Management Insights

Rewarding Good Behavior

Is it better to reward behavior or results? Two new papers describe the effect of pay for performance and suggest that rewarding behavior is more effective. In a study where half the students at poor performing schools were given the opportunity to earn a cash payment if they passed all tests, completion rates increased by about a third - but only for girls and mainly for those who only needed to improve a little. Students whose performance improved had clear ideas about what they needed to do to improve.

A different study paid some students for test scores and others for specific tasks like reading books. The results of the experiments where performance was rewarded were disappointing - plenty of money was paid out, but no evidence was found that paying students led them to do better. However, where students were simply given $2 for every book they read if they passed a computerized comprehension test, school grades improved substantially. This suggests that for students who do not know how to improve their own performance, the best strategy may be to reward them for simple tasks that ultimately translate into higher grades.

Applying these findings into a business context, incentive schemes designed to reinforce and reward specific behaviors on a frequent basis may be more effective for more people than schemes that award a year-end bonus based solely on performance.

Making Effective Presentations

You have a unique opportunity to change minds when you make a presentation. Unfortunately, it's an opportunity that is frequently wasted. Presentations are often a waste of effort for the presenter and a waste of time for the audience. Before subjecting your audience to a slow death by PowerPoint, consider the best way to engage them.

Start by asking yourself if you even need to make a presentation. Seth Godin notes that the best presentation is no presentation at all. If you can get by with a memo, send a memo. Alternatively, meet one on one, look the other person in the eye and make your case.

If you decide that a presentation is the best approach, make it interactive. You don't like to be talked at and neither does your audience. Frame the dialog by defining the questions that need to be discussed. Then let people ask questions. If this is not practical, pose rhetorical questions instead. Answer questions by telling stories and by providing relevant examples.

If you must use slides, keep them simple. One slide, one point. No bullets, just pictures. For great examples of this technique see Steve Jobs keynote presentations or this presentation by Stanford professor Larry Lessig.

When you present, speak from your heart not a script. Don't worry about trying to get the words exactly right. People remember scenarios not words. Your audience are more likely to be influenced by your passion and authenticity than by any particular choice of words. And finally, look at your audience when you speak, don't read from your slides. Your audience is quite capable of reading them. If you need to read from your slides, you are either unsure what your point is, or your slides are unclear.

Simply presenting one fact after another - slide after boring slide - is unlikely to change anyone's mind. We use metaphors to make sense of the world and most of our thinking is organized as stories. If you want to change minds, make an emotional appeal to your audience by telling compelling stories and by engaging them in a conversation.

Spreading Good Behavior

The New York Times reports that recent research suggests that behavior is "contagious". Analysis of data from a heart study covering 15,000 people over 50 years suggests that both good and bad behavior - such as smoking, obesity and happiness - pass between people almost as if they were a contagious virus. This supports findings from a previous study at Dartmouth College which demonstrated that dorm mates "infect" each other with good and bad study habits.

Sociologists hypothesize that behaviors spread partly though subconscious social signals that we pick up from those around us, which serve as cues to what is considered normal behavior. It is also suggested that behavior is not only affected by the people immediate around us, but by others who are indirectly connected to us. For example, smoking appears to be spread socially - a friend taking up smoking increases your chance of smoking by 36 percent, and if you have a three-degrees-removed friend who started smoking, you are 11 percent more likely to do the same. It is postulated that our ability to affect people up to three degrees away from us may have evolutionary roots since tribal groups that were tightly connected were more likely to pass along positive behaviors than those that weren't.

These findings have several important implications for managers. Firstly, it highlights the importance of positive role-modeling, hands-on management, and on-the-job coaching by front-line managers to seed good behavior. Secondly, it underlines the importance of building a strong workplace culture that rewards good behavior and encourages on-the-job socializing to spread desirable behavior. Finally, it stresses the importance of acting quickly to address bad behavior before it spreads to others.

The good news for managers who want to improve behavior, math is on your side. For most of us, within three degrees we are connected to more than 1000 people - all of whom we can theoretically help just by our own contagious behavior. It appears that managers really do get the behavior they exhibit and tolerate.