Performance management teaches managers and leaders how to influence behavior. When you think about it, the behavior of people is the only way anything gets done in business. If leaders don't understand behavior management methods and can't apply them consciously and correctly they are almost certainly decreasing some behaviors they want, and increasing some behaviors they don't want.

Every single accomplishment that takes place in any organization is dependent on behavior. Consequently the one thing that executives, managers and supervisors should know the most about is human behavior. No business or organization can survive and grow without knowing the conditions under which people do their best.

Every management system ever devised to bring out the best in people will fail if it violates the basic laws of human behavior. Most of us look at the behavior of other people and wonder why they do certain things. We look for the answer in what happened directly before the behavior in question. In other words we think that the behavior was caused. It was motivated by some sort of internal or external force driving need or desire.

When you understand behavior analysis you will realize that a person does things because of what happens to them when they do it. In other words, because of the behavior is not as a result of the conditions prior to the behavior but what happens and immediately after the behavior.

It might seem that scientific methods to change behavior are not practical for front-line leaders. But it is actually the most practical way to manage people. Everybody knows that people don't do what we tell them to do. Yet we run our businesses as though all the performance and productivity problems are caused by people who don't know what to do, don't want to do or simply don't care. So we try and find better ways of telling them what to do. A good example of this is training courses. We put people on training courses and tell them what to do. Then when they don't do it, we blame the training course or the unwilling course members.

When our behavior changes the environment in some way that we like, we repeat it. And when we do something that changes in the environment that we don't like, we stop it. Every single thing we do produces a consequence for us. If a company has got productivity problems, quality problems, cost problems then the behaviors associated with those undesirable outcomes are being reinforced. This is not theory, this is reality. People don't resist change provided the change delivers an immediate positive consequence for them.

We know that the best reinforcement is positive immediate and certain. Peers are the most effective source of reinforcement at work and the most underutilized. They are in the best position to deliver positive and immediate reinforcement. They can observe performance more closely and more often than managers or supervisors. The whole concept of teams has missed the concept of peer reinforcement and as a result has met with little success in improving overall organizational performance.

When peers recognize that they can and should be a major source of reinforcement for each other, improvements occur more frequently, much faster and last much longer. Source: http://bit.ly/dmCAnf