Killer whales do not get reprimanded for doing things wrong, instead their trainers encourage them when they do things right and distract them when they do things wrong.

And motivational speaker and best selling author of the One Minute Manager, Ken Blanchard, said that managers can take a leaf out of the trainer?s book and learn to give positive feedback.

?There is no negative interaction between the trainer and the killer whales,? he said in his talk called Whale Done!. ?And if you can do that with killer whales, what can you do with people??

He said that when trainers got a new whale, they spent a lot of time playing with it and feeding it, and told Dr. Blanchard they wanted to convince them they meant them no harm.

And Dr. Blanchard said that this was very important, for staff to feel management meant them no harm and would not randomly, say, get rid of ten percent of staff in a cull.

In the talk, Dr. Blanchard said it was important for managers to know where they were going. ?Are you a serving leader, or a self-serving leader?? he asked. ?What is your purpose??

And he said that after the boss knew where he was going, and that he was there to serve and get the best out of his staff, then things would start to improve.

Dr. Blanchard said that after people start to perform at work, it is really difficult to keep things going.

And he said that managers often, after a good start, left employees to themselves, only swooping in on staff when they had done something wrong. ?How do you know if you are doing a good job?

?No one has yelled at me lately,? he said, saying this was not the way to manage properly. ?The big thing you have to do is accent the positive and catch them doing something right,? he said. Dr. Blanchard said that when he was a college professor, he would always get into trouble for being unorthodox.

On the first day of term he would give out the final exam, and spend the rest of the year teaching his pupils to answer the questions.

?Life is all about getting ?A?s. You want people to potentially win.?

And he said this was very much what bosses had to do. They had to help match what staff needed to what they could get from the manger.

He also said that one thing that is not done enough is day to day coaching.

He rejected evaluation forms as a waste of time, filled out to satisfy the managers, and were not true tests of performance.

And he said that when staff do something wrong the focus should be not on telling them off, but redirecting them, and if a person has to be chastised, it should last no more than a minute.

?The best option is to redirect them back to the goal that you had in mind or to something else,? he said. ?When there is a mistake, don?t spend a lot of energy on it.?

And he said that most people already knew they had made a mistake, and did not need to have a strip torn off them. ?There is not much you can do about the past,? he added, saying that being judge and jury did not help the matter.

?What you are doing is praising progress,? he said, adding that they may not have got it all the way right, but may be getting there. ?Accent the positive. People love to be recognised, this is a universal factor.?