ARECENT NEW YORKER CARTOON pictures a blackboard bursting with obscure mathematical formulations. One scientist, looking at the board, says to a colleague, "Oh, if only it were so simple." I couldn't held recalling the cartoon as I read Alfie Kohn's article in the January issue of INC., "Incentives Can Be Bad for Business."
Kohn clearly knows his field. From an academic perspective, his article is superb. He musters compelling evidence to argue that -- on the production line or in the research lab -- workers will respond most creatively if they have a sense of autonomy, on the one hand, and if they value a task or a job for its own sake, on the other. He is saying that intrinsic motivation is the key to high performance, and I certainly agree.
Kohn further argues that companies can undermine worker creativity by providing the wrong incentives -- if, say, they put too much emphasis on extrinsic rewards, such as money, prizes, and positive feedback. These kinds of incentives, he says, lead employees to focus on performance that is quick, riskless (that is, noninnovative), and geared strictly toward volume of output. If a company does use incentives, Kohn recommends that they emphasize quality of output, rather than quantity, and that they encourage self-control (that is, innovation and risk taking). For similar reasons, Kohn argues against establishing a competitive environment in a company. He particularly abhors contests in which some people get no reward because other individuals or groups did better.
On a point-by-point basis, I have no quarrel with any of Kohn's arguments. Moreover, I find him to be a through student of the arcane experimental literature on social psychology. But when it comes to the real world of business, I worry that he leaves the wrong impression on a number of scroes.
Positive reinforcement is better than negative. Kohn does a nasty disservice to Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner by portraying him as a mindless advocate of "waving dollar bills in front of people." To be sure, Skinner is the popularizer of positive reinforcement, but Kohn ignores his most important finding, one with huge implications for business, namely: positive reinforcement is much more beneficial than negative.
That's key oversight because negative reinforcement (criticism) is far and away the most common means by which American companies try to influence performance. They constantly tell people what they did wrong, rather than what they did right. Yet, as Skinner showed, negative reinforcement -- even if well intended -- seldom leads to improved performance. More often, it produces a) convoluted efforts to hide negative results and b) risk-averse behavior to a much greater degree than that which Kohn decries when criticizing the excesses of positive reinforcement.
Anyone who has spent time observing real-life business practices knows that Skinner is absolutely right on this point. The great quality advocate, W. Edwards Deming, a statistician who has little truck with psychologists, is adamant in his agreement. He has said that the American propensity for negative performance appraisals is our number-one management problem. Nor is he being totally facetious when he contends that it takes half a year for the average manager to recuperate from his or her performance review.
And, by the way, Skinner would be the first to agree with Kohn that "surprising" positive incentives work best. Skinner, after all, was the one who discovered that aperiodic (random, unexpected) "schedules of reinforcement" are much more powerful shapers of future behavior than periodic (routine, expected) schedules.
Business problem number one is the almost total absence of positive reinforcement. Although Kohn is correct about the pitfalls of positive reinforcement, he is arguing in a vacuum. If only American business were having trouble because of too much emphasis on extrinsic motivation, resulting in the denigration of intrinsic motivation. Unfortunately, the much larger problem is the almost total absence of positive reinforcement in the average U.S. company, regardless of size.
Consider these two anecdotal, but typical, examples. One involves Sam Preston, a recently retired executive vice-president at S. C. Johnson & Son Inc., which makes Johnson Wax among other products. Throughout his career, Preston would look for positive acts by employees. Whenever he stumbled on one, he would pen a quick note to the person responsible, concluding with the initials "DWD." Eventually, the recipients figured out that "DWD" stood for "Damned Well Done." When I met Preston, he had just finished his round of retirement parties, and he spoke of his amazement as person after person came up, occasionally verging on tears, to thank him for a single "DWD" that he'd sent as much as 15 years earlier.
I heard a similar story from a man who had recently bought a quarry in New England. Upon learning that a certain quarryman had cut an extraordinary amount of rock the day before, the new owner had impulsively grabbed a walkie-talkie to offer congratulations and praise. Shortly thereafter, he was talking to another employee and learned that the quarryman had been on cloud nine for days. Turns out that this stellar, 25-year veteran of rock blasting had never before received a word of praise from the boss.
The plain fact is that, in America, workers and managers receive far too little positive reinforcement for their contributions. The average employee faces a daunting array of hurdles and uncertainties. Simply to make it through the day is often worth a "well done." But that average person is not likely to receive even a doff of the cap from year to year, or decade to decade, let alone day to day. On a personal note, I must admit to Mr. Kohn that, despite having achieved a modicum of acclaim, I myself can never get enough of that wonderful stuff called positive reinforcement -- and if you must schedule your applause in advance, it's jolly well fine with me.
Positive reinforcement need not be quantity based. Kohn cautions against rote behavior stemming from positive reinforcement, but the real source of rote behavior is excessive attention to volume. What gets measured gets done, as the saying goes, and -- at the vast majority of companies -- what gets measured is volume. What gets overlooked is quality. The operative phrase is: "Don't improve it; ship it." That's a big problem, but what else can we expect when volume is all that we try to measure?
The solution, however, is not to abandon incentives, but to base them on nonvolumetric factors as well. In this regard, I was delighted to learn recently that First Chicago Corp. in giving some of its managers bonuses based in part on their success in meeting certain "minimally acceptable performance" goals, as determined by customers.
Similarly, it was quality of service that helped Phil Bressler establish himself as Domino Pizza's top franchisee in the important category of repeat business. Each of his stores would give out a volume-based award for best driver. Before the award was made, however, customers were asked to evaluate the driver's performance. If the quality of service didn't measure up, then no award.
The point is, there are ways to measure what was once thought to be unmeasurable. You can keep score on quality, customer service, responsiveness, innovativeness, even customer listening. Moreover, the sheer act of keeping score will provide a positive stimulant to improvement. Job number two, I'd agree, is to get the right balance between intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors, but first let's put some of these other missing indicators on the map.
