« Change Management Strategies: Rules for Team Change | Home | Effective Team Building: When to Team »
Leadership Skill: Rotten Rewards
By harveyrobbins | December 23, 2002
Despite some talk about team rewards, most team members are paid today exactly as they were paid in the days before teams, on a strictly individual basis.
We are rewarding individuals when we should be rewarding teams or the workforce as a whole. Not that there cannot or should not be “stars”. Once again the 80/20 rule comes into play: 20 percent of team members accounting for 80 percent of team success. But a successful team is always chipping away at the 80/20 rule - it seeks to get the very best out of all its members.
In a typical Japanese corporation today, about a third of all compensation is based on company performance.
On the other hand, we ask unions to help increase productivity when they know that success means decreasing the workforce, laying people off - the exact opposite of their best interests.
We establish bonuses to motivate people, but the bonuses don’t motivate because they are automatic or guaranteed. We patronize team members by dangling carrots in front of them. My, isn’t that an attractive carrot?
We set up policies and procedures to instruct team members to do the right things without being supervised every moment - but we fail to shape a culture within our organizations that lets teams and team members feel secure doing the right thing.
Teams will not carry out business objectives if doing so puts them at risk.
Teams don’t fail because the people on them are stupid. Nor because they don’t enshrine the virtues of customer satisfaction, quality and the rest. Teams fail when the people on them don’t feel safe going after their own stated goals.
Topics: Leadership Skill |