5 Reasons Why You Should Treat Your Employees Like Dogs
Thats right, you should be treating your employees like dogs. If you aren’t, you are missing out on some great leadership opportunities for yourself and you are holding back your employees from growing.
My wife and I recently got a dog and I immediately saw parallels between puppy training and growing employees. Below the top 5 reasons why you should treat your employees like dogs -
- Reward and Punishment – Very simply, you get much more bang for your buck in rewarding correct actions than you do from punishing incorrect actions. Rewarding can be as simple as saying “well done,” you don’t need to be handing out $50 gift certificates everyday. The trap that people stumble into is that everyone makes tons of mistakes and it seems natural to point out the mistakes. Constantly.
Puppies will work very hard for praise and treats. They will sit still for 30 minutes and just stare if you have a treat in your hand and ask them to stay. Yelling at them doesn’t have this lasting effect. If she tries to eat something off of the table and we yell at her, 5 seconds later she will try to eat off of the table again.
- Reward for the Right Actions – Make sure that the rewards that you give your employees are in line with your vision. If your vision is to have top notch customer service, don’t give out bonuses based on sales – give them out based on customer service!
When Returning home from work, I have to be careful to only praise the puppy when she is calm and not jumping around like crazy. By doing this she connects people coming in the house with being calm.
- Don’t Punish for Failing Desired Actions – If you want innovative employees, don’t punish them when their ideas don’t pan out. Instead of yelling, have an after action review with a group and talk about what can be improved next time. Most of all, be sure to praise them for their innovative thinking.
Never yell at your dog for going to the bathroom in the house. Most likely she’s already forgotten that she did it. Even if you catch her in the act, all it does is make her scared to poop in front of you and actually makes it more likely she’ll go hide somewhere in the house to go to the bathroom next time. You are better off praising them when they do it right.
- Be Consistent – Employees count on you to treat them fairly and to provide them support. Consistent leaders create environments where employees are empowered and confident.
Puppies don’t understand “sometimes.” Either they are allowed up on the furniture or not; its either OK to jump on everyone or no one. You have to decide what is acceptable and be consistent in what you ask for.
- Training investment – It’s easy to forget to train your new employees, as the reason you hired them in the first place is that the current workload is too high! But you have to make the time to start training as soon as new employees come on board or you are either going to end up playing cleanup or finding that you have to micromanage them to get results.
The best time to start training your puppy is right away. The sooner you teach your puppy how you want them to act, they sooner you don’t need to watch over their every move.
Am I a sadist or are there parallels in good puppy training and growing your employees? I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on growing employees.
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Great Article, and great title to get me to start reading it!
There might be a degree of separation in the parallel, but none the less these are five great tips to keep in mind when building, managing and trying to grow a healthy team! And five great tips for training your new puppy!
Great attention grabbing analogies. Once you get beyond the tongue-in-cheek reference to employees as puppies the validity of your suggestion really jump out at you. Everyone likes clear, frequent and consistent feedback and direction. Giving clear, frequent and consistent feedback and direction is in itself a good motivator since in indicates your interest and concern. Likewise the lack of this feedback can be a big de-motivator. Your post highlights the need for this in a great fashion.
[...] Encontrei este artigo no blog “Leadership + Management Training“, e achei as analogias muito interessantes (talvez até um pouco forçadas… mas o importante é que servem para a reflexão). Então segue aqui minha tradução comentada: [...]
Congratulations on the new blog.
My kids have been bugging me to buying them a dog. Your post makes me think if I have enough time to deal with a dog, I have enough time to start a new company.
[...] That, and beating them around the head with rolled-up newspapers. So when I saw the article 5 reasons why you should treat your employees like dogs my hopes were raised, albeit briefly. No abuse [...]
[...] 5 Reasons Why You Should Treat Your Employees Like Dogs [...]
[...] not every day that you can read an article titled 5 Reasons You Should Treat Your Employees Like Dogs. Today is that day. Go ahead. It won’t [...]
[...] Leadership + Management Training and Tips » 5 Reasons Why You Should Treat Your Employees Like Dogs [...]
I saw Steve Finkel a couple of times. He raises dogs and he said, regarding control of candidates: “It’s how you train puppies and it’s how you train people.”
There was a great article by Amy Singer, in the New York Times, entitled “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage” on June 25, 2006, and I wrote about it on my blog discussing discipline in children.
http://ldpodcast.blogspot.com/2006_07_01_archive.html
People and animals have similar psychology and motivations- we are looking for a reinforcing response from others, and this guides a huge amount of behavior of kids, spouses, employers, employees- everyone.
Great points. One primary reward that’s often overlooked is fair pay. Saying “great job” means nothing if the employee isn’t making enough money to pay the rent and still eat three square meals a day, especially when the person saying “Great job” takes home more than six times what the employee does, drives an extravagant car, is always doing pricey renovations to their McMansion and flaunts it in the face of their “underlings”. Often, just being paid enough to get yourself a treat when you want it is reward enough. Similarly, if inflation is 4% in a year, managers and business owners need to realize that anything less than a 4% raise is actually a pay cut for the employee, and falls under punishment. So if you give an employee a 1.5% “merit” raise in a year that has 4% inflation, the psychological effect is that of punishing the employee for doing good work.
[...] Lead by example. If the company approaches a problem that covers new ground, don’t expect your employees to know how to solve it. If you know how, give them a crash course and let them take it from there. And by leading, I don’t mean leading employees like a puppy. [...]
Another principle in dog training that could be applied when delegating work is not punishing for the dog not understanding what you want. This could be applied in business too.
Tom Kelly
Art of Dog Training