Whale Done! 5

Today, we will continue to learn with Wes Kingsley in Ken Blanchard's book entitled Whale Done! It carries the subtitle "The Power of Positive Relationships." The message and the "to do" items meld nicely with our journey to culture excellence in safety, quality, ethics, production, in fact, with all we do.

Last time, our friend Wes Kingsley, along with a large room full of people, was vigorously taking notes as the Consultant explained about the four kinds of consequences in response to a specific behavior - No Response; Negative Response; Redirection; and Positive Response. The presentation continues ...

Consultant: "Catching people doing things wrong is easy. All you have to do is wait for them to foul up. Then you can look smart by pointing out their mistakes. I call that the GOTcha Response. Nothing to it. In fact, many bosses, as we've already suggested, are 'seagull' managers. They leave their people alone until they do something wrong. Then they swoop in, make a lot of noise, and dump on everybody. It's the old leave-alone-zap approach."  

 

There were so many heads nodding in agreement in the room that it looked like a "bobble-head" testing site. Was your head nodding, too? Maybe, just a little bit?

 

Consultant: "Catching people doing things right is what I've come to call - if you'll pardon the pun - the WHALE DONE Response. That response is much harder because it takes patience and self-control. Especially if you've been ignoring what people do right and have been using lots of GOTchas, you must learn to observe what they are doing in a whole new way. You may even have to deliberately look past the undesirable behaviors that used to grab all your attention. In other words, you have to change what you are looking for. Your search for something done well may require greater effort, but it has far greater payoffs in generating the kind of behavior you want from your people at work and from your kids at home."

 

A new slide appears on the screen at the front of the room reviewing the two responses the Consultant had named.

Consultant: "If you grew up being GOTcha'd a lot, maybe you've tended to perpetuate it with others. But if your goal as a manger is performance improvement, it's vitally important you start using the WHALE DONE Response. I think you can begin to see that a lot of us often do things exactly backwards. We focus our attention on poor performance rather than on good performance. In the process, we reinforce the very behavior we don't want!"

 

Another slide appears on the screen.

 



Consultant: "Attention is like sunshine to humans. What we give our attention to, grows. What we ignore, withers... Think about this. When do you generally pay attention to people? It's when they're doing things wrong, isn't it? And when do you pay little attention to them? When everything's okay. Wrong! Right then, when things are going well, we lose a great motivational opportunity. We go brain-dead, become inactive, and don't pay attention or communicate. But if you were to systematically give people positive, specific feedback after they did something right, do you think you would get more of that behavior, or less of it?"

 

The audience responds with a robust, "MORE."

 

Consultant: "Of course you would. That's why we need to wake up and do and say something positive and encouraging when people are exceeding expectations, or when they've corrected errors they've made ... When you accentuate the positive, you'll begin to pay attention to what you do or say after people perform. I guarantee their performance will improve, and so will your relationships. Just remember, you're always reinforcing something - even when you're doing nothing ... The more WHALE DONEs you do, the better."



So, have we learned all there is to the WHALE DONE Response? Does the Consultant have additional tips for us to catch people doing right? Find out next time!

Donald G Rosenbarger
Senior Vice President
Delta Companies Inc