Influencer by The power to change anything

Author:The power to change anything
Language: eng
Format: epub

do anything. Each year a new survey publishes the fact that employees would appreciate more praise, and each year we apparently do nothing different.

This is odd in light of the fact that humans are actually quite good at rewarding incremental achievement with their small children. A child makes a sound that approximates “mama,” and members of the immediate family screech in joy, call every single living relative with the breaking news, ask the kid to perform on cue, and then celebrate each new pronouncement with the same enthusiasm you expect they’d display had they trained a newborn to recite “If” by Rudyard Kipling.

However, this ability to see and enthusiastically reward small improvements wanes over time until one day it takes a call from the Nobel committee to raise an eyebrow. Eventually kids grow up and go to work where apparently the words good and job aren’t allowed to be used in combination, or so suggest employee surveys. There seems to be a permanent divide between researchers and scholars who heartily argue that performance is best improved by rewarding incremental improvements, and the rest of the world where people wait for a profound achievement before working up any enthusiasm.

Reward Right Results and Right Behaviors

Perhaps people are stingy with their praise because they fear that rewarding incremental improvement in performance

means rewarding mediocrity or worse.

“So you’re telling me that every time a screwup finally does something everyone else is already doing, you’re supposed to hold some kind of celebration?”

Actually, no. If employees’ current performance level is unacceptable and you can’t wait for them to come up to

standard, then either terminate them or move them to a task that they can complete. On the other hand, if an individual is excelling in some areas, while lagging in others—but Design Rewards and Demand Accountability 207

overall is up to snuff—then set performance goals in the lagging areas, and don’t be afraid to reward small improvements.

This means that you shouldn’t wait for big results but should reward improvement in vital behaviors along the way.

For example, while working on a change project in a massive production facility in Texas, a member of the change steer-ing committee abruptly informed the leaders that the culture was too negative. Apparently he had read the surveys. His exact words were: “Do something right around here, and you never hear about it. But do something wrong, and it can haunt you for your entire career.”

With this in mind, the CEO asked all the leaders to keep an eye open for a notable accomplishment—something they could celebrate. For about a week nothing happened. Then one of the assembly areas set a performance record. The crew had assembled more units in one day than ever before. The CEO immediately called for a celebration.

While it seemed like a victory, the details the leaders uncovered as they researched this record revealed something quite different. It turned out that in order to set a record in production, the afternoon shift had reduced quality standards on the product. They

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