Rapido presented by Kristen Sukalac at the 2014 IABC France Annual General Assembly on leadership lessons from dog training.

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3. Let people know what you want them to do rather than punishing them for failing to
guess correctly. There are three levels of intervention to do that:
1) Capture what people are doing that is right. This ranges from simple things like
saying thank you to elaborate recognition programs and virtually free things like
LinkedIn recommendations to salary bonuses.
2) Shaping is when you take an existent behavior that is close to what you want and
help to improve it by insisting on closer and closer approximations to perfection
before rewarding the behavior. An example of this might be in the level of
feedback you give to an intern, starting with the broad issues and gradually
providing feedback on finer and finer points of refinement when the broad issues
have been mastered.
3) Luring occurs when you actively teach the new behavior to someone. In human
terms, providing training or explicit instructions in the forms of new protocols are
parallels.
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4. Unfortunately, both dog training and management tend to focus on what the subject
is doing wrong and miss the hundreds (or even thousands) of times a day that the
subject is getting everything right, or at least close enough that you could shape the
behavior. You hear a lot of talk these days about companies wanting to be more
innovative. But few companies actually stop to think what that means through the
entire management chain down to the daily feedback that managers give employees.
But punishment has another adverse and devastating effect, especially if it is the only
feedback that is received: punishment can effectively shutdown experimentation and
experiential learning.
There’s a saying in dog training (and child raising) that you get the behavior you
reinforce.
If people are constantly shot down when they suggest something new, they will
eventually stop suggesting anything at all. The worst situation is when people are
punished for rules that they don’t know exist and that seem to be arbitrary. In cases
like this, people develop what is called “learned helplessness”. The theory was
developed by a man named Martin Seligman who conducted experiments about
classical conditioning in the 1960s. In the first set of experiments, dogs were in a
room with a metallic floor. A light flashed on shortly before an electric charge crossed
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5. the floor. Dogs quickly began reacting to the light in advance of the electric charge,
demonstrating classical conditioning. But something strange happened when the
dogs were placed in a room where only half of the floor was electrified. Instead of
jumping to the safe half of the room to escape, the dogs laid down and accepted
their fate, because they had learned in the first experiment that there was nothing
they could do.
This same principle applies to human. In businesses, we can see it in the resignation
of employees in traditional top-down control-and-command organizations where
people are unmotivated and see no point in taking initiative. They have learned that
not only can they not change the situation, but that they may even be punished for
trying. In extreme cases, we see the crises some companies have faced in recent
years with waves of suicides in certain companies. Simply changing policies or
procedures will not make the situation change, as Seligman’s second experiment
demonstrates. Concerted and sustained efforts are need for one individual to learn to
take initiative again. It is even more difficult to effect change across an entire
organization.
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6. Once you’ve helped people reduce their stress levels and become more physically
receptive to learning, then you embark on a process of change.
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7. Human beings – like dogs – are social animals. A lot of our learning happens by
following the example given by others. If a young child is uncertain, it will often look
to a caregiver for a clue on how to react – if the caregiver shows confidence, the child
is more likely to act confidently.
Informal social leaders are also influential for effecting change. Mapping social
networks and working with ambassadors who have strong social capital -- rather than
just having it championed by people in the official hierarchy -- can greatly increase
the chances that a change will be accepted.
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8. People have as tendency to think of reporting and evaluation as a form of report
card: you’re either going to be chastised or justified in what you are doing. But finding
ways to keep track of events – even informally is important for two other reasons:
1) It allows you to have a clearer idea of what is working and what isn’t and WHY so
that you can make tweaks.
2) It can also help track change over time. This is especially important in incremental
change processes where the daily grind keeps you from raising your head and
realizing just how much ground you’ve covered.
In the case of my dog, we keep change logs when working on a specific issue, like
separation anxiety. More generally, I blog about his progress. This started out as an
emotional outlet for me when we were at the peak of problems with him – the blog’s
original name was “Surviving Spencer”, and my husband told me the first article was
depressing! But it’s also useful to read back through the articles and see how much
has changed. It’s even more helpful when other people read it and comment on how
things have improved. It’s also a resource for other people going through similar
challenges.
When things go wrong, I use the blog article to reflect on what I could have done
differently to achieve a different outcome.
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