There’s one thing I keep coming back to on a regular basis, especially when it comes to my leadership approach: The system adapts to the incentives it experiences.
It seems obvious, but I think a lot of people in leadership or management positions (myself included, at first) don’t really consider that when working with direct reports. The underlying assumption that I had when first entering a position of authority was that everyone on my team wanted the same thing as me: to be able to do a good job and meet our goals.
What I didn’t really understand at the outset was that they weren’t really our goals at all. They were my goals. Big difference. One of the first problems I had noticed was that there wasn’t much consistency in how each contributor was doing their work, which made things hard to evaluate for quality. Since our business is Quality Assurance, this was a really important thing.
My approach was pretty simple. I had come up with some straightforward SOPs, metrics to track adherence to them, and offered the opportunity for guidance to anyone who wanted it. It never even occurred to me that most of the people on the team didn’t want to change the way they were doing their work and had very little concern for what I wanted.
Of course, I had a really tough time getting people to do their work differently. I had multiple requests for exceptions, alternative methods and approaches, all of which I considered and some of which I granted. Worst of all, I got something I never expected: compliance theatre.
The whole point was to make things easier to understand. Why was everyone fighting me so hard on this? I later realized that they simply had no real incentive to do things the same way, let alone my way. I changed my approach, taking the time to provide public shout-outs for the few that did really good work according to the SOPs. I also used 1:1s to retrospectively review completed1 work, providing live feedback where I saw room for improvement. I had multiple conversations with each person about why some standardization was important, and that it protected them even more than it made my job easier. Me providing the opportunity for public praise, specific feedback on what “good” looked like, and insight on how being consistent across the board made everyone look more professional and valuable finally created enough incentive for people to get on board.
Over time, everything started improving. Our metrics started looking better, and the team started to converge on a consistent way of doing things. They appreciated the feedback, and also that I was willing to take feedback from them on how to improve our processes.
I have started applying this principle to every aspect of my life, and it is helping in every one of them, even with my colleagues and people that I report to. Understanding incentives and how they are used is imperative to managing any system.
Onward.
Tristan
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