“Maybe, I will have to give them some more training. That might perk them up,” Victoria replied. “The J-curve says that productivity on anything new will decline before it gets better, but more training might be the ticket.”

“And what else?” I prodded. Victoria was getting push back as her team took on more responsibilities.

“I guess I could talk to them, as a group, let them know how much I was counting on them,” she added.

“Those are both things that you could do, probably won’t hurt, but probably won’t have the impact you are interested in,” I explained. Victoria’s face twitched. She was looking for more approval than I was giving.

“Both things you suggest,” I continued, “occur before you get the behavior you want. Most managers go there. It’s not that it’s bad, just not very powerful. The power is not in what you set up before the behavior, but what you set up after the behavior. Consequences. And the most powerful consequence is a positive consequence.”

“You mean like a bonus?” Victoria guessed.

“A bonus is a reward, not a consequence. An immediate positive consequence is more powerful than a reward. Rewards are always delayed, can get taken away, the qualifications may change. Immediate reinforcement is more powerful than an uncertain reward.”

“I don’t know. If I can’t ply them with money, what can I do?” Victoria cringed.

I was meeting with the production team, and they were a bit disgruntled. Actually, they were pissed.

“We had this big meeting last month. The theme was WHATEVER IT TAKES,” Barbara explained. “And they offered a bonus if we met our goals every day this month.”

I nodded, listening. All the faces were quiet, stone quiet, intense.

“We were up to the last day,” she continued. “As we were counting the last batch, on the last day, we discovered a defect, not just one, the whole batch was bad. We had to scrap everything. We pulled the morning’s production run. Same thing. A whole day’s work had to be re-done, and if we were going to get our bonus, we were going to have to stay on past our shift.”

“Did you tell your supervisor?” I asked.

“No, way. He doesn’t have a bonus on the line, we do. So we pulled another batch of material off the shelf. We had to use every last piece. And the team agreed we would stay over until we finished. You see, they won’t pay the bonus if we have to go into overtime, so everybody punched out while we worked.”

“And?”

“And we got it done. Made the quota. Quality passed. High fives all around. At least that’s what we thought. Next morning, though, you would have thought we had set fire to the place. We all got yelled at, and now we hear they are re-thinking our bonus.”

“We lost our best salesperson,” Krista explained. “I don’t know what happened. She had been with us for four years, was making good money, won salesperson of the year last December. I am confused.”

“Were you able to talk to her, before she left, to find out the story?” I asked.

“She had a de-brief with HR, but I don’t know if we ever get the truth out of those exit interviews.”

“They why do you think she quit?”

“I think she had been promised a crack at some of our bigger accounts,” Krista started. “But our Director of Sales and Marketing decided to hold back. Instead, he re-assigned a bunch of smaller accounts to her. He kept the big accounts for himself, even though he doesn’t make commission on them.”

“How do you think that made her feel?” I prompted, knowing the answer.

“You could tell it was a big let-down. I guess the money and the awards weren’t good enough for her.”

“What do you think she was looking for in her job?”

“Funny, she said she didn’t feel like she was growing. I think she was bored. My opinion, she wanted more challenge.”

“First of all, who’s goal is it?” I asked. Gordon was perplexed. His memo to the team fell flat and he needed their cooperation to complete the project.

“Well, it’s my goal, but it’s their goal. I gave it to them,” he explained.

I sat still. Gordon finally broke the silence. “Okay, it’s my goal.”

“And your job is to get your team engaged to achieve your goal. How can you do that? I gotta tell you. I looked at the project specs and the deliverables and the milestones aren’t that exciting.”

“Well, yes, but when the project is finished, overall, it will be quite an accomplishment. That’s how I described the vision in my memo,” Gordon continued.

“And you think a memo is the best way to engage your team? This is not Mission Impossible. Your memo is not as exciting as a tape that self-destructs.” I stopped and let Gordon stew for a bit. “No one listens to you, no one reads your memos. Yet, you need them to cooperate to achieve your goal. How are you going to do that?” -TF

Hassan started this the other day looking for Reasons People Work. Here is Elliott’s take:

From Social Power and the CEO: -Elliott Jaques
People want work in which they can have the opportunity to exercise their full potential capability, to spread their wings widely, to receive a fair compensation for that work and to be recognized and understood as not needing artificial carrot and stick treatment on order to get on with that work.

By work, I mean an organism’s use of judgment in making the decisions necessary to reach a goal. Goal directed work is a basic feature of all life.

All humans need to do work that not only benefits oneself, but is, at the same time, of value to others.

It may be noted that, not only do millions gain work opportunities by becoming engaged in employment, but need something on the order of 40 hours per week of such engagement. That is what explains the fact that the employment work week, which came down to 40 hours during the first half of the twentieth century, has gone no lower. Any smaller number of hours is not sufficiently fulfilling. Indeed, people who work on their own, routinely spend many more than 40 hours per week.

Tomorrow
What is Work?

Yesterday’s question: Reasons people work? brought some very thoughtful responses. You can see them all here.

Many of you subscribe by email so unless you follow the link above you are going to miss this one, from Ozzie Gontang, a good friend and Vistage Chair in San Diego. You can visit his blog Mindfulness.

From Ozzie on Reasons People Work:
As social animals, since we are herd or pack animals, there is a drive to contribute, to find meaning and purpose in what we do. Work allows us to challenge what we are capable of becoming.

The word competition means to “seek with” so work is a way of measuring one’s value to community and to oneself. Since the measure of performance is performance, work allows us to measure ourselves against our best performance in being the unique world class human I can create and instrument myself to be.

It is interesting that the word “job” which is Anglo-Saxon and means a lump was presumably used at the beginning of the industrial revolution meaning that someone could not do a job/lump of work. What one needed was the bigger picture in which the piece/job/lump existed. The old story of laying brick or building a cathedral.

Two hundred and fifty years later we are afraid of losing our “lumps” and also that in our global economy we are brought back to the fact that we are and always have been: interdependent.

Tomorrow
More thoughts on this subject from Elliott Jaques.