Every Friday, we make it our business to find an interesting compensation/reward oriented blog post from the past week from somewhere outside the Cafe, and highlight it here. This week we point you to Steven Roesler's All Thing Workplace blog, and his recent post Kill Change With Too Many Priorities.
Steve may cover "all things workplace", but I find many of his ideas and insights have very direct implications for measuring and rewarding performance. In the post we showcase today, Steve discusses a research study which examines why many U.S. businesses are so unsuccessful at effecting change. The reason?
Managers have so many priorities at once that they can't tell what's important and what isn't.
Ring any bells?
As Steve relays it:
Although change projects are given top priority at most companies, almost half of the more than 500 managers surveyed said that a significant number of such projects failed to meet the stated goals.
The #1 reason given for failed change initiatives was having too many "top" priority projects and an inability to coordinate and integrate these across their organization
This is an important point for compensation practitioners, as our efforts and programs aimed at measuring and rewarding performance often fall fictim to the "everything is a priority" syndrome. Reward programs are most powerful and effective when they are used as a mechanism to focus attention on imperatives. But if everything is an imperative, nothing is an imperative, because there's only so much attention to go around.
To drive his point home, Steve shares a personal anecdote:
Sitting in a conference room not long ago, I watched an executive trying to get guidance from his CEO: "I've got no less than than twelve initiatives going simultaneously. Which should I really focus on?"
The CEO answered, "Yes", and sat silently. He thought it was a clever response.
We'll see what the results yield.
For workplace wisdom, you really can't beat All Things Workplace. Click through and read the rest of Steve's post ... and be sure to put his blog on your regular reading list.
Have a great weekend!
Ann,
Very kind mention; glad this bridges the gap into the compensation community as well.
--Steve
Posted by: Steve Roesler | 07/26/2009 at 05:45 AM