In another lifetime, I worked as a waiter at a chain restaurant. Every month or two, the district manager would visit and order as a customer. Everyone was afraid to wait on him as he always left critical notes on the “comment card.” Somehow, I’ve always been relatively insensitive to criticism, so I would end up waiting on him since no one else wanted to do it. It didn’t bother me much. Every time I waited on him there would be a critical comment. He could always find something wrong. I remember one time he wrote “the bacon was placed on the bacon cheeseburger at the incorrect angle.” Finally, one time he wrote on the card “adequate.”
After he left, the manager of the restaurant was ecstatic! He hung the comment card on the wall, and everyone enthused for days about how the team served the district manager, and he couldn’t find anything to criticize.
Perhaps not surprisingly, with such bad management the restaurant did not do well in the long run. I left for graduate school, but the manager and the assistant manager departed in a very dramatic fashion, requiring that same district manager to run the restaurant for months. The restaurant eventually closed. The whole chain has been closing restaurants for many years, although they are still in business.
Of course, we understand that such poor management practices are likely to lead to problems.
Surely, an Organizational Behavior Management (OBM) intervention would have led to dramatically superior performance. But I think there is something more we can learn from that district manager.
The problems with being too negative are obvious. But problems can also arise if you are too positive. Specifically, I’ve seen some BCBAs that are so positive the staff don’t think they have any need to improve. This can lead to overconfidence. This is terrible for your Poogi.
This leads to a staff who think they are the best in the world and are simply not trying very hard. You have to be skeptical of your stories. The first step in the POOGI is realizing that there is a need to improve. No matter how good you are, there is always dramatic room for improvement.