Rewarding A Job Well Done

We’ve been talking about accountability, and in our last post we addressed the topic of employee appreciation. In this post, we’ll look at an example of a team that took the issue of employee appreciation to heart , making a plan to reward the right kind of behavior in an effective way. The leaders of this team learned that using positive reinforcement is a great way to strengthen personal accountability.

This particular IT team had been notorious for not recognizing team members for a job well done, something that was obvious in their low employee engagement scores . They realized, in fact, that they were rewarding and holding people accountable for the wrong things . They called their culture a hero worshiping one; for example, you were a hero if you worked all night or all weekend to fix a problem. Even if you were the very one who caused the error in the first place, you were the one held up as exceptional. They knew they were operating in a fire-drill mentality, and that this pace was not sustainable.

They needed to force themselves to engage in the longer-term advance thinking that would allow them to find more holistic solutions, and prevent any further emergencies. Yes, they needed to deal with the fire, but they had to work hard as a team afterward in order to keep the flames from igniting in the future. They needed to look at the bigger picture to discover the problem patterns and then brainstorm solutions, instead of staying stuck in an action-oriented mode. They needed to send a new message.

Now, this leadership team did not have strong interpersonal interest and skills, but they started writing thank-you notes for those individuals who had truly demonstrated the right behaviors – the kind they actually wanted to reinforce, such as working collaboratively across departments to resolve issues before they became full-blown forest fires, and taking more time to do the necessary up-front planning. Each senior leader brought their handwritten note to the staff meeting, and spent the first five minutes sharing these success stories, and passing the cards around for all of the leaders to sign. When the leaders saw these individuals after the meeting, they would reinforce the positive message and its impact by specifically thanking them for what they had done.

Well, the word spread, and not just about the thank-you notes and long-awaited recognition that they symbolized, but also about what was being recognized. You could literally see change happen among the leaders as they really thought about what they should be rewarding and among the employees as they received the recognition they had been missing.

Hopefully, you’ve realized by now the importance of personal accountability, and how leaders can reinforce it in one-on-one situations that will lead them to reward and recognize success. In our next post, we’ll turn our attention to the leader’s role in reinforcing responsibility at the team level.