and then you have a thought, I want to text him instead. Text your best friend. You want to give somebody a replacement behavior. So an example for tactical is that say a teammate misses their end of week report. They're supposed to turn in at Thursday at 5pm PST. You don't see it, it's Friday morning, 9am you reinforce this for them by doing a couple things. You say, hey, let's put a reminder on your calendar. So that's like the tactical operational piece of this. The next piece is that you encourage them and reward them for all the times they do turn in on time. And even if it sucks, even if it's not filled outright, you reward them for the fact they got it in on time. This is what happens. This is from their perspective. They turn in their report, you yell at them. They now associate turning in the report with being yelled at, the likelihood that they want to turn it in in the future is low. You ever had a parent that's like, why don't you call me more? And you're like, mom, I don't call you more. Because every time I call you, you tell me how I don't call you. On the other side, we have developmental accountability. An example of this would be there's a lot of people that join the workforce who get by by just being likable, right? And we all probably know somebody. It's like, you have someone on the team, they're just, like, super likable. Everyone loves them. But, like, low execution, not very effective. You reinforce their likability by giving them more attention to others on the team, talking to them more frequently, entertaining their ideas. What we want to do is we want to take all the energy that you give to reinforcing them being likable, and we want to switch it over to reinforcing any little thing they do that drives results. And what you'll see is that over time, they will shift their behavior from doing all the things just to be liked to doing all the things that drive results. It's kind of like a comedian. If you ever see a comedian go on stage and it's like they make a joke, and then nobody laughs. You can just see that suddenly they get less and less confident in making the jokes. Now that person is up there literally being paid to make jokes. The likelihood that they make good jokes after that is low. If somebody does a behavior or exemplifies something in your company that you don't want more of, extinguish it by just not responding, not reacting. I will never punish by making a face or making a noise that's going to, like, give any sort of feedback. I just. Nothing. Blank stare, neutral. And so if you have teammates who exemplify behaviors that you don't want, write down what those are and then decide to ignore them and instead take your energy into where they're doing things you want more of and. And reward them for that all day. So the question is, why is there such a large void of this in business? And there's a couple reasons for that. One is that people generally don't like giving people feedback because they have a negative association with it. Because most places teach you how to give feedback in a way that is not giving feedback. It is insulting people. Of course you don't want to insult people. Insulting people does not change their behavior. It just makes them hate you. Giving someone Feedback makes them like you more and change their behavior. And so the reason that so many people have a hard time giving feedback and holding people accountable is because they've been taught wrong. And to be honest, most people do it wrong. So the fact is giving feedback is providing someone with information that will change their behavior. If it has not changed their behavior, then it is not feedback. And so the most effective way that I have found to give feedback is this self assessing. Okay, because self assessment is number one. If you can get somebody to assess their own behavior and present it to you, that is king above all else. Now second best from there is what I like to call share the facts and state the truth. So number one, state the facts of what happened in a neutral way. And when I say facts, this means that there can be no opinion woven in here. If an alien came down to earth and stated the facts of what happened, in this instance, it he would have no opinion. So you want to state the facts with absolutely no bias. On Monday you showed up to the meeting 30 minutes late. That's a fact. Anyone who came in and was on the meeting would be able to state that. Then you ask the person what they think about that fact. What do you think of that? Then all of a sudden they're the one that's like beating themselves up. You are going to guide them towards a productive solution. Great. Hey, it happens. But what do you think we can do next time to make sure it doesn't happen again? Ask them for their idea. Hey guys, if you already don't know by now, I am actually Fairly Active on LinkedIn. I may go so far as say it's actually become my favorite platform. So if you'd like to connect with me, just send me a request or hit follow and shout out those who've been sharing my posts and tagging others. And then the most important part is that you have follow through in that the next time when they do the corrective behavior, you reinforce that behavior. Great job being on time for all your meetings today. Like love it. Awesome. Such a good job. You may feel like a kindergarten teacher doing this, but I swear to God it works. And the simpler the better. You can give a thumbs up, you can give a high five, you can give a pound. It doesn't matter what it is. I actually think that hand gestures are the most effective. If you're remote, you can a giant smile. Great job Air5. Love it. The more vague a positive response is, it's sometimes the better because they get to interpret it however they want. Here's another example. Let's say you have a salesperson and they're underperforming. State the facts. Last week your close rate was 20% below what it's normally been. What do you think of that? Great. So what could we do to increase your close rate? Great. So what do you think we should do going forward? Great. Is there anything I can do to help you? Great. How can I support you in fixing that? You become their comrade rather than their dictator. And then the next time that they increase their close rate because maybe they identified. Hey, actually I realized I didn't stick to the script this week. You're not even going to reinforce the fact that they close somebody next. You are then going to reinforce, hey, by the way, fantastic job. Those five calls, those three calls yesterday, you, you stuck to the script in each one. I don't even care if it closed or not. Great job sticking to the script because what do we know? We know that if they stick to the script, eventually they'll close the deal. So here's the thing that I want to reinforce here. Most employees behaviors come from their past experiences. Either they've been rewarded for them or they have been effective in driving results. So if we don't reinforce the new behaviors that we want now in this job, we old behaviors we shall get. So here's what I want to do. I want to make sure that you never end up as one of those 50% businesses that goes out because you can't build a team and hold them accountable. And so I've broken this down into a formula that I hope is as easy as possible to understand so you know exactly what you need to do when you get off your couch or out of your bed and you go back to trying to hold your team accountable. The accountability formula is expectations plus measurement times reinforcement equals accountability. Let me break that down for you. Expectations are essentially the instructions that you give somebody, okay, a job description, a core value, an sop, a brand promise, a departmental promise, role expectations, company mission behaviors. You want them to exemplify instructions. You want them to follow processes. You want them to adhere to instructions. Expectations are instructions. The second piece is measurement. So how do we know that they are doing or not doing the instruction or expectation is by measuring those things. And so measurements can look like timelines, project management boards, KPIs, MBOs surveys, utilization metrics. I want you to do these things. Here is how I will measure those things. Now the last step is the only thing, and it's the most important thing to both of these which is reinforcement. Reinforcement is essentially what you do after you receive the measurement. You give them the instruction or the expectation. You measure the thing, they hand you the measurement, or you measure the thing. What happens next? Do you applaud them? Do you give them a high five? Do you yell at them? Do you tell them what you want differently? What happens after the thing is measured is reinforcement. And so if you want a high degree of accountability in a company, then you will provide a high amount of reinforcement. The amount of reinforcement you provide dictates the strength of accountability in a company. The less reinforcement that you give somebody, the lower the degree of accountability. Even if you have the instructions and the measurement, the higher the degree of reinforcement you give them, the higher amount of accountability you will have. And now again, within reinforcement, that in itself is a neutral word. Specifically, if you want to build a company the way I build one and not have everyone live in fear, then you would use positive reinforcement specifically because there is negative reinforcement that also works the same way, but it doesn't work as well in the long run. And so for this sake of this we talk about positive reinforcement. The more positively you reinforce the measurements going in the direction you want, the more that you get that behavior. Self assessment is king. Above all, you set the expectations. You create a self measurement tool. They fill out that measurement tool, you reinforce them, filling it out and the metrics that you like seeing, that is it. That is the best way to reinforce and get more of the behavior you want a company. So here's an example of this, that I actually use my own company. Okay, so I've got, here's our core values. We've got unimpeachable character, sincere candor, competitive greatness. And then I have a self assessment that they fill out that says, rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 on how you exemplify these values. Here's what the values mean. And then they turn that into me. And then we get to talk about what they can do to improve. Sam.