Reward Based on Performance… and Only Performance

By Eva Rykr on January 30, 2010 2 Comments

There’s nothing more motivating than being rewarded and recognized for high performance when you have earned it. Similarly, it is very defeating and disengaging to watch someone who hasn’t worked as hard get more recognition than you. We all instantly know when such an injustice has been committed. But can we tell when we are treating others in such a manner?

I recently came across a video that asked, ‘Are you playing favorites?‘ In order to find out whether you are playing favorites with your people, rank each one of your direct reports (using a scale of 1-10 works) on the following dimensions:

How much I think they like me.
How much they are like me.
How much they contribute to the company or to our customers.
How much positive feedback and recognition I give them.

If your ratings for #3 and #4 are correlated, you are not playing favorites. However, if #4 is correlating with #1 or #2, you may be creating an environment that teaches people to suck up to you!

2 Responses to “Reward Based on Performance… and Only Performance”

Michael Leiter says on: 30 January 2010 at 7:53 am

Eva
Excellent points. It’s so difficult for leaders to catch when they’re straying from a focus on performance into personal likes and dislikes. The pleasant, attractive, and charming people just seem so capable. As with much in psychology, it resolves to a measurement problem: do you have a way to evaluate performance objectively, and preferably in a way that moves it from a single-person evaluation to one that is more of a shared process.
Still, there is room to slip off the rails, but a solid system tones down the personal preferences.
Michael
http://www.workengagement.com
@workengagement

Reply
- Eva Rykr says on: 30 January 2010 at 8:32 am
  
  Thanks for stopping by, Michael! I think the most important part may be just being aware of the fact that, as humans, we have a tendency to do allow our personal preferences to cloud our judgment. And caring about whether or not we make such errors in the future. Still, objective evaluations will help regardless of whether that is the case or not.