Reward and incentive structures are often designed around the performance results that are relevant to the business of the enterprise. One reason for this is that everyone can see and easily measure the bottom line. While this will often be a necessary input, it is nowhere near sufficient to result in high levels of productivity. My own test for this is to ask teams and whole organizations within the enterprise what would make them more productive or likely to meet the stated targets. I would be surprised if any of them responded that more money would make any difference to their productivity.

Another popular approach is to measure by accountability and individual results. The hope here is that by making each senior manager accountable for something specific, they will ensure that their teams use everything at their disposal to fulfill those targets. The process is then repeated until each person in the organization is accountable for something. How can we then be surprised by the “management trap” where the last manager in the chain micromanages their team’s activities and even assigns and tracks tasks to the atomic level? Since everyone is focused and every task has an owner, this should result in the goals of the enterprise being delivered in the most productive manner, right?

In such an environment, helping others to achieve their targets becomes unnatural behavior since this can only be done at the expense of delivering the results that you are personally accountable for. Even with the best intentions, there is a barrier to the help that an individual can provide, since only the person accountable really knows enough about the work to continue doing it. The same is true for teams or departments, which is why they often operate in silos.

One of my former teams was suffering badly from this when I joined. Each developer was responsible for the delivery of one or more projects, each varying in effort between 3 and 12 months. Everyone knew which developer had the most critical or toughest project – or in this case both. They were each secretly glad they were not him. To make things worse, his knowledge of the application and phenomenal design and coding skills meant he was constantly redirected to small urgent projects or involved in complex support issues. Despite occasional short contributions from the rest of the team, the result was a perpetual delay of that project - and the rest were also faring badly. The team decided to self-organize around the main projects, thereby putting our own individual objectives at risk and potentially facing disciplinary action - I was personally referred to HR for this. We all spent the next two weeks pairing with and learning from our friend everything there was to know about the top project. During the following three weeks the team made the first delivery on it in nine months.

The issue, I believe, is at the enterprise level rather than at any one of the management levels a team reports into. I agree with those who suggest that the prevalent need of the individuals we work with is not to be told what to do or how to do it. For us the critical step was to work together to define these as a team. As our team evolved, we defined the behavior we thought was “right”, that we wanted to see in ourselves and wanted others to identify looking in on our daily work. One of these took the form of a team principle:

We value the productivity of others above our own.

This turned out to be one of the strongest accelerating factors on our productivity. If you think this simple assertion might be the right thing to do in your work, feel free to apply it. Gather your teams to discuss what behavior would help them increase productivity and to define guiding principles for themselves. Turn those into department or enterprise guiding principles so everyone uses them when making his or her own daily decisions. At the same time, soften the stance on individual accountability or task-assignment. I’m interested in hearing about your own experience with this.

In this blog I am keen to explore the next stage: how to measure and foster the behavior that is embodied by such enterprise guiding principles.