Are your employees well-trained seals?
Julie Scardina, SeaWorld animal ambassador, knows how to train sea mammals. Please substitute the whales and dolphins below with whatever mammal who works for you.
✓ Don't take your whale's compliance, motivation or energy for granted. Use effective communication, encouragement, rewards, creativity, effort and variety. Pay attention to good behavior. Don't make a big issue of their mistakes.
✓ Set your dolphins up to succeed. Reward them sometimes for nothing more than a great attitude.
“Work hard to create an environment that is interesting, fun, stimulating. Draw attention to behavior you want repeated.”
✓ Don’t punish. Go neutral. Inattention is effective discipline. Punishment has a dampening effect, which can lead to defensiveness and aggression. Give misbehaving dolphins a couple of hours to hang out by themselves.
✓ There are four animals in your pool. You send them all out on a job and one of them says: "Ehhh, I'm going over to talk to the whale at the coffee pot." The last thing you want to do is leave the three whales that do the right thing and give attention to the time waster. Where do you devote time and effort? Devote it to the mammals doing the right thing.
✓ Trainers never view themselves as a boss, especially when dealing with whales.
‘I’m 110 pounds and get into the water with killer whales. The last thing I want is a whale to be thinking: “You know, yesterday, she told me that I wasn’t doing a very good job.”
✓ Avoid feedback that is intermittent or vague. You want your whale to be thinking: “We had fun yesterday, even though I wasn’t quite understanding what you wanted. I’m ready to try again.”
✓ Don't give fake praise. What you reinforce is what you get.
✓ Fish is not the reward of choice for whales and dolphins. Each animal has its own favorites. Be creative. It can be toys of different sizes, different colors of ice cubes that melt in different ways that they chew, swallow or push around and watch melt. They like being touched, scratched or rubbed. Variety is important.
An overused reward for humans is money.
✓ Mammals become satiated with rewards that they get over and over. We all like to get back rubs. But if somebody gave us ten back rubs a day, we’d want something else. Keep it fresh.
✓ When you ask a whale to breach and splash the audience, the best time to reward him is at the apex of his behavior. But it's impossible to reward him when he's up in the air. Use a communication "bridge." Blow a whistle to tell him he’s going to get the reward.
✓ A “bridge” for human mammals is praise.
✓ Submissive whales go, "Uh-oh, the dominant whale’s looking at me funny. I'm dropping my fish, or I'm not going to play with that toy." Teach the dominant animals that they need to be kind to less aggressive animals if they want to get reinforced.
✓ Treat all animals with respect. No one incident of bad behavior is worth losing a close relationship over.
✓ Competency comes from the right mix of success and challenges, failure and encouragement. Notice good behavior, ignore the bad. If you are dishing out discipline or punishment, you're wrong.
Did you know?
• Scardina was the most frequent guest on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
.• She’s allergic to fish. "I can handle it and feed it to the whales, but I can't eat it."
• Her pets included a blind rescue parrot from the Amazon.
Leadership expert Del Leonard Jones wrote the historical novel, The Cremation of Sam McGee built upon the poem of Robert W. Service. The novel is set in the 1898 heyday of yellow journalism and travels from Cuba to the Yukon. The narrator is a fabricating newspaper reporter working for William Randolph Hearst during the Spanish-American War and Gold Rush. The first chapter is here.
Jones has also edited Advice from the Top: 1001 Bits of Business Wisdom. The book focuses on the leadership advice of Fortune 500 CEO's such as Fred Smith of FedEx, but also gets advice from athletes, coaches, entertainers and experts including Julie Scardina.
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