I wrote about 18 months ago about Alfie Kohn's provocative book, Punished by Rewards -- The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plan$, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes. This article in The Business Innovation Insider provides an important quote from Kohn:
My perception is that the closer you get to workplace business perfection, the less important 'rewards' in the most visible sense become. (Of course there is compensation -- I don't know of any successful business that will be around for long if it doesn't fairly compensate its employees!) When things aren't quite right, rewards can act like golden handcuffs -- holding things together, sort of. In the end, of course, the business crumbles under the weight of its negative environment.Q:. What type of environment is most conducive to building a culture of innovation?
Alfie Kohn: The absence of rewards is necessary, but not sufficient, to create a culture of innovation. What we also need is what I like to call the "3 C's": choice, collaboration, and content. Choice means that employees should be able to participate in making decisions about what they do every day. Collaboration concerns the need to structure effective teams to facilitate both an exchange of ideas and a climate of support. Content refers to what people are asked to do. (As Frederick Herzberg put it many years ago, "If you want people motivated to do a good job, give them a good job to do.") A workplace characterized by these three features is one where the focus is on working *with* employees to solve problems and devise solutions -- as opposed to doing things *to* employees by treating them like pets.
Business people must tread carefully in moving to a 'reward-free' environment. Unless the other aspects are all in place, things will collapse -- and (significantly) if your business diverges from the ideal model to the, sadly, more conventional approach, you may find, if you have built a reward-free model, your now-disgruntled employees will leave you sooner than later.
I never contracted with the commission-only publishers described in my article, and now believe that all sales employees should be offered a fair salary to start. However, I haven't quite made the jump to 100 per cent salary just yet. I will however pull up an article explaining how one very successful business person has done this, and achieved great results.
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I have to take issue with Mr. Kohn’s comments.
He said: “Punished by Rewards -- The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plan$, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes.”
Since when were incentives bribes?
And when he stated: “The absence of rewards is necessary, but not sufficient, to create a culture of innovation.
That sentence makes no sense.
And when he goes on to say: “What we also need is what I like to call the "3 C's": choice, collaboration, and content. “
So what. That’s pretty accepted in any company.
Mr. Kohn obviously admonished anyone or any company advocating any type of acknowledgment for performance. That and his: “Punished by Rewards -- The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plan$, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes.” is indicative of a socialist view where individualism is to be not only tolerated, but subordinated to the greater good of the “community.”
But then again, Alfie Kohn is an American academic, so no “A”s, gold stars, praise or incentives should ever be given to the “workers”, but only elitist academic. Perhaps he feel the same thing about his university degree. Perhaps that should be rescinded and never again should any college or university award “degrees” - more “bribes.’
He also forgets, or since he has never been a business owner has not learned what we have, is that “disgruntled” employees leave for many reasons, and money, rewards or their absence, are just ne of the many reasons. In fact, during my 2 years as a retail store manager and 33 as a business owner I have found a tremendous advantage of the use of incentives, monetary or other wise. Heck, even when I receive one or more incentives of our own customers, the customer obtains additional positive results.
In fact, I find the mind set of referring to incentives as bribes, "offensive", to use the often utilized far left term. They have worked as long as mankind has existed and in every capacity possible. And we humans have been trained since beginning to learn how to walk to respond positively or negatively to incentives. So that societal training, and expectation just continues into our adult lives.
His book appears to be a subtle attempt at preparing the reader for socialism indoctrination. Unfortunately he selected the wrong element (the business world) of society for the market of his book. Personally I’ll stick with the psychiatric concepts of action and reaction, condition and response, and hundreds of years of proven results due to “incentives” in both personal and business relationships.
I guess comrade Kohn's readers should all be happy that at least it’s nice of Mr. Kohn to allow his workers to receive monetary compensation instead of two loaves of bread and a bottle of wine as their weekly stipend.
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