by Joe McCannon and Sachin H. Jain | 12:00 PM August 7, 2014
People have a deep need to feel that their contributions to the group are acknowledged — even celebrated. Financial compensation alone cannot satisfy that requirement.
Fairly assigning credit, however, is difficult. In a knowledge economy, the intellectual origin of a given idea is very hard to document. Where new concepts are often conceived collaboratively, how do we know where credit is due? If one employee insists that he or she made more of an effort or contributed more to an outcome than another, how can we verify that? Getting employees to even discuss the topic can be difficult given that many feel conflicted about it: They want to be acknowledged but are embarrassed by their desire for external recognition.
We have tested an approach that has seemed to address these issues in our jobs in the nonprofit and government sectors, where financial incentives can be scarce and other forms of recognition, therefore, are especially important. This method seeks to both eliminate resentments and arguments over recognition and foster collaboration toward better results. It includes these four elements:
Tie individual recognition to group performance. When we’ve tied individual recognition to the overall success of the group, we’ve been able to reduce tension over who did what while reinforcing teamwork. A similar approach is used in the National Hockey League, where a “plus-minus” system calculates how often a skater is on the ice when a goal happens, awards a point when the team scores and subtracts one when the opponent does. Over the course of a season or a career a player’s cumulative plus-minus score estimates how important his presence is to the overall success of the team. (Bobby Orr, the greatest defenseman in the league’s history, was a staggering “plus 597” for his career, meaning that when he was playing, the team scored 597 more goals than it surrendered.)
Recognize outcomes. Our experience has shown that the most successful teams align their recognition systems with the outcomes they want and periodically reassess the outcomes to determine whether they are still relevant. By contrast, we have seen many struggling teams that award recognition for activity metrics (e.g., length of service, attendance) that may not have direct bearing on those goals. Johns Hopkins Medical, the internationally renowned health care system, has recently taken a bold step toward rewarding outcomes. Instead of pegging academic advancement solely to peer-reviewed publication, it now provides academic physicians with points for a successful project to improve patient care or outcomes, regardless of publication.
When hiring, focus more on track records and less on pedigree. Let’s face it, people often are more impressed by an Ivy League degree than one conferred by a run-of-the-mill state school. While such credentials can impart some useful information about how hard job candidates have worked or their intelligence, the story of the book-smart Ivy Leaguer who enters an organization only to be flummoxed as he tries to put theory into practice is almost a cliché. One commonsensical approach for dealing with this issue is to winnow candidates for a position on the basis of their record in producing outcomes and only then consider their pedigree. Many organizations, of course, also rigorously reassess new hires at the end of a probationary period to make sure they really can contribute and fit the organization’s culture.
Embrace risk-taking and failure. In organizations where failure is viewed as a threat to recognition, conservatism and orthodoxy thrive. By contrast, many successful organizations value failure as integral to learning and improvement. Explicit recognition of failure offers an opportunity to demonstrate its importance. For decades NASA has rewarded admission of failure (versus hiding potentially problematic results). Likewise, the advertising agency Grey bestows a Heroic Failure Award, reinforcing the company’s emphasis on experimentation. Managers can put this into practice by dedicating time for post-mortem “hotwash” meetings, providing an opportunity to internally recognize team efforts and embrace all aspects of a project.
To be sure, the assignment of credit can never be perfect. Every organizational context will be different and bring with it its own challenges. However, when managers look beyond these hurdles and dedicate the time and effort to get this right – thoughtfully managing an economy of recognition in their organization – they will strengthen relationships, boost team morale, and have a tangible impact on the organization’s performance.
JOE MCCANNON
Joe McCannon is a consultant to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He previously served as a senior advisor to the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and as a vice president at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI).
SACHIN H. JAIN
Sachin H. Jain is chief medical information and innovation officer at Merck, an attending physician at the Boston VA Medical Center, and a lecturer in health care policy at Harvard Medical School. Follow him on Twitter at @sacjai.
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