Page 212 - The Power to Change Anything

Design Rewards and Demand Accountability 201

troubled teenage girls, administrators noted an alarming trend.
Suicide attempts among residents had increased dramatically.
After administrators tried everything from giving emotional
speeches, to holding group sessions, to enlisting the help of
friends and family—all to no avail—they came up with, of all
things, an incentive. They came up with an incentive that
could be invoked on the spot, that was immediately motivat-
ing, and that was clearly tied to the desired behavior. This
wasn’t any old incentive, but one that on its face sounded crazy.
Here was the incentive. If a teenage resident attempted suicide,
she would be denied TV privileges for the next week. Suicide
attempts dropped to zero.
Without going into the complex psychology of suicide
attempts versus suicide gestures and then missing the point of
the example, suffice it to say that small incentives that are
immediately linked to vital behaviors can yield amazing results
with some of the world’s most difficult problems.

If You’re Doing It Right, Less Is More

From the examples we’ve provided, it should be clear that
when it comes to offering extrinsic rewards, the rewards
typically don’t need to be very large—at least if you’ve laid the
groundwork with the previous sources of motivation. No-
body’s suggesting that corporate executives should ask em-
ployees to come to work without any compensation or that
children should never get paid for helping out around the
house. However, when you do want to provide a supplemen-
tal reward to help shape behavior, as the much maligned
adage goes, it’s often the thought, not the gift, that counts.
That’s because the thought behind an incentive often carries
symbolic significance and taps into a variety of social forces that
carry a lot of weight, much more so than the face value of the
incentive itself. So, as you think of awards, don’t be afraid to
let the thought behind the award carry the burden for you.