Page 177 - How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times

164B RE-ENGAGE

organizational goals. As one Best-Places-to-Work respondent noted,
“I feel there needs to be more value placed on the team concept. The rec-
ognition is placed on individual basis, and some people need to be valued
as team players.” Different business situations require different ap-
proaches, of course. Complicating this issue, many managers are not
natural team leaders, but have been rewarded with promotion into
management for being outstanding individual achievers. We suggest
that leaders can correct this by implementing new processes for select-
ing managerial candidates with natural team leadership and coaching
talent.
We thought it somewhat surprising that Gratton and Erickson in
their study found that the type of reward system had “no discernable
effect on complex teams’ productivity and innovation” regardless of
whether rewards were based on individual or team achievements. 2

Undependable Team Members
As evidenced in some of the verbatim survey comments presented
earlier in this chapter, employees held strong negative perceptions
about coworkers they felt they could not depend on to do their jobs.
The resentment many employees harbor about indifferent and unpro-
ductive coworkers is a common cause of employee disengagement. We
recommend six ways to deal with the problem of nonperformers:

1. Implement a more careful and selective sourcing and hiring process
so as to avoid hiring them in the first place.

2. Allow current team members to participate in the interviewing and
selection of new team members.

3. Reevaluate and reassign employees who are mismatched in their
current jobs.

4. Select and promote only those managers who are willing to con-
front poor performers without procrastinating.