Page 217 - The Power to Change Anything

206 INFLUENCER

do anything. Each year a new survey publishes the fact that
employees would appreciate more praise, and each year we
apparently do nothing different.
This is odd in light of the fact that humans are actually quite
good at rewarding incremental achievement with their small
children. A child makes a sound that approximates “mama,” and
members of the immediate family screech in joy, call every sin-
gle living relative with the breaking news, ask the kid to perform
on cue, and then celebrate each new pronouncement with the
same enthusiasm you expect they’d display had they trained a
newborn to recite “If” by Rudyard Kipling.
However, this ability to see and enthusiastically reward
small improvements wanes over time until one day it takes a call
from the Nobel committee to raise an eyebrow. Eventually kids
grow up and go to work where apparently the words good and
job aren’t allowed to be used in combination, or so suggest em-
ployee surveys. There seems to be a permanent divide between
researchers and scholars who heartily argue that performance
is best improved by rewarding incremental improvements, and
the rest of the world where people wait for a profound achieve-
ment before working up any enthusiasm.

Reward Right Results and Right Behaviors
Perhaps people are stingy with their praise because they fear
that rewarding incremental improvement in performance
means rewarding mediocrity or worse.
“So you’re telling me that every time a screwup finally does
something everyone else is already doing, you’re supposed to
hold some kind of celebration?”
Actually, no. If employees’ current performance level is
unacceptable and you can’t wait for them to come up to
standard, then either terminate them or move them to a task
that they can complete. On the other hand, if an individual
is excelling in some areas, while lagging in others—but