I just read another bad leadership article.
It was in a popular magazine, and it was touting one of the biggest misconceptions you will ever see in the leadership training world — that boosting employee productivity is a matter of creating the right incentives and sanctions.
Don’t get me wrong.
There was a BIT of good information in the article.
Like avoiding incentives that pit employees against one another, where there are winners and losers (think about the recent uproar at United Airlines when it leaked out publicly that they had switched their bonus structure to a lottery style structure, where employees were eligible to win prizes–such as cars–while the losers won nothing, even if they met or exceeded all their performance goals for the evaluation period.
Generating resentment among your people is a pretty bad strategy.
And, don’t get me wrong, creating incentives and rewards can be a powerful way to motivate behavior…
…at least in the short term.
And therein is the misconception.
Dozens of recent management studies (like this one) show that rewards only incentivize in the short term.
They are external motivators, which can (kind of) work for simple tasks and simple goals.
But for achieving complex goals that require high-performance talent working together to solve critical challenges, you have to change hearts and minds.
Rewards do nothing about your people’s attitudes towards what they are working on. The motivation is all external — to get the carrot.
In fact, the same studies and others show that if employees understand and feel good about the mission, and they believe in it, performance is actually higher when there are NO carrots in the form of rewards.
There is a place for showing appreciation, but it’s after a job well done by employees and team members who are doing a great job because they are happily working towards organizational goals. Thoughtful rewards given randomly for a job well done, in the language of appreciation team members “speak” are the most effective ways to inspire your people and boost productivity.
So, the key is not structuring incentives to force externally motivated short-term behavior change, but to change attitudes towards work (internal motivation) with a clear organizational mission that everyone knows and believes in, a culture of appreciation and collaboration, where empowerment is fostered, through freedom along with transparency and accountability.
I talk about simple ways you can achieve these ends in my free training.
It’s a popular training for a reason.
And it contains lots of great, actionable tips.
Watch our training, which covers these tips and more.
