Why Performance Declines After Praise
Generally speaking, it’s better to praise someone for not smoking than warning them about lung cancer. But we typically default to warnings.
When you see a friend smoking, what’s the first thing you say? “You’re going to die of lung cancer if you don’t quit.”
Immediate praise impacts behavior more than threat of future punishment. (The Influential Mind)
Why performance declines after praise:
Daniel Kahneman reports that a flight instructor resisted giving praise to top performers. (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
Kahneman was teaching instructors that praise improves performance better than punishment.
During the training an experienced instructor explained to Kahneman that praise doesn’t work. The instructor rightly noticed that after praising a top performer, performance declined.
The instructor also noticed that when he yelled at poor performers, they improved during their next exercises.
The instructor concluded that yelling works better than praising.
Confusion about praise and punishment:
Suppose you praise today’s top performer. How will they perform tomorrow? Statistically, their performance is likely to deteriorate. You might think, “Praise caused them to ease up.”
Suppose you punish today’s bottom performer. How will they perform tomorrow? Statistically, their performance will improve. You might think, “Punishment works.”
Poor performance is typically followed by improvement regardless of praise or punishment. The only place a poor performer has to go is up. Peak performance typically deteriorates in the short-term.
Don’t assume praise caused peak performers to slack off.
Choose praise:
When it comes to developing skills, immediate praise works better than threat of future punishment.
- Make it a daily habit to notice progress.
- Praise behaviors you want your team to repeat. Bad behaviors capture your attention. Search for something to praise.
- When you point out something that isn’t working, turn toward the future. Focus on behaviors that cause improvement. Threat isn’t enough.
How might leaders make development and improvement more likely?
INVITATION: Join me TODAY (4/23/2018) at 11:30 a.m. EST on Facebook life for a conversation with Jon Acuff!
Hi Dan,
I love your articles and share them regularly.
While I totally agree with this article, the title is misleading to me….why do you say that performance declines after praise when the article clearly says that positive reinforcement for doing something well ultimately results in better performance than warnings or threats?
Thanks Ann. Because performance – statistically speaking – does decline after praise.
I suppose I left out the idea that praise for top performers may seem to cause a decline in their performance.
Frankly, I just liked the title. 🙂
“Frankly, I just liked the title!”
Love this response! Thank-you – made me smile this Monday morning.
Great post, Dan, thanks!
As is the case in so many scenarios, context is key:
Research by Stacey Finkelstein from Columbia University and Ayelet Fishbach from the University of Chicago highlights that when you don’t really know what you are doing, encouragement helps you to stay optimistic and feel more at ease with the challenges you are facing — something novices tend to need. In their studies, beginners overwhelmingly preferred a cheerleading, strength-focused instructor.
The same research highlights that a more critical assessment tells you where you need to spend your effort and offers insight into how you might improve. People who already have developed some knowledge and skills don’t actually live in fear of negative feedback. If anything, they seek it out. Intuitively they realize that negative feedback offers the key to getting ahead, while positive feedback merely tells them what they already know.
So praise to build confidence and competence and then, when the person can stand on their own, incorporate more constructive feedback to maximize performance.
Thanks Kevin. I’m so glad you added your insights.
When we’re doing well – and we aspire to do better – we lean into feedback that helps us improve. That’s so true. It’s important for corrective feedback to include ways to improve.
I”ll add that just because experienced people benefit from corrective feedback, we should continue giving praise.
After giving presentations for example, I enjoy both praise and suggestions for ways to improve. Frankly, I often seek suggestions from key individuals. But the praise seems to fuel my fire too.
Hi Dan:
I totally agree that praise for specific achievements, ideas, or innovative ways of doing tasks will encourage those who want to succeed to do even better. I would like to point out that “Thanks” is not the same as praise and won’t yield the same results. You can be thanked for holding a door, or passing the salt — but praise goes deeper and, as pointed out, doesn’t just encourage a repeat (holding the door for the next person once again) — but encourages breakthroughs and significant benefits to the Team and the Agency.
So Dan, your insight into what is really important to building leadership skills brings me to read your blog every day, even when I’m crunched for time.
See what I did? 🙂
Here’s to praising — and praising effectively!
Thanks Mary. Your comments are so helpful. I remember learning that recognition, praise, rewards, and thanks are different things. It was a real eye opener.
BTW. I’ll be having a Facebook Live conversation with Roy Saunderson on April 25. We’ll talk about all this stuff. 🙂
Cheers
Dear Dan,
While agreeing with you that praise is good when you want to improve skill or behaviour of fellow colleagues, I disagree on your saying that the praise for performance work differently. It may be in some cases when done privately. The praise in public surely encourage the team members to excel like the star performer and promotes healthy competition.
Putting pressure to perform by yelling may have a temporary effect yet the under-performers need to be shown the better ways to succeed. The success stories of star performers once praised in public go a long way to improve performance to show up next time.
Thanks Dr. Asher. I always respect alternative view points. 🙂
Your insight that pressure may have temporary effect is important. We should judge leadership behaviors by both their short-term and their long-term effect.
Best
It is EASY to get all this stuff confused. And very few situations in a workplace model a pigeon pecking a light in a Skinner Box. So things about reinforcement somehow ring a bell? BUT, we have mixed stimuli and mixed rewards and a bunch on ancillary factors operating. SURE it is confusing.
Okay, I got one of those doctoral thingies working with pigeons pecking a light in a Skinner box. Mine had electrodes implanted in the reward areas of their brains so that they would respond to that ESB just like they would if they were hungry and were getting grain. So, I spent years playing with schedules of reinforcement, changing frequency and patterns of how contingent those stimulations were in generating predictable behavior. (Slot machines operate on a schedule of random payoff times and rewards, so they generate the highest levels of response which is also hard to extinguish. Heck, any pull might make them a huge winner, right? — Note that all those big fancy buildings in Las Vegas or Macau or elsewhere were made from the monies tied to those hopes / expectations.)
In the workplace, praise is semi-contingent with performance in that not all high performance gets rewarded and those rewards are unpredictable. And note that people get paid for showing up, not generally for DOING things (some exceptions exist). MANAGERS generally are NOT paid for performing tasks, but hopefully for getting results (not always). And there is a LOT of superstitious behavior occurs – read about cargo cults if you want to see the impact of some reward somehow tied to some behavior that gets repeated.
Getting to the point, we WILL generate a post-reinforcement pause after a reward in most schedules of reinforcement. People will take time off after a Big Result like a large same. In many organizations, getting some praise IS a Big Result, simply because it does not happen often.
Back in the late 70s, I was doing Behavioral Engineering using rewards and people and contingent performance. But because workplace environments are “so messed up” with peer pressure operating (+ or -) and with management praise (+ or -, depending on a wide variety of factors) and with Performance Appraisals (delayed, non-contingent annual “increases”) and so many other things, here is my advice:
FORGETTABOUTIT. Forget about trying to manage rewards in an environment that really does not allow you to manage rewards.
Here is What To Do / Remember / Consider:
— “Nobody ever washes an rental car!” — Give them some ownership involvement
— “Feedback is the Breakfast of Champions!!” — GOOD congruent performance feedback, delivered immediately and contingently and in a way that is understandable is FAR more effective than messing with reinforcement (and negative reinforcement and punishment, which are not the same thing).
Simple article on more of this stuff, including Samuel Goldwyn, at https://performancemanagementcompanyblog.com/2013/07/29/feedback-and-performance-and-management-techniques/ , with a Feedback Analysis Checklist sure to generate some considered alternatives in what might be done to improve performance.
Thanks Dr. Scott. I love feeling your passion on this topic. If I understand you, forget about using praise as a tool for changing behaviors. Use Ownership and Feedback.
That seems a bit extreme. But, your focus on ownership and feedback seems appropriate.
I want to joke and say, “Calm down.” But I’m concerned that my sarcasm would be misunderstood. 🙂
Thanks for all the value you add.
Ha! You and I go back a long way so your impressions ARE good. I see this stuff misused all the time. Negative Reinforcement is NOT punishment, for example, in that you reward GOOD behavior by REMOVING some adverse thing. An example is the good performer gets rewarded by having a bad boss fired. (Yes, THAT is rewarding to the good performer!!)
Praise IS good. But there are simply so many OTHER factors actually operating. If the boss is perceived as a BOSS (spelled backwards, that is self-explanatory), than the person might rather be ignored than recognized. If that praise is given publicly and the other people then later pooh-pooh and make fun of “goody two shoes,” than the praise is actually punishing.
Praise from a GOOD boss is GOOD.
BUT I had a senior manager go around a workplace (on my request) and say the same damn thing over and over to the 50 people working in low cubicles and he did more damage with that insincere “praise” than he would have done if he simply addressed the whole group at once. Bob was a good guy and he did care about people, but he should have done the usual video than MBWA with me; I had no way to interrupt that behavior without embarrassing him. (I would never make that mistake again; I would better prepare the manager with info and personal stuff…)
Performance Feedback Systems generally SUCK. Imagine trying to learn to play the piano if you got a written report of your play two weeks later. Well, we do not even do it that well in most organizations. I read that REMOTE workers got more feedback from managers than PEOPLE WORKING IN THE SAME OFFICE – they simply checked with the remote people more.
Yeah, I DO get emotional. When a survey showed that 35% of workers would forgo a raise to have their boss fired, I KNOW that we should be doing so much more so much differently!!!
Hey Dr. Scott. Thanks again for adding your insight.
For some reason – even thought it’s a small part of your comment – the piano illustration went DING DING in my head.
Cheers
Praise is the way to go. I find my team responds best to praise.
Thanks Tina. Have a great week.