Are You “Rewarding A While Hoping For B?”

Incentives matter. Rewards motivate people to behave in certain ways. Using incentives, therefore, is one great way to influence the form, direction and intensity of how people act. 

Goals also matter. They help us clarify where we’re headed and how to focus our efforts. Setting difficult, specific goals, therefore, is one of the best ways to motivate yourself and others (see the numerous studies on the topic, particularly those by Gary Latham and Edwin Locke). 

But goals and incentives can—and sometimes do—run amuck. 

And when that happens, it’s often in the form of “rewarding A while hoping for B,” a topic described thoroughly in the classic management article by Steven Kerr.  

That is, we often forget that it’s not just about what you’re rewarding formally; it’s also about what you’re rewarding informally. And it’s in the unintended informal rewards that we can run into trouble. 

Here’s a simple example: You assign a task to one of your direct reports. He quickly responds with a sub-par product with multiple errors. You’re frustrated, but you know that you can fix the errors about 10 times more quickly than he can. So you tell him that it’s not sufficient, but then you go ahead and fix the product yourself—leaving him with no more tasks to complete that day. 

What have you done? 

In addition to missing a training opportunity, you’ve informally rewarded your direct report for sub-par effort. By not having him go through the pain of fixing the problem, he now knows that he can get by with little effort. That leaves you at the office at 7 p.m., while he’s already home or at happy hour. 

Did you mean to reward poor performance? Of course not. But in a way, you did. 

Here’s another simple example: You set a team goal of 1,000 error-free shipments of one of your new products. If that occurs, everyone on the team will receive a $3,000 bonus. One of your people finds an error after one of the products ships, but it’s an error that the customer might not notice for quite a while. Have you rewarded that employee to speak up and report the problem, or have you rewarded silence?  

Here’s a bigger example: Wells Fargo. As you likely know, between about 2011 and 2016, the company set goals for its lower-level bank employees to sell additional products to its customers—a practice known as cross-selling. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. What company doesn’t want its customers to purchase and use more than one or two or three or more of its products or services? 

But what happened at Wells Fargo is that the incentives and goals were such that people—more than 5,000—found numerous “creative” ways to cross-sell. These methods included widespread opening of accounts for customers who didn’t request them and even using fake customers to pad one’s sales numbers. 

Here’s a Wall Street Journal recap of some of the highlights. 

Clearly, this was an error of management and leadership at a grand scale. It’s hard to claim that such a problem might be due to a few “bad apple” employees given that at least 5,000 were involved. 

Instead, it’s the barrel—the system. And in particular, it’s the incentive and goal-setting systems set in place by senior leaders—the “barrel makers.” They, along with the direct violators, are culpable. 

Incentives and goals are important aspects to guiding people’s effort at work. When properly aligned with organizational objectives, they can powerfully harness people’s ingenuity for the good of the team. 

But it’s equally important to remember that incentives and goals may have unintended consequences. So let’s be on guard for those ways—both big and small—in which we might be “rewarding A while hoping for B.”

Find this thought provoking? Leave a comment, like and share!

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About Ben Baran
Ben Baran, Ph.D., is probably one of the few people in the world who is equally comfortable in a university classroom, a corporate boardroom and in full body armor carrying a U.S. government-issued M4 assault rifle. More at www.benbaran.com and www.agilityconsulting.com.

On Strength Training and Leadership

Goals are everywhere, but they rarely correspond with behavior. To illustrate, here’s a quick story. 

I started taking strength training seriously in January 2013. I was serving in Afghanistan, and neither my military base nor the weather was conducive for my go-to physical exercise, running. 

So I dove into educating myself and practicing getting strong by focusing on kettlebell training and the “big lifts” in the world of barbells: squat, bench press, and deadlift. 

I made some progress, but I hit a plateau after a few months. This is common, but my plateau seemed unusually stubborn. I found this troubling, particularly given that my goal was to join the “1,000 Pound Club” by the time I was set to leave my base in late November. This means that the clock was ticking, reminding me of the dwindling of time left for me to squat, bench press, and deadlift a combined 1,000 lbs. 

Then, I started reading more from the renowned strength and conditioning coach and writer Dan John  (he’s full of great advice and philosophical musings, as is Pavel Tsatsouline).

At that moment in Afghanistan, one of Dan John’s most deceptively profound statements resonated with me like a quick slap to the face:

“The goal is to keep the goal the goal.”

Up until that point, I had been combining my strength training with some periodic treadmill running and other “cardio” exercise. But Dan John’s statement, “The goal is to keep the goal the goal,” illustrated how I was doing all kinds of things that weren’t conducive to my goal. In addition to my regular treadmill running, I wasn’t consuming enough protein each day, and I wasn’t getting enough sleep. 

So I changed. I aligned my schedule, my training program and my diet to that goal. I forged new habits and stuck to them. And on Nov. 8, 2013, I squatted 315, bench pressed 275 and deadlifted 425—for a total of 1,015 lbs. 

I’m not sharing any of that to brag. Not at all. Although I’m probably a little stronger than the average person and it was a nice personal milestone, it’s all relative. In the world of serious lifting, I’m really weak. 

So what does this have to do with leadership?

I’m sharing that personal experience because I think it has a great deal to do with what I see people struggle with over and over and over again. 

Leaders set goals and busy themselves with setting priorities. Organizations have numerous metrics to assess performance. That’s good, in and of itself. 

It’s necessary to have goals and ways to measure them, but it’s not sufficient if they don’t influence behavior. 

All too often, I encounter executives who are distracted. They have goals—indeed, often brilliant, strategic ones—but they fail to execute. It’s because they aren’t keeping the goal the goal. They fail to separate what they can do or even should do with what they must do. Their “priorities” are more often than not just lists of more stuff to do.

There’s a Russian or Chinese (or West Virginian, for that matter) proverb that states: “He who chases two rabbits, misses both.” 

It seems to me that distractions and “being busy” are killing both effectiveness and efficiency for leaders and organizations everywhere. Looking critically at my own life, I can find many examples.

But in an increasingly turbulent world—one in which we have increasingly greater numbers of flashy things vying for our attention—it seems like we could all perform at a higher level if we paused, identified what really matters and held ourselves accountable for behaving in ways that align with our top priority. 

Namely, I think that whether you’re trying to pick up something heavy or lead a team or guide an organization in a new strategic direction, it’s helpful to remember that goals are meaningless unless you truly commit to both the goal and what it’s going to take to achieve it—and what you’re going to prune from your list of activities (what’s your “to don’t” list?). 

So here’s to picking up something heavy, developing a new product, launching a new business or inspiring a team to go beyond what they thought possible—all while keeping the goal the goal. 

Find this thought provoking? Leave a comment, like and share!

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About Ben Baran
Ben Baran, Ph.D., is probably one of the few people in the world who is equally comfortable in a university classroom, a corporate boardroom and in full body armor carrying a U.S. government-issued M4 assault rifle. Visit: www.benbaran.com. 

Employee Motivation: Expectancy Theory

Expectancy theory is one of the most well-known theories of work motivation. It takes a rational approach toward human behavior, assuming that people make conscious decisions among alternatives. In this clip, I explain the basics of expectancy theory and some of the potential implications it has for managers.