Tag Archives: Motivation

Rewarding Hard Work Rewards the Wrong Thing

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Hard work and good work. Two things that should be rewarded and are. But sometimes I believe we place more reward on hard work then on good work. I think this is backwards, and it hurts companies more than they know.

It goes something like this. Stay late, get rewarded. Deliver a day ahead of a deadline, get rewarded. Create a great design in half a day and cut out early? Well, the boss wants to know, what else could you have done with that extra 30 minutes?

It doesn’t always happen like this, and, in the long run, good work is what is rewarded, by the market. But for the day-to-day it’s the martyrs that tend to get the kudos. Regardless of whether that extra work is of any real benefit to the company at all.

Why is this? I think it’s two fold.  One, good work is much harder to do than hard work. Hard work, ironically, is the easiest pursuit in business. It’s easy to put your head down and grind out a ten hour workday. Much easier, than say, creating a product that resonates with your audience. Two, it is exceedingly hard to evaluate good work as it is happening; to the point where it’s easier to revert back to the tried and true, and ask “how hard are they working?”

In this TED talk Daniel Pink, author of the new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (affiliate link) describes a fascinating study call the “Candle Problem” wherein a group of people motivated by financial rewards based on performance (speed in this case) perform worse at solving the problem than those without any incentive to solve it as fast as possible.

And I believe that this thinking, that rewards for metrics like speed and volume over quality, is what ruins many work places and diminishes the value of the employees that work there.  For example, it’s been said that Apple’s upcoming tablet computer has been in prototype for at least 6 or 7 years.   Never quite ready for the big time in the world of high Apple standards.  Is there any question that it will crush the slew of PC-based tablets just released at CES last week in order to get “ahead” of the Apple launch?  There shouldn’t be.  Apple will own the dominant tablet device.

Now, do you think that the product managers and designers on the tablet are more worried about making the tablet their life’s work, or shipping something quickly?  The answer is obvious.  Apple values good over hard or fast or any other attribute.  More and more the successful companies are the ones that value good thought and products over hard work and speed.

It’s not that hard work and speed to market aren’t important.  Of course they are.  But on a continuum of business priority in what order do they fall and in what way are they rewarded?  Is good thought rewarded above hard work? Is it even rewarded in the same way that hard work is?  Highly doubtful. Highly foolish.

So back to you.  When is the last time you evaluated how you reward your people? If successful companies are more successful at rewarding good thought over hard work, it seems imperative that your people are rewarded the same way.

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What if there was no one to tell you no?

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What if there was no one to tell you no? How would that change your job? What would you different? What if the way things ran in your business/department/division was your call? What if there wasn’t the excuse of someone telling you no to hold you back. What would you do right now? I’m betting that for most of you it’s different then what you’re doing right now. It’s probably more interesting and exciting as well. It probably pushes the envelope and redefines the way your company thinks about itself and how it interacts with your customers.

It’s probably a really good idea. It probably won’t get the thought it deserves.

I think we’re often too quick to kill our most creative ideas. It’s easy to look at how the corporate bureaucracy grinds down true innovation and give up before you even really get started. Why waste time and energy even thinking about an idea when time and again you’ve seen exciting ideas replaced with middle of the road compromises that feel and look safe? Why try, when it is so clear that your idea faces long, long odds? It’s easier to just go with the flow and shelve that idea for another, safer time.

This is a grave mistake.

As marketers it’s our job to continue to not only got to the well for great ideas time and time again; but it’s also our job to fight for our ideas, to champion new ways of doing things that make our businesses better and our customers happier. It’s our job to keep envisioning what it would be like if there wasn’t anyone to say “no.”

When an idea dies or gets watered down it is not an occasion to give up on innovating – it is a call to push even harder.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the highly-regarded ad agency sums it up best in their employee handbook:

It takes a special person to succeed here, one who has a passion, confidence and work ethic to believe in their ability to come up with more great ideas if and when their original great idea dies. And ideas do die here. On every account. In every department. Great, groundbreaking ideas die horribly sad deaths. But what makes us better than most is our ability to go back to the well and come up with more, better and even greater ideas.

This is the charge of every marketer. Keep the innovative ideas, the ones that would see the light of day without the naysayers, coming. Over and over again. In the face of probable defeat, that is the job of the great marketer. Because the next idea may just be the one that changes everything.

Don’t let the coffee run out

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A photo of a cup of coffee.

When I was 15 I learned a valuable lesson. I worked at a local convenience store on the weekends while in high school for some extra spending cash. On Sundays I had to open the store at 4am and stay until 2pm when the owner would arrive to relieve me. Since then, I’ve never believed that all 8 hour shifts are equal.

The owner would remind me every Saturday afternoon to make sure that I didn’t let the coffee run out on Sunday. Coffee and newspapers were the two biggest sellers and she never wanted the store to be without coffee. It was her only directive. She would even show up early some days and make a beeline for the coffee pots to make sure i wasn’t falling down on the job and that we had fresh brew.

There is lots to do on a slow morning in a convenience store. Take inventory, front the shelves, stock the cooler, do some light cleaning and plenty more. All important, all subordinated to the need for fresh, hot coffee always available.

I was reminded of this simple, clear directive this week with the slew of goal planning posts for 2010. Some elaborate, some less so, all process driven to help you set your agenda for 2010. Useful, likely, but effective? Questionable.

I’d argue that we all have a goal or directive like the one my old boss had. One that the rest are subordinate too. That if we take care of that one thing all else will seem to be what it truly is-secondary.

It may be as simple as keeping fresh coffee always on. It may be much more complex, like opening a new company. Either way there is probably one thing, one objective that trumps the rest. Get that one thing right and you’ll be way ahead of where you are now.

So instead of setting goals and making elaborate plans may I suggest trying this instead? Without any uncertainty, pin down that one thing that will truly make a difference this year – and then go for it with abandon. I bet you’ll end up where you want to be.

Image via Wikipedia.