There’s a truism I first heard years ago from Tony Robbins, and it surfaces consistently across all areas of life, individually and at the collective level:
What gets rewarded gets reinforced.
How do you train a dog?
I’ve never had a dog of my own, but from what I’ve observed you teach the dog commands and reward it with treats when it obeys. Soon enough, the dog learns the new behavior.
What gets rewarded gets reinforced.
Human beings like to think we are much more sophisticated than dogs, because we have more evolved brains and emotions.
We’re not.
Let’s not confuse complexity with sophistication.
Our brains and emotions may make us more complex, in that what we consider to be a reward isn’t as simple as a treat. Sometimes our reward system is backwards. If you were trained to do your best work in response to criticism and emotional abuse, you might turn those behaviors on yourself. You reinforce the self-criticism because the work you do in response to it reinforces that it works.
Similarly, the schoolyard bully thrives on the kids who fight back or on the notoriety. These are the “rewards.”
What gets rewarded gets reinforced.
This applies to companies and the collective as well. If your company has a misalignment between stated values and employee behavior, look at what you’re rewarding. For example, an organization that says it values eduction and customer service but focuses its recognition and awards on its top sales people reinforces that its top value is making money.
What gets rewarded gets reinforced.
What makes some posts rise to the top of your news feed or social media feed? Those with a lot of comments and engagement, or from the people you engage with most. You help train the algorithm.
What gets rewarded gets reinforced.
It’s interesting to look at the world through this lens, to notice the systems in place: how they’ve been designed to promote or ignore various components of our societal fabric, and how they shape what skills, opinions, and traits get valued or devalued.
What gets rewarded gets reinforced.
Here is where we do have an advantage over dogs: we get to choose what behaviors to reward in ourselves.
We also get to choose what we are willing to tolerate from others. This calls to mind another favorite truism:
You train people how to treat you.
Ultimately, you can choose to be in charge.
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