Handling The Positive Reinforcement

I would like to write about one feature that every project manager should have, it is so important as the methodologies and standards used in our projects. The sentiment of the team is crucial to get a good performance and harmony between the members.

However, to reinforce the positive, there should be positive things and that is the problem that many managers have. So, the first step is find out the best activities that each team member performed and give a positive feedback, if we want to continue getting outstanding behavior, we should push such behaviors. Alternatively, we should avoid the negative feedback and challenge the members to question themselves why they were not praised for those activities. Basically, we are driving the sentiment in the right direction with the desired behavior and mitigating the poor aptitudes.

One important thing for any employee is the recognition of its work, they want to be highlighted. Here is where The Reinforcement Theory of Motivation become in handy, because following the guidelines for any given situation, the employees can decide among multiple options and the option they pick is the one has had better sentiment impact in the past.

Now, rewards or punishments, are usually the end of any behavior and where I would like to differ with the theory, because I personally think that punishments or negative feedback are not an option, instead I would like to share the technique explained in the book “How To Win Friends & Influence People” where the strategy to help the employees is avoid the negative behaviors using their ego to challenging them to make a better work every time.

As project manager we should lead our team members to learn their behaviors and promote the good feelings fairly instinctively and constantly.