Once upon a time, an elderly fencing master, after a long
and distinguished career, was asked, “How is it so many champions came out of
your salle d’armes?”
“Very simple,” he replied. “Only champions came in.”
*******
I’ll tell you a secret.
It’s the secret to being a good fencing master, good
teacher, good boss, good leader.
It’s a simple thing, and it doesn’t require you to go on a
diet, stand outside during inclement weather, or do any heavy lifting. It won’t
muss your hair or scuff up your blue suede shoes.
Here’s the secret in a nutshell:
Believe in your students, in your
workers, in your followers.
And show them that you believe in
them.
I offer the following four items of evidence for your
consideration.
Item #1: The X Files v The Y-Philes
Very few people, under very few circumstances, labor for
extrinsic rewards alone. They will, however, bust the proverbial hump in order
to feel competent and self-determining in dealing with the world as it exists
for them.
Douglas McGregor postulated two different theories on
peoples’ work behavior, dubbing them Theory X and Theory Y. There is a fair
amount of social science research to back him up. Each of the theories encompasses certain
specific assumptions.
Theory X assumes:
The
average human being has an inherent dislike of work and will avoid it if he
can.
Because of their dislike for work, most people must
be controlled and threatened before they will work hard enough.
The average human prefers to be directed, dislikes
responsibility, is unambiguous, and desires security above everything.
Theory X management is characterized by tight
controls, “micro-management,” and harsh, often disproportionate
punishment. Theory X thinkers view
people as expendable, easily replaceable. I think of it as the “Plantation”
model, the “Work ‘em ‘til they drop; slaves are cheap,” philosophy.
Theory Y assumes:
The expenditure of physical and mental effort in
work is as natural as play or rest. Indeed, work can BE play.
Control and punishment are not the only ways to
make people work. Man will direct
himself if he is committed to the aims of the organization. (Note, as example,
the great numbers of volunteer firefighters).
If a job is satisfying, then the result will be
commitment to the organization.
The average person, under proper conditions, will not
only accept responsibility, but seek responsibility.
People will use their imagination, creativity, and
ingenuity to solve work problems.
Item #2: The
Mood Pyramid?
Abraham Maslow postulated that there were a variety
of human needs that provided the motivation for human behavior. He arranged
these needs in his famous – and frequently misunderstood – “hierarchy of
needs.” I’d be willing to wager he
almost immediately regretted that he hadn’t called it a circle of needs, a
garden or a pantheon of needs, or even “Abe’s Big Box of Human Needs.”
Maslow’s five types of needs are:
1. Biological or Physiological
needs - air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep.2. Safety needs - protection from elements, security, order, law, stability, freedom from fear.
3. Social Needs (Love and belongingness) - friendship, intimacy, affection and love, - from work group, family, friends, romantic relationships.
4. Esteem needs - achievement, mastery, independence, status, dominance, prestige, self-respect, respect from others.
5. Self-Actualization needs - realizing personal potential, self-fulfillment, seeking personal growth and peak experiences.
According to Hoyle, 1) when one has a deficit in
one of these needs, one is motivated to fulfill that need and) 2) one must
fulfill the lower needs before one can address the higher needs.
The trouble with Hoyle’s interpretation is that it
is demonstrably false.
IF, as typically asserted, the lower biological needs
and safety needs MUST be met before one can be motivated by the higher social,
esteem and self-actualization needs, just how exactly does one explain the
phenomenon of the volunteer firefighter?
A volunteer firefighter is a person who knowingly and willingly assumes
great personal risk in order to rescue another person (or sometimes even a dog
or a cat or other animal), who may be a complete stranger, a person to whom
he/she has no prior specific duty, thereby putting his/her own “biological and
safety needs” on hold for the sake of social, esteem or self-actualization
needs. AND the volunteer firefighter does
this for NO material reward. If the “hierarchy” model were correct, then
volunteer firefighters would be impossible, at least without the influence of
incredible amounts of alcohol or demon possession.
This is not the single lonely exception. From the Spartans at Thermopylae, to Sidney Carton, to Rachel Corrie, human history is replete with exceptions. And there are countless
exceptions today, every day, as ordinary people do extraordinary things,
apparently oblivious to their own biological and safety needs. I should hasten
to add that not all these things are good and noble.
I would submit that, in fact, those human needs, so
astutely observed by Mr. Maslow, aren’t arranged in a rigid, permanent
hierarchy at all. At any given moment, a person may be motivated by a
particular need, depending on a complex web of circumstances. One must ask,
like a good actor, not just “What is this person’s motivation?” but also “What is this person’s motivation AT THIS
MOMENT.” That notwithstanding, it’s also
true that a person may seem to have a particular core need that tends to drive
his/her behavior. Often, this driving need is the result of some significant
experience of deficit, in that person’s past, for which their current behavior
is an attempt to either compensate, or prevent a recurrence of the experience.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Find out what it means to me. – Aretha Franklin
Item #3:
Don’t it Make My Brown Eyes Blue
The day after civil rights leader and anti-war
spokesman Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered, Jane Elliot, a third grade
teacher decided to try an experiment to help her all-white class understand the
meaning of racial discrimination.
On
that first day of the exercise, she designated the blue-eyed children as the
superior group. Elliott provided brown fabric collars and asked the blue-eyed
students to wrap them around the necks of their brown-eyed peers as a method to
easily identify the minority group. She gave the blue-eyed children extra
privileges, such as second helpings at lunch, access to the new jungle gym, and
five extra minutes at recess. The blue-eyed children sat in the front of the
classroom, and the brown-eyed children were sent to sit in the back rows. The
blue-eyed children were encouraged to play only with other blue-eyed children
and to ignore those with brown eyes. Elliott would not allow brown-eyed and
blue-eyed children to drink from the same water fountain and often chastised
the brown-eyed students when they did not follow the exercise's rules or made
mistakes. She often exemplified the differences between the two groups by
singling out students and would use negative aspects of brown-eyed children to
emphasize a point.At first, there was resistance among the students in the minority group to the idea that blue-eyed children were better than brown-eyed children. To counter this, Elliott lied to the children by stating that melanin is responsible for making children blue-eyed and was also linked to their higher intelligence and learning ability. Shortly thereafter, this initial resistance fell away. Those who were deemed "superior" became arrogant, bossy, and otherwise unpleasant to their "inferior" classmates. Their grades on simple tests were better, and they completed mathematical and reading tasks that had seemed outside their ability before. The "inferior" classmates also transformed – into timid and subservient children who scored poorer on tests, and even during recess isolated themselves, including those who had previously been dominant in the class. These children's academic performance suffered, even with tasks that had been simple before.
The next Monday, Elliott reversed the exercise, making the brown-eyed children superior. While the brown-eyed children did taunt the blue-eyed children in ways similar to what had occurred the previous day, Elliott reports it was much less intense. At 2:30 on that Wednesday, Elliott told the blue-eyed children to take off their collars. To reflect on the experience, she asked the children to write down what they had learned. Later she was quoted as saying "I think these children walked in a colored child's moccasins for a day." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott)
In addition to providing a direct,
emotionally-connected learning experience for her students, Ms. Elliot brought
to light a vital psychological principle, often know as the Pygmalian Effect.
Simply stated: “people tend to perform in accordance with the expectations
placed upon them.” Treat people like winners, and they will tend to behave like winners; treat them like losers, and they will
tend to behave like losers – and lose.
This is because everyone acts in accordance with
what he/she believes to be true.
Item #4 Goldilocks
and the Three Learning Domains
We recognize three types or “domains” of learning:
the cognitive, the psycho-motor and the affective.
In short, the cognitive domain is about
knowing, the psycho-motor domain is
about doing, and the affective domain is about feeling.
The cognitive domain deals with acquisition and
processing of information.. If you can
explain how an internal combustion engine works, you’re operating in the
cognitive. If you can recite a history of 16th century fencing
masters, the books they wrote and what they said in those books, that’s the
cognitive domain. If you know all the rules, tactics, and strategies of the
game of basketball and who played for what team over the last decade and what
all their “stats” are, that’s the cognitive domain.
The psychomotor domain deals with the acquisition
and performance of a physical skill. Now, if you can disassemble and reassemble
an internal combustion engine, that’s the psychomotor domain. If you can PLAY
basketball, even if you can’t remember who started for the Boston Celtics at
the GARDEN in 1961, that’s the psychomotor domain. If you can wield a sword
effectively, even if you’ve never even heard of Capo Ferro’s “Gran
Simulacro…”that’s the psychomotor domain.
As teachers, as coaches, as bosses, we tend to
concentrate on these two domains. Do our people have the knowledge to do the
thing? Do our people have the skill to do the thing? If they do, then all should be well, right?
Not so fast, m’darlin.’
Enter the affective domain, the realm of the
emotions. The affective domain is how you feel about the thing, about your work. While the Cognitive
domain explains WHAT to do and the Psychomotor domain teaches you HOW to do it,
the Affective domain tells you WHY you do it.
It provides the emotional connection that motivates (back to you, Abe…) your behavior. You can have all the
knowledge and skill in the world, but without motivation…
Allow me to cite my favorite example. 1990. Japan.
“Iron” Mike Tyson versus James “Buster” Douglas for the heavyweight boxing
championship of the world.
Tyson was in the view of most aficionados of the
sweet science, a practically invincible champion. He had summarily destroyed
the previous 9 challengers in less time than it generally takes me to make
coffee. Buster Douglas was a good but uneven fighter, sometimes excellent,
sometimes mediocre. Though the challenger was ranked #3 in the world, the fight
was seen as such a mismatch, that the odds against Douglas were about 50 to 1. If there were bets made, they were bets on
whether or not Douglas would survive the first few rounds. It was inconceivable
that Douglas might actually win the fight, right up to the moment Douglas
knocked Tyson out in the X round.
Upon
winning the fight, the first thing Douglas said to the microphone-proffering
sports press was this: “for my mom, god bless her heart.” You see, Buster’s mother, to whom he was very
close, had died just 23 days earlier. He fought the most perfect fight of his life,
not for the belt, not for the money, not for himself at all.
He did it for his mom.
Because she had believed in him.
La Belle
I strongly encourage to cultivate your capacity to
believe in your people. REALLY, believe in them. In your gut. This isn’t
something you can fake. If you’re faking it, anyone with two brain cells to rub
together will see through your posturing in short order. It has to be real,
honest and sincere. If you’re a teacher and you can’t or won’t believe in your
students, if you’re a boss who can’t or won’t believe in your crew, then I
strongly encourage you to find another line of work.
Take Home Points
1.
All people
act in accordance with what they believe to be true.
2.
People tend
to act in accordance with expectations placed upon them.
3.
People are
not primarily motivated by survival or safety needs.
4.
People need
to feel competent and self-determining.
5.
Teaching in
the affective domain is the key to enabling a person’s best possible
performance.
Recommended reading/viewing
1.
Religion, Values and Peak Experiences by Abraham Maslow
2.
Psycho-cybernetics
by Maxwell Maltz
aac
