How to Manage Your Team with ABA Principles?

We often forget to apply ABA principles on our team while we are busy using them to help children with autism to learn. We must remember ABA works on all human beings!

Here are a few ways Dr. Aubrey Daniels spoke about in his lecture last week on how to improve performance in businesses:

1) The environment has stimulus control and reinforcement. If you find your team not doing what they should be doing, or have bad habits in their work, we should ask "what in the environment has the stimulus control over these behaviours?" And "what in the environment is reinforcing the incorrect responses?"

2) Workers need shaping too! Although we are grown adults being paid to do our work, and we "should" be doing our work without making mistakes, very often we find people fail to do what they were told to do. The best way to improve performance is through shaping. Start from what the person is already doing and ask them to change "just one thing" each time. Remember to reinforce the changes in their behaviour. When we invest in people and take time to train them, they feel valued and it will keep the turn over rate low in the company.

3) Be a coach, not a supervisor. Most people sign up for a job because they know they want to do it and they have the skills to do it. Yet the first day they turn up to work there is a supervisor checking up on them, telling them how to do their work. This sends the message of "I don't trust you" to the workers. A coach however, does more asking and less telling. If there is a problem, ask your team for help. Invite your team to pinpoint the problem and the changes required (defining the target behaviour you want your team to do). You will be surprised they are ready to offer solutions to solve the problem.

4) Make reinforcement contingent on target behaviour. Forget about traditional management practice such as "employee of the month", end of year bonus, "The Sandwich" feedback and so on. Express your appreciation to your team as you "catch them being good".

Hope these tips will help you to increase your team's performance.

Email us at info@headstartaba.org if you have any questions or comments about this article.

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