It’s quite amazing what dead men don’t do.

Dead men don’t complain or insult customers; and they don’t drink and drive or speed. Dead men don’t leave the toilet seat up or leave their clothes lying on the floor; and they don’t walk on the grass or pee in the pool. Dead men don’t make errors or have accidents; and they don’t prepare incomplete reports or leave their work stations.

But dead men can teach you something about frontline leadership.

The Dead Man’s Test was devised by Ogden Lindsley as a way of deciding if something is a behaviour. If a dead man can do it perfectly, it is not a behaviour and it won’t solve your problem.

Dead men don’t make errors, have accidents, leave their work stations or upset others. You could have a team where all these things don’t happen and still have serious problems. You can in fact make fewer errors, have fewer accidents, not leave your workstation, and not upset others by simply doing nothing.

You pay people for active behaviours and active results. So the ability to specify active behaviours is an important part of creating performance improvement. There are good reasons for taking this approach:

• People perform best when they know exactly what they should do
• If you’re always saying ‘don’t’ to people then they’ll feel like they’re being constantly criticised
• While people may stop doing what you don’t want them to, it doesn’t mean that they’ll start doing what you do want

Unfortunately we often programme people to do the very thing we don’t want them to do. For example, if I say, “Don’t think of pink elephants”, what is the very thing you are thinking about right now? I doubt that you’ve thought much about pink elephants in recent times. Yet as soon as I tell you not to think about them, your natural reaction is to do so.

What dead men can teach you about frontline leadership is to tell people what you want them to do, not just what you don’t want. An active behaviour involves doing something, rather than omitting something. So let people know what you want from them.

Image by Aschwin Prein