Bringing Out the Best in People

What if everything you thought you knew about motivation at work was wrong? In Bringing Out the Best in People, behavioral psychologist Aubrey Daniels argues that the secret to consistently high performance isn’t pressure, fear, or charisma—it’s something far more fundamental: the consistent, deliberate application of positive reinforcement. The book builds on behavioral science to reveal how people’s actions are shaped not by vague attitudes or personality traits, but by the real-time consequences they experience in their environment.

Behavior Is Driven by Consequences

Daniels opens with a bold claim: humans behave just like every other organism in nature—we do what gets us something we want or helps us avoid something unpleasant. The science of “behavior analysis,” pioneered by B.F. Skinner, demonstrates that behavior is a function of its consequences. People don’t need psychology’s guesswork about “motivation” or “drive.” What matters is what happens immediately after an action. Do we experience reward, indifference, or punishment? In the workplace, most people repeatedly experience punishment or nothing at all—so they stop trying.

Daniels applies this insight to the modern organization, where decades of management fads have failed to create lasting results. From Total Quality Management to Six Sigma, most initiatives faded because they lacked a grounding in how humans actually learn and sustain performance. Positive reinforcement, however, is timeless—it has worked for millennia because it’s built into our biology. “Every organization,” Daniels writes, “is perfectly designed to produce what it is producing.” If results are inconsistent or morale low, that means the workplace is reinforcing the wrong behaviors.

The Problem with Traditional Management

Much of Part I dismantles what Daniels calls “the perils of traditional management.” Early chapters describe how managers rely on common sense, fads, and threats to control performance—all forms of inadequate antecedents. Managers tell people to “work harder” or “be accountable,” assuming knowledge changes behavior. It doesn’t. Instead of measuring results and reinforcing the right actions, managers deliver memos, slogans, and training sessions—the managerial version of “louder, longer, meaner.” In one story, a supervisor was berated weekly by his boss threatening to fire him. After years of it, the supervisor laughed, saying he had learned to ignore the yelling entirely. Threats minus follow-through, Daniels notes, quickly lose power. Real influence requires consistent consequences, not loud words.

“My own management style,” he quips, is the corporate disease. When every manager acts on intuition rather than science, organizations create chaos. You wouldn’t trust a surgeon improvising new anatomy—but countless leaders “operate” on human behavior without evidence. The book’s aim is to make management as disciplined a science as medicine or engineering.

Understanding the Four Consequences

Daniels builds his approach around four basic consequences of behavior: positive reinforcement (rewarding desired behavior), negative reinforcement (removing something unpleasant when the behavior occurs), punishment (applying something unpleasant), and penalty (removing something valued). Two increase behavior, two reduce it—but only positive reinforcement produces sustainable, creative excellence. Negative reinforcement (“do it or else”) gets compliance, not commitment—it drives people to do just enough to escape pressure. Over time, the workplace becomes dominated by stress and underperformance.

From Punishment to Performance

Positive reinforcement, by contrast, creates what Daniels calls discretionary effort—the energy employees choose to give beyond requirements. He recounts the “Image Loops” team at Kodak, which rewarded meeting quality and productivity targets by shutting down early on Friday to work on self-chosen improvement projects. That small shift—putting reinforcement into the work itself—produced enthusiasm, creativity, and higher output. The key is to make desired behavior immediately rewarding. Waiting for an annual bonus, he explains, is too delayed to shape daily habits. “A small reinforcer delivered today beats a big reward promised later.”

The book’s thesis is simple but profound: management is about shaping behavior systematically through timely feedback and reinforcement. Once you understand that business is behavior, you can make improvement continuous. Chapters on measurement, goal setting, and team recognition show how to pinpoint what to reinforce, how to track progress, and how to build a culture that feeds on success instead of fear. Daniels even reframes “employee engagement”—a modern corporate obsession—as the natural outcome of positive reinforcement, not another program.

A Timeless Scientific Lens

Though originally written in 1994 and updated for the digital age, Daniels stresses that the laws of behavior “haven’t changed in 2,000 years.” His examples—from a furniture worker ignoring quality slogans to supervisors misreading employee attitudes—remain painfully relevant. Technology may reshape workplaces, but it doesn’t replace motivation grounded in consequences. As industries automate, Daniels warns, understanding reinforcement will only grow more crucial because many jobs will become less naturally rewarding.

In the pages that follow, you’ll learn how to replace punishment with reinforcement, craft “performance feedback” systems, set goals that accelerate improvement rather than limit it, and build fair reward systems. Ultimately, Daniels offers more than management training—he outlines a scientific theory of leadership grounded in empathy, data, and genuine human motivation. “The best way to run an organization,” he writes, “is also the best way to treat people.” That’s the astonishing power of positive reinforcement.

If you’ve worked under a boss who motivated through fear, you’ve experienced what Daniels calls management’s addiction to negative reinforcement. Traditional leaders believe people need pressure to perform: deadlines, demands, or threats of termination. But while these methods get short-term compliance, they destroy long-term creativity, trust, and engagement.

Why Common Sense Fails

Daniels mocks the reliance on “management by common sense.” What seems obvious—reward good work, scold poor performance—is often wrong. Common sense is just personal experience filtered through emotion. As W. Edwards Deming used to say, experience teaches us nothing unless it’s examined systematically. Daniels recounts organizations swinging from fad to fad: TQM in the 1980s, emotional intelligence in the 1990s, and engagement surveys in the 2000s. Each new buzzword promised transformation; each faded within a few years because leaders never measured or reinforced the behaviors required.

He illustrates the absurdity with the story of “the guru and the chicken farmer.” Seeking advice, a farmer keeps visiting a mountain guru who prescribes random fixes for dying chickens—feed them corn, use troughs, add ventilation. Each helps briefly, then fails. The farmer returns to find all his chickens dead, and the guru sighs, “That’s a shame; I had many more solutions.” Daniels’s point: most corporate initiatives are the same—clever theories disconnected from behavioral evidence.

The “My Way” Trap

Too many managers proudly proclaim, “I manage by my own style.” Daniels dubs this MOMS—My Own Management Style—and notes it’s as reckless as a pilot landing by intuition. Different “styles” create chaos: employees get mixed messages, results vary, and senior leaders drown in policies trying to contain inconsistency. Without a unifying method grounded in behavioral science, companies compensate with bureaucracy and slogans rather than genuine leadership.

Antecedents That Don’t Work

In Chapter 3, “Louder, Longer, Meaner,” Daniels explains why telling people what to do rarely works. Instructions, posters, or speeches are called antecedents: they precede behavior but don’t cause it. A “quality is our priority” sign won’t ensure quality if managers later reward speed over accuracy. Consequences—what follows behavior—determine what people repeat. The furniture worker who saw defective chairs pushed down the line ignored every slogan about excellence because his supervisor reinforced output, not quality. “Quality,” Daniels jokes, “was just the most important slogan.”

Even government campaigns misunderstand this. Health warnings on cigarettes didn’t stop smokers; social consequences such as no-smoking laws did. In short, no matter how persuasive the message, only consistent consequences change behavior. That’s the chasm between management theory and behavioral science—and why negative reinforcement dominates by default.

Everything you or your employees do, Daniels insists, happens for a reason—and that reason is what happens next. The chapter “Behavior Is a Function of Its Consequences” reframes management as a science of cause and effect. When people repeatedly skip safety checks, it’s not laziness; it’s because the environment rewards speed or indifference. When managers ignore strong performance but react instantly to mistakes, they teach people to avoid initiative. The solution is not pep talks but altering consequences until the right behaviors become naturally rewarding.

The Four Consequences Explained

• Positive reinforcement: adds something desirable to increase behavior (praise, recognition, autonomy).
• Negative reinforcement: removes something unpleasant (pressure, threat); it motivates compliance but not excellence.
• Punishment: adds something unpleasant (criticism, extra work) to reduce occurrences.
• Penalty: removes something valued (bonuses, privileges) to decrease occurrences.

In a typical day, every worker experiences all four. If every consequence for improvement is delayed or absent, motivation collapses. Daniels describes the Chrysler superintendent who confessed, late in his career, that he could name the 30 “bad” employees he had punished but not the hundreds of steady performers he’d ignored. “They made me successful,” he lamented, “and I can’t even remember their names.” Daniels calls that the tragedy of reinforcement neglect.

Immediacy Matters

Consequences decay with time. Immediate feedback is potent; delayed rewards fade fast. He explains this with smoking: a puff gives immediate pleasure (PIC—Positive, Immediate, Certain) while quitting offers only distant, uncertain benefits (PFU—Positive, Future, Uncertain). The same principle applies to work. Daily acknowledgment of effort motivates more than annual bonuses. “We spend more money on what happens when people get sick, retire, or die,” Daniels quips, “than on what happens while they’re alive and working.”

For leaders, the takeaway is clear: create reinforcement loops that act now, not later. Frequent check-ins, public praise, tangible recognition, and feedback dashboards all deliver immediate, behavior-shaping consequences. Modern neuroscience (and Daniels’ behavioral data) agree—dopamine fuels learning when feedback is instant and specific.

Most employees, surveys show, work far below their full potential. Daniels calls the untapped performance gap “discretionary effort”—the difference between what people have to do and what they could do if they were motivated. In one study, only 23% of workers said they performed to full capacity. Unlocking that hidden energy is the holy grail of management, and Daniels claims only one proven key: the systematic use of positive reinforcement.

Natural vs. Created Reinforcement

Reinforcement comes in two forms. Natural reinforcement arises directly from the task: the satisfaction of solving a problem, completing a clean code build, or seeing a customer smile. Created reinforcement must be added externally by managers—praise, notes, recognition. Great leaders design jobs so natural reinforcement happens often and pair it with authentic social reinforcement. Daniels warns that most jobs offer almost no natural feedback: the claims processor finishes a task only to see two more appear. Without added acknowledgment, motivation dies. When Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama redesigned its processes to make daily progress visible and recognized, productivity soared 300%.

Finding What Works for Each Person

Reinforcement is personal. What fuels one employee might bore another. Daniels teaches three techniques to identify effective reinforcers: Try, Ask, Observe. Start by trying small acts of attention; people usually find the effort itself reinforcing. Then ask for feedback—after, not before, to avoid promises you can’t keep. Finally, observe what people do naturally when they have choice; their hobbies or preferred tasks reveal intrinsic motivators. He calls this “Grandma’s Law,” based on psychologist David Premack’s research: make high-frequency behaviors (things people like doing) contingent upon low-frequency ones (things they avoid). At Kodak, managers allowed teams that met weekly quotas to spend Friday afternoons on passion projects—achieving both engagement and innovation.

Peer and Managerial Reinforcement

Peers, not managers, are often the most powerful reinforcers because they observe behavior in real time. Yet organizations rarely train employees to reinforce one another. Daniels argues that “team” initiatives fail when they ignore peer reinforcement: team members must learn to recognize and acknowledge each other’s successes. Managers, meanwhile, must act as “reinforcement coordinators,” ensuring positive consequences flow in all directions. The manager’s job, he insists, is not supervision—it’s coaching. When recognition becomes habitual across levels, discretionary effort becomes the norm, not the exception.

Goals, Daniels warns, often harm more than help. They’re usually set as threats (“meet target or else”) and therefore become negative reinforcers. People do just enough to avoid punishment. He sides with W. Edwards Deming, who criticized traditional goal setting for limiting performance—workers hit the target and stop. However, Daniels doesn’t reject goals; he redefines them as tools for reinforcement. The purpose of goal setting is not to measure people but to create more occasions for success.

Small Wins and Shaping

Instead of vast “stretch goals,” Daniels recommends small, attainable, and frequent goals—each one an opportunity to celebrate progress. This approach, known as shaping, reinforces incremental improvement rather than binary success or failure. If an underperforming employee produces 73 units when the standard is 110, set the next goal at 75, then 78, then 83. Each achievement earns recognition, building a habit of success. Slow and steady, as in the classic fable, truly wins the performance race because every improvement is reinforced, while large, distant goals offer too few reinforcement opportunities.

Making Goals Work for Everyone

Equal percentage goals (“everyone improve 10%”) are inherently unfair—too hard for low performers, too easy for high ones. Daniels again points to shaping: tailor goals so each person’s next success is within reach. And make attainment visible. Frequent visual feedback—graphs, dashboards, daily scorecards—lets people experience progress as its own reinforcement, much like watching the steps tick up on your smartwatch. Over time, the behavior accelerates naturally. At Delta Faucet, applying these principles cut training time by more than half as learners received fast, visible feedback while practicing new assembly tasks.

When goals become frequent, individualized, and reinforced through celebration, they no longer feel like pressure—they feel like momentum. That’s Daniels’s version of motivation done right.

Daniels devotes an entire section to exposing the flaws of traditional reward systems—from “Employee of the Month” plaques to year-end bonuses. These, he says, are the corporate equivalent of junk food: expensive, infrequent, and nutritionally worthless for motivation. Real reinforcement must be immediate, contingent, and personal.

Why Recognition Programs Fail

Employee-of-the-month awards violate every law of reinforcement. They’re delayed (monthly), non-contingent (criteria unclear), competitive (only one winner), and often embarrassing (public exposure can be punishing). One rental-car worker told Daniels the secret to winning: “Be nice to your manager.” Such programs create more resentment than motivation. Instead, Daniels promotes criterion-based recognition: let everyone who meets a clear standard win. Success should be expandable, not scarce.

Redesigning Rewards That Actually Work

Effective rewards follow four rules: they must be valued by the recipient, contingent on specific performance, delivered frequently, and emotionally meaningful. Cash bonuses rarely meet these criteria—they’re delayed and impersonal. Social and symbolic rewards, when genuine, work better. He cites Japanese firms like Fuji Electric, where employees average 100+ implemented improvement ideas per year under a system themed “Finding joy and gladness at work.” Contrast that with American suggestion systems yielding fewer than one idea per worker annually; the difference lies in daily reinforcement and celebration, not culture.

Relationships Multiply Reinforcement

The final “R,” relationships, determines whether any recognition succeeds. “If people don’t like you,” Daniels writes, “nothing you do will work.” Reinforcement divorced from trust feels manipulative. Great managers start by pairing their presence with positive consequences—asking about families, celebrating wins, showing appreciation. Over time, their approval itself becomes a reinforcer. In this respect, Daniels parallels Dale Carnegie’s human-relations wisdom but grounds it in behavioral science: actions, not personality, create likability. When respect and reinforcement flow freely, workplace morale and performance rise together.

Daniels’s insistence that “business is behavior” leads naturally to measurement. But not the punitive kind most employees dread. In performance management, measurement isn’t about catching failures; it’s about creating feedback that helps people win. Instead of “who’s not measuring up,” Daniels asks, “how can measurement become a reinforcing process?”

Why Measurement Alone Doesn’t Motivate

Managers love the phrase “what gets measured gets done.” Daniels calls that a myth. People don’t act because of metrics; they act because measurement is linked to reinforcement. If performance charts provoke punishment, employees avoid data or falsify it (as scandal-ridden companies have shown). He tells of an accounting clerk who proudly graphed her own progress; seeing productivity double became its own reward. That’s the secret—make measurement visible, fair, and positive.

Counting vs. Judging

Daniels distinguishes two forms of measurement: counting (objective rates or frequencies) and judging (subjective ratings). Counting is stronger but not always possible, so he recommends behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS)—where each rating level is tied to specific observable behaviors. This eliminates the vague “meets expectations” trap. He also warns against ranking employees against one another; competition undermines teamwork. Measure performance against standards, not peers.

Above all, he cautions: measurement used for punishment evokes fear; measurement used for learning evokes excellence. Turn data into a mirror, not a weapon.

In the final chapters, Daniels elevates performance management to an ethical philosophy of leadership. Science, he argues, is amoral—it can manipulate or liberate. The leader’s values decide. Positive reinforcement, applied ethically, embodies honesty, fairness, and respect. When managers keep promises, connect behavior to outcomes, and treat employees as learners rather than problems, trust and integrity thrive.

Performance Management as a Way of Life

Daniels summarizes his model with five steps: Pinpoint → Measure → Feedback → Reinforce → Evaluate. Each step builds accountability. You define success concretely (Pinpoint), track it (Measure), show progress (Feedback), encourage it (Reinforce), then refine (Evaluate). It’s simple but profoundly powerful—a scientific loop for continuous improvement. When applied with empathy, it turns abstract values like honesty or justice into observable behaviors. Fair pay, timely recognition, and consistent follow-through create psychological safety—what Daniels calls “peace of mind.”

He closes with a moral challenge: managers control the environment that shapes behavior. That power can create either tyranny or trust. “The best defense against tyranny,” he paraphrases Skinner, “is the education of everyone in behavioral science.” The more people understand reinforcement, the less they can be manipulated and the more they can create workplaces of mutual success.

Ultimately, Bringing Out the Best in People isn’t just about productivity—it’s about cultivating dignity through scientific compassion. When done right, managing behavior becomes humanity at its best.