I don’t know what to post about first…
Either the realization I had about you humans tonight or…
This wonderful song that I got off a cd this past week and now I’m in a love affair with or…
Just ramblings of the weekend.
I’ll go with the realization. I’ll give info on the song later tomorrow or whenever I’m not dead tired from the new job.
So here is the re-realization I had about people/humans/mortals tonight.
A management style that I learned about a while ago (even though I’m not in management) is based on the fact that everyone is either “reward-focused” or “consequence-focused”.
I don’t remember what the exact terms (in quotes) were but that’s the main idea.
I know my last manager was consequence-focused. He used to always tell us that if we didn’t do some such thing, we would be put on some list that “the higher-ups get and we don’t want to be on that list“.
We never saw any evidence of any list but it struck fear in the hearts of those of us that had wives and kids to feed. The rest of us weren’t phased by it.
But that’s because we were reward-focused.
We would rather he said how if we did what he wanted us to do, we would be rewarded by him taking us out to lunch on “horrible taco salad day” in the cafeteria. Or how he would mention it when we were applying for another position within the company. Or how it would put us in a better position for recommendation for a some type of a promotion in January.
But I re-realized that tonight with my girlfriend. Not in a dirty way. (So my mom and dad can keep reading).
It happened while she was preparing some papers for her grad school applications. She wasn’t motivated very much at the time and she made that clear to me.
She got me a beautiful, wonderful, sugar-free cake for my birthday the other day. I told her that if she worked for 10 minutes straight, I’d give her a piece of that cake.
Without delay, she got to work.
It was incredible!!!
And that was what reminded me of that management technique that I spoke of earlier.
When I told her of it, she said how that would’ve worked on her earlier if I had offered to reward her with … something else that distracted her anyway instead of carelessly telling her to “get to work”.
So I’m going to make an effort to focus on one’s motivational style in lieu of telling one to simply do something.
Popularity: 34% [?]
Similar posts:
Subscribe to the RSS feed
Subscribe to the RSS feed
by Donald Westlake)
Comments(2)
