🎯🐳Whale Done! The Power of Positive Relationships in Steemit🐳

Came across the book Whale Done! The Power of Positive Relationships as a young manager ten years ago. The book was first published in 2002. Picking up the book was no accident, aside from having read Ken Blanchard's other work in the book The One Minute Manager and loving it, I had a feeling that building and maintaining positive relationships may be the most important leadership lesson I will ever learn.

It is only in retrospect that I can confirm, that feeling ten years ago was absolutely right.

This is part of a series that started with a thought about bringing things I am passionate about in Steemit. I am a student of life. I read one book per month. I would really love to read more, but one is what my schedule currently allow. I study for the purpose of being able to share learning with my staff. I have a young and energetic team, they are also really passionate about what we do. Their youth gives them rigor, though it also means they are inexperienced.

What we lack in experience we compensate for through continuous education.

After reading a book, I would gather my staff and do a short talk about things I learned from the book. I would then encourage bouncing ideas and ask about how we can apply those key learning to our reality as work. My staff looks forward to those sessions, and have in fact started their own hunt for new things to learn and share.

Last month, I thought about using ideas and principles learned from reading books, and relate it to my Steemit experience with the objective of trying to make newer Steemian's experience more enjoyable, and learning curve shorter.

Here are the other posts in this series:

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up & Who to Follow in Steemit
Good to Great & Steemit
Happiness Chemicals and Steemians' Evolution
Five Elements of Effective Thinking & Steemit

About The Authors

Kenneth Hartley Blanchard is the Chief Spiritual Officer of San Diego, California based company - The Ken Blanchard Companies. The Ken Blanchard Companies is a training and consulting firm on management with international clients. I first came across Ken Blanchard through his other work The One Minute Manager. That book was translated to several languages, and sold over thirteen million copies.

Thad Lacinak describes himself as behaviorist, author of Whale Done series, leadership and training consultant. In 2008, Thad retired from a 35-year career at Busch Entertainment Corporation (BEC), as Vice President and Corporate Curator of Animal Training where he directed animal training and enrichment efforts at all U.S. Sea World and Busch Gardens Theme Parks. Thad oversaw and coordinated the efforts of over 450 animal trainers and keepers at these parks. In short, Mr. Lacinak had the world’s largest animal training staff as well as the world’s largest collection of trained animals under his purview. He then started his own company called Precision Behavior based in Merritt Island, Florida. In this role, he manages project development and consulting and works to advance animal behavior modification techniques and trainer safety within the zoological community.

Jim Ballard is a writer, corporate trainer, and an educator. He has written a number of inspirational books, including Mind Like Water and What's the Rush? He has coauthored several popular books along with bestselling business guru Ken Blanchard.

Steemit Review

I've always thought of Steemit as a platform of positivity. The book is all about the use of positive reinforcement that the authors re-engineered into a whole new level of positivity they called "accentuating the positive".

The Whale Done Approach was presented in the book through a narration of a third person character's experiences at SeaWorld. Wes Kingsley is a manager who took some time-off to escape from family and office life which he is finding difficult to balance. He decided to wander at the famous Shamu Stadium at SeaWorld, primarily to see the show of huge killer whale perform in perfect unison with their trainers, who are less than 2% of the wales' weight.

The key observations from the trainer-whale relationship were then presented in an educational way on how to train and motivate people.

The Whale Done Approach and Steemit

Build Trust

The book starts with this message with saying how building trust can be a slow, but rather important process. The trainers involved in training the killer whales have to win their trust before they can expect them to do any of the acts they perform with hope not to be eaten in the process 😭 🐳. This is the same in leadership. Trust is the basic foundation of relationships, it can be established by being reliable through delivering to promises, being honest, showing that you have integrity, and most importantly being open.

In Steemit, building relationships based on trust can be achieved through engagement with the community, whether online through Steemit or the many platforms connected to the blockchain, or offline through activities, and meetups in support of the community's objectives.

We see really good content creators who leaves the platform for not doing so well. They missed that this is a social media platform and building connections, is no less important than creating good contents. If nobody knows you, who will support you?

We've also seen users who rose to great heights only to be quickly reversed because of lack of integrity, not delivering on promises or commitments, or just plain betrayal of trust given to him or her. Building trust is not a one-time event, it is rather an on-going effort, most specially as your grow in terms of both following and reputation.

Accentuate The Positive

Positive reinforcement is another great lesson from the book. It is focused on catching people demonstrate the right behavior and encouraging repeat of such behaviors.

This can be achieved in Steemit by as simple as leaving an encouraging comments. We already have enough critics in the world, what we are in need of is more encouragements.

When Mistakes Occur, Redirect the Energy

The book spoke about different types of responses to mistakes. The first and the most popular is ignoring. Negative response in form of an angry look, criticism, or raised tone of voice. The book proposes a different approach in terms of responding to mistakes, one that is characterized by redirection. This means getting the attention back to what is supposed to be done in the first place, or pointing to another activity where the person can do better.

I see a lot of frustration over SPAM comments, and the response is typically hostile through a derogatory comment, or a downvote. Below is a response I wrote to what may be considered as a SPAM comment by someone whose been downvoted enough to have a reputation score of three. The user might not listen, but that is not up to me anymore. I really hope he/she appreciated my comment and apply my advise on his/her journey moving forward.

Here's a couple of comments I left to a new Steemian who posted a photo with no text save for the title and the tags. I could have just ignored the post and move on to the next, but wanted to share things I learned from earlier experience in the platform.

The WHALE DONE Response

• Praise immediately
• Be specific about what they did right or almost right
• Share your positive feelings about what they did
• Encourage them to keep up the good work

I think meaningful interactions in Steemit should have these four elements. I need to exert more effort on that myself, but really am trying hard.

Credits:

Cover Photo Background
Whale Done!: The Power of Positive Relationships

References

Ken Blanchard
Thad Lacinak
Jim Ballard
Building positive relationships – the whale done way

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