My next meeting was to hear the other side of the story.
“I hear you are re-thinking your productivity bonus for the production crew?” I asked.
“You bet we are,” Ralph stated flatly. “I know you just met with them. You have no idea what kind of havoc they created. It’s bad enough we had to scrap an entire day’s production run. Then they pulled all the inventory and re-ran everything, so I have a full crew here today with nothing to do. We are trying to get some more raw materials in, but we are having to pay a 30 percent rush charge. And to top it off, they knew they weren’t supposed to work overtime, so they punched out. Now I have someone complaining to the Department of Labor that we forced them to work off the clock. What a mess.”
“See what you started?”
“What are you talking about?” Ralph stepped back.
“That bonus you created,” I replied.
“Nothing wrong with a bonus, I just can’t believe what the crew did, just to get it,” he defended.
“So, you set up an environment of distrust and now you can’t believe how your game backfired.”
“What do you mean distrust?”
“You decided to withhold $100 of their pay, because you didn’t trust your team to do their best.”
Ralph looked puzzled. “No, the $100 was a bonus.”
“No, you were holding $100 of their pay, because you didn’t trust your team to do their best,” I repeated. “You set up the game, they were just playing it and you didn’t like the outcome. By the way, they earned their bonus according to your rules, so you are obligated to pay it.”
Ralph just stared.
This is one of those great stories of the manager feeling that what he did is right. The culture that he came up in is one of withholding and punitive reduction, the produce and your fired line.
The team did act just the way that the manager wanted. He wanted them to work off the clock and to produce – the incentives created the outcome.
It call returns to a Kantian view of people – Treat all people as ends in and of themselves, never as means to reach an end.
And to
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