Guidelines for Correcting
by
Charles Lamson
Correct correcting is not easy. To decrease unwanted performance you must pay careful attention to several guidelines. While following these guidelines, you will discover that you really are correcting performance, not simply punishing or penalizing it. You are helping people do the right thing as well as reducing the chance that they will perform in an undesirable manner. Following are 10 points to consider when using correcting.
Point 1: Pinpoint the behavior being corrected. The first step in correcting performance is to pinpoint the problem behavior or performance and the correct or desired performance. It is not enough just to point out what someone is doing wrong. You must also specify clearly what behavior is needed. For example, it is better to tell the ward secretary on a hospital floor that the physicians' orders are not being posted on the patients' charts within the 10-minute standard, than it is to tell him that he is wasting time or that he is inefficient. Pinpointing the performance that needs to be changed and letting the performer know what you want reduces the emotionality of your interactions. The performer is less likely to get defensive when he is asked to change a specific performance than when reprimanded in vague and general terms. Point 2: Use data. Use data when you correct. Ideally, information of this sort should have been available as feedback all along; however, this is often not the case. For example, the ward secretary, mentioned above, should have received regular feedback on his accountabilities. In the absence of this information, the head nurse must accumulate specific data before correcting him. She must say something specific: "For the last three days you posted orders on time only 56 percent of the time." Another important use of data is to confirm that what we think is a punishing consequence is, in fact, punishing. What we think is punishing may in fact be reinforcing. Suspension may be the equivalent of a free day off for some people, or reprimanding someone publicly may make him feel good that he really got your goat by making you lose control. Only careful monitoring of data on the performance you intend to punish or penalize will let you know for certain whether you are, in fact, using these consequences effectively. If the person keeps repeating the infraction, you are in all likelihood using the wrong consequence. Point 3: Provide reinforcement for what you do want. Of all the guidelines for correcting, this is the most important one. If you only punish what you do not want and do not reinforce what you do want, improvement in performance is unlikely. People perform in undesired ways because they are reinforced for doing so. If your punishment works and they stop the undesired behavior, they will behave to obtain reinforcement in other ways. Ideally, you should be ready to reinforce only desired behavior. An incompatible behavior is one that cannot occur at the same time as the behavior targeted for change. Examine the list in figure 1. You cannot be working at your work station and taking breaks at the same time. Therefore, if you increase working at the work station, you will automatically reduce excessive breaks. The key, however, is to identify what you want, even if it is not fully incompatible with the undesired performance. Always be prepared to provide reinforcement for desired performance before you punish the unwanted performance.
Figure 1 Examples of Incompatible Behaviors
Point 4: Correct immediately. As discussed in previous posts, consequences are most effective when they are delivered during or immediately after the behavior. Just as you should try to reinforce immediately, you should also administer punishing consequences during, or immediately after, undesired performance. Unfortunately, company and government regulations, and increasing employee litigation all make it difficult to respond immediately to instances of undesired performance. Still, the longer the delay between the occurrence and the consequence, the less effective the correction will be. Point 5: Don't correct when angry. Do not attempt to correct while you are angry. It is better to delay punishment and deliver it calmly than to deliver it immediately while you are upset. There are at least three reasons for this. First when you get angry, you are likely to say things you do not mean or cannot follow through. In anger, we tend to use hollow threats, instead of simply stating the real consequences of the unwanted performance. When correcting you should only state the future punishment contingencies when you are certain they are appropriate for the behavior and when you are prepared to deliver them. A threat inappropriate for the behavior or unlikely to be administered erodes one's position of respect.  Second, correcting in anger may reinforce the very performance you want stopped. Some people may find it very reinforcing to see you get upset. Your emotional display could give them clear cues as to how to take control of the situation. Also, when you get angry at people, they usually get angry in return. When people are angry they are less interested in learning how to act in the future than they are in responding effectively to your anger at that moment. Obviously, no one wins in such a situation. This is the type of situation that escalates arguments. Third, your anger may prompt the person being corrected to offer excuses or denials. For example, suppose you say, "How many times do I have to tell you that we don't have enough engineers? When are you personnel people going to get busy and get some engineers in here?" The response may be, "Don't you know anything about what's going on in the outside world? There is only one engineer for every five jobs. And, furthermore, your attitude certainly doesn't help our recruiting efforts." The calm manager is more likely to say something like, "What do you think we can do to to increase the number of engineers available for the Kosmas project?" The personnel director may still respond, "There are not that many to go around." But the manager whose judgment is not affected by anger can make an appropriate response like, "You're right Joanna. But what can we do to at least get our share?"  Point 6: Be consistent. When you state the consequences of a particular behavior, you must be willing to follow through and deliver those consequences. Inconsistent follow through will weaken your correcting efforts. To be consistent, you must follow all instances of the pinpointed behavior with punishment or penalty and you must do this no matter who the performer might be. This is actually quite difficult to do. We typically become sensitized to unwanted behaviors in our poorer performers because we are looking for unwanted behaviors. Many times the behaviors we choose to focus on in poor performers are actually fairly common to even our best performers. If you punish a low performer for being late to meetings when your best performers are late but escape your attention, you will send the message that you are punishing certain people because of who they are and not because of what they do. Point 7: Maintain a ratio of 4:1. Correcting is aided by maintaining a high ratio of reinforcement to punishment. Make the work environment reinforcing. Maintain a ratio of at least 4:1. Reinforce all behaviors that deserve it. This practice makes any instance of punishment that much more prominent by contrast since the environment is predominantly positive. Maintaining a minimum ratio of 4:1 also predisposes people to accept correction. Knowing from experience that the boss has their best interests at heart, they view correction as an attempt to help them grow rather than as a put-down. The more reinforcement people receive, the more secure they become about their abilities, the more open they are to correction. When your attempts to punish behavior are effective, you will seldom need to use it. If a punisher is used too frequently. It might lose its potency over time. The only recourse then is to increase the severity of the punishment, and it is always best to prevent the situation from reaching that point. Point 8: Do not use the sandwich method. The sandwich method is a negative consequence placed between two positive consequences. This is an ineffective way to correct performance. Sandwiching detracts from the reinforcing value of the positive comments and diminishes the corrective value of the punishing consequences. Correcting involves the use of positive reinforcement and punishment, but they are used at separate times on different behaviors. If you punish an undesirable response on one occasion, you should reinforce the desirable or correct behavior on another occasion. You do not reinforce what you want and punish what you do not want in the same breath. These actions should follow the behaviors they are intended to affect. Point 9: Never correct publicly. If providing positive reinforcement for the desired behavior is the most important guideline in correcting, this one is the second most important. Do not tell people they are doing wrong in front of other people. Make sure that when you correct someone, other people cannot hear you. Ideally, others should not even see the interchange. When possible, ask the person to join you in a private area where the problem can be discussed. Aside from moral issues involved in such a strategy, the negatives generated by such action more than outweigh any benefit derived from it. Point 10: Do not confuse intention with effect. Keep your focus on what you see and hear. Do not read into peoples' behavior what they did or did not intend. In other words, you might not have intended to make a subordinate angry by what you said, but the way you said it had that effect. Stay focused on the behavior and its effect on you, on others, and on the result. Stay out of interpretation, such as "You didn't like being assigned this project from the beginning and that's why you failed to finish on time" or "You have a lot of need to control others." There is no need for uninvited and unwise armchair psychology or interpreting beyond the data when dealing with employees. Do consider first describing the impact or effect of the person's actions on you or others when you see something that needs to be improved, and of course, describe the impact of patterns of behavior you like. This can help people understand how their patterns of behavior are being received and interpreted by others. For example, you might tell an employee the following: When you continue to interrupt as often as you do in meetings and without asking permission or considering what is being said, it can be interpreted as rude and indifferent to the worth of what others are saying. I counted your interruptions for the last three meetings, and you interrupted an average of six times during our one-hour meeting. Speaking only when others are finished as well as commenting occasionally on what is said by others are behaviors I want you to work on. Those behaviors will also improve what people say about your intentions. At our next meeting, I want you to wait to speak until others are finished, with the final goal being no interruptions. I also want you to make one positive comment about another person's remarks during the meeting. I know that over time those things will have a positive benefit in how people feel about whether you are rude and whether you value what they have to say. It will make your valid, constructive comments easier to listen to and thus of more value to all of us.See Figure 2 for a summary of guidelines for correcting.
Figure 2 Guidelines for Correcting
*SOURCE: PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT: CHANGING BEHAVIOR THAT DRIVES ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS, 4TH ED., 2004, AUBREY C. DANIELS & JAMES E. DANIELS, PGS. 256-261*
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