Staircase of Commitment
We are inclined to want to motivate staff. But in fact they come to work already motivated. We come wanting to do our best and to take pride in our work. (Douglas McGregor 'Human Side of Enterprise' 1960) We love being part of a dynamic and challenging environment and we hate the circumstances that make us apathetic

We trap our people in hierarchical command and control structures. The boss not the customer is the dominant force. The purpose of this structure is facilitate the giving of directions and to ensure compliance - appropriate for military situations. However the innovation and creativity of the individual is not recognised and is only needed relative to the actual task as designated. The waste is extreme.

We think that we can keep staff focused through the setting of targets and then making judgements relative to those targets. What happens in practice is that staff get trapped in situations in which they have very little influence. To meet the target they are forced into manipulating the data. This practice is very widespread. It destroys the credibility of our data, as well as undermining staff self esteem when forced to lie.

We say we have a desire to create teams, but then use structures that exploit self-interest and greed. We have career plans with a proliferation of grades. We have departments competing for budgets, we have bonus systems, performance related pay and all manner of commission systems. The result is that instead of working in partnership with our colleagues we compete - we euphemistically call it playing ‘politics.’

The basis of reward thinking is "Do this and I will give you that" It is an attempt to manipulate by providing a bribe. It is a distortion that results in conflict and complexity. ( Please do consider the very important work published by Alfie Khon in his book "Punished by Rewards.") What happens in simple terms is that the thinking moves from the this - the task - to the that - the bribe or manipulation. The result is that in place of constructive dialogue relative to the task conflict ensues relative to the bribe. This effect was seen as far back as 1929 in the Hawthorne experiments. But we have failed to learn, we keep trying to motivate through some type of reward scheme, be it PRP, or accreditation or qualifications or crude bonus systems. The only time reward schemes work is when the tasks are simple, repetitive and require no initiative. In the main, reward schemes are a major source of conflict and waste. Unfortunately 'reward thinking' is endemic in our society. We return to this theme when considering The Problem with Standards