Is your Appraisal system used to provoke more performance? Is the old GE method of “rank and yank” used to remove the 10% lowest performing people? Does your organisation use a plethora of systems to coerce and bribe employees to be more effective? An article I shared recently alleged that Amazon managers were hiring more people than they needed, because they were incentivised to fire the least well performing. The perverse effects of incentives are well documented – don’t do it!

Money – pay, bonuses, rewards – is a complicated subject. For something that has been around for thousands of years, human beings have a very poor understanding of what it does. Human lives are so very different now from those far off times, at least for the wealthy who do not have to worry about their safety, starving or their future. You can see that the relationship with money – it provides security – changes as lives change. What does that mean for the leaders of organisations today? Enjoy the video.

Professional people do not need motivating by their managers do they? They know what to do, so you just let them get on with it. What is your experience? Perhaps leaving professional people to “just get on with it” is not the answer. Professional people have already shown that they can defer gratification by going through their qualification process. They usually do have a strong and far-sighted view of the right thing. Managing professionals is on a par with herding cats. They have minds of their own and want to do it their way when they are ready. But what if doing it “their way” does not match the organisation’s needs?