Wednesday, April 11, 2007

The Carrot Principle

I read an interesting book on the weekend called, The Carrot Principle - How the Best Mangers Use Recognition to Engage Their People, Retain Talent, and Accelerate Performance by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton. Clearly this is a title that would attract anyone who is trying to lead a company.

The gist of the message is covered in the title which is appropriate rewards motivate people. One thing that I like about the book is it talks about goal setting, communication trust and accountability, and the use of carrots as an accelerator to make all of this work faster and easier.

The book has a multitude of statistics and studies which of course adds to the credibility.

One thing that I have found over the years is formalized carrot programs become stilted and can even become entitlement instead of being earned. Similar to performance metrics – sometimes they focus on the wrong thing and are given to people for performing only one part of the job when inherently the job is more complex than just one dimension.

This said, the book definitely reminded me that I need to work harder at recognizing performance.

I have a simple compensation philosophy (and I know the carrot is not all about compensation) and that is "if the company does well, the people should do well", or in other words, the company should pay what they can afford to pay which allows staff to participate in success.

2 Comments:

At 4:45 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think that rewards are necessary. Not only that it motivates employees into doing better, it also gives them a sense of responsibility. They know that to get a reward, they need to do their job better. By aiming for it, they develop responsibility over their work.

 
At 10:31 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think it's a common knowledge for everyone that rewards are helpful in motivating people.

The idea of developing responsibility is something we don't recognize. It's true that some have the feeling of responsibility but others will just turn reckless.

 

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