Praise vs Raise
BNET recently published a great article about how important praise is for employee job satisfaction and how it can do much to manage moral when increased compensation or bonuses are not an option. I think we can all identify times of great accomplishment during our careers when the reward was not in the form of payment, but in the form of special recognition.
While working as a frontend web developer managing FranklinCovey’s Symposium website I was amazed at the sheer amount of copy edits I was asked to make and which were often as simple as “can you change the n-dash in the third paragraph to an m-dash”. Even though the tasks were small and with many of them I was tempted to stick it on my todo and deal with it when I was done with “more important tasks”, I made it a point to make each change when I first read the email requesting the change. The client was so impressed with this they emailed the president of my company requesting I be sainted. I remember how much this meant to me at the time. Certainly verbal rewards, when they are heartfelt and warranted, can do much to create an effective and loyal employee.
But one thing managers must be careful of, that wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the BNET article, is to avoid condescension. This is particularly true when leading teams of programmers. If there’s anything I’ve learned about the programmer’s mind, it cares little for elegant decorations and hype designed to change the appeal of something. Managers who use carefully developed “motivational” techniques on software developers, designed to increase performance or augment loyalty, will often find it backfiring. Developers have the excellent ability to see right through pretty speeches and get to the heart of an idea. In other words, praises, motivational speeches, complements etc, if they are not heartfelt and presented with logical evidence of their merit, will likely produce the opposite of the desired result.
I want to particularly emphasize the logical evidence of merit. I think at the heart of condescending praise is the insufficient merits regarding the action. This might work with a child or for someone with low IQ and desperate for attention (“Look how much your handwriting has improved!”) but most people, and especially an analytic mind, will recognize the degree to which the compliment was been warranted.
Tags: Consultants, Human Capital Management, Human Resources, Labor Relations, Managing a Team, Motivation, Praise, Praise Consultants, Workforce Management...
Andy Branch is a project manager/producer at