INCENTIVE: Some Rabbits Like Carrots

An incentive is a reward meant to encourage effort.

To be effective, it must promise to provide something valuable to a person in exchange for doing something useful for the one providing it.

What incentive you can use will depend on ECPM in the employee’s work. If you can measure their output and have developed criteria, you can attach carrots (incentives): “Act as I want you to—take a carrot.” When no criteria for work effectiveness exist, carrots (or sticks) become useless.

Managers who find themselves in such situations get cognitive dissonance. They all learned the adage, “You cannot manage what you cannot measure,” but what do they do when they have nothing to measure and no criteria? They will resort to meaningless metrics. By the way, whenever you encounter measurements that management cannot readily explain or you cannot understand their explanation, these metrics are likely meaningless, and no proper control system exists. {MEANINGLESS METRICS}

Even with ECPM, any incentive program involving people is guesswork to a certain extent. Therefore, managers must study the effect of incentives on output parallel to actual work, as the results will improve their future incentive programs.

{ECPM, COMMON SENSE, “EFFECTIVE MANAGERS”, ABUNDANCE OF RESOURCES, GUESSWORK, BLACK-BOX APPROACH, ADEQUACY, MOTIVATION THEORIES, EXPECTANCY}