Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.—Dwight D. Eisenhower
Leadership is getting someone to do what they don’t want to do, to achieve what they want to achieve.—Tom Landry
The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.—Ken Blanchard
Leadership is about influence, not power. Highly-effective leaders know how to tap into the hearts and minds of their followers. If you stand and look over the shoulders of those you supervise, you’ll never get people who care about their jobs. We do not preach the old “carrot and stick” approach to influence. Rather, we will teach you how to get intrinsic, true, inner motivation.
According to the old-school organizational cliché, what gets rewarded gets done. So, many organizations offer rewards such as profit-sharing, bonuses, employee of the month programs, prizes, and special parking spaces to influence employees. These are classic examples of extrinsic or token rewards. Extrinsic rewards can significantly lower intrinsic motivation and can create reliance upon the rewards. In situations that are already intrinsically rewarding, the addition of extrinsic rewards may reduce the effectiveness of the intrinsic rewards. Extrinsic rewards are effective in teaching a rat to run a maze, but are not effective in influencing staff performance.
Rewards fail to make deep lasting changes because they are aimed at affecting only what people do and not at what they think and feel. If employers want to do nothing more than induce compliance in employees, then rewards may be a valid practice. If employers want staff members to be self-disciplined, self-motivated workers, then rewards are worse than useless; they are counterproductive.
