Managers assume that they know what other people like. They assume that their employees like what they like. The truth is they often don't.

Boone says he has learned a lot just from watching his kids. One straightens up at just the threat of a spanking, he says. The other doesn't seem to be the least bit phased by a spanking.

"Anybody that's raised a couple of kids knows that you have to select the motivation that best fits that one child," Boone said. "You have to figure out the same thing with employees. You have to figure out what it is that motivates that person."

In addition to the motivation, Boone says management has to figure out what type of task an employee excells at.

"I have long been an advocate of asking people those types of questions when you're interviewing people for a job," Boone said. "When you are given an assignment, how do you like to handle it? Do you like to work with teams? Some people can't handle it." Some people just want to be assigned the task, and they'll show up at the designated time with the finished project.

"If that person likes to work like that, why on earth are you giving them team assignments?" Boone said. "It's like you're begging them to perform poorly."

Boone said he encourages managers to find out what their employees like to do in their free time so they can figure out what tasks the employee will excel at.

The Dallas lawyer tells the story of a man he knows in Fort Worth that was named to manage a hotel, a hotel that was at the bottom of its ranking in the chain.

When he arrived, more than half of the employees were on disciplinary probation. The employee turn over rate annually was approaching 100 percent.

The man called his supervisors in and told they he was taking everybody off probation and that they were not to put anybody on probation for the next two weeks.

During that two week period, each supervisor was to find something good that each employee was doing and compliment him on it.

Boone said that at the end of the two week period, the hotel manager asked his supervisors if they wanted to put anybody back on probation. No one did.

By the end of the first year, only two people had been placed on disciplinary probation. By the end of the second year, the turnover rate had dropped to almost zero. Boone said that hotel manager was in the business of developing his employee work force.

"It's a different attitude toward your employees," he says. "Not getting all the work done, but seeing that the people that work under you have the greatest opportunities to show their skills."

Positive reinforcement, however, has to be earned. "You cannot just give it away," Boone said. Giving superfluous compliments is not respect. "Respect is recognizing something some one did," Boone said. "It can be something very small."

Employees need to be complimented or thanked for working through their lunch hour or doing a good job on something they could have gotten by with by doing poorly.

"You need to reward people for that," Boone said. "You need to make it immediate when you do."

If somebody stays late and works the weekend, they need to hear it's a good thing.

Boone says one his first supervisors, for whom he has great respect, always did two things.

"If he was mad at me about something I did that he didn't like, he told me, he came to me and he told me," Boone says. "On the other hand, when I did something he thought was good, he told everybody else."

Boone says that there are times when the best thing a manager can do for his good employees is to get rid of the ones that aren't.

There are times, he admitted, when positive reinforcement doesn't work.

A message is sent when two people are paid the same for the same job, but one performs well and the other one doesn't. That message is that the good employee's hard work is not going to get him any further advancement.

"We're talking about perfect worlds where each employee knows how to perform his job," Boone admits.

In the real world, there are numerous distractions. He says that studies show even most efficient person gets only about 60 percent of the work he plans on completed on any given day.

"Don't feel like a failure if you come to work with big tasks sitting on your desk and nine hours later, you leave with big tasks still sitting there," Boone says. "It happens to everyone. It's not just you. You've just been highly efficient at handling the other small fires that came up that day."

There is an old saying in the cattle business that a person makes his money when he buys his cattle. With Boone, it's the hiring decision that's critical.

He tells of a friend, interviewing a prospective employee, who asked the would-be employee where he saw himself in five years.

The interviewee replied, "In your job."

That could have been a negative, Boone said, but the interviewee added that he was going to make the interviewer look so good that the interviewer would be promoted and when he was asked who should fill his old position, the natural answer would be the interviewee.

"Now that's a team player," Boone said. ©