Should we also reward individual performance?
Whether the company attains its goals or not, there likely will be individuals who will exhibit a high level of personal achievement. Shouldn’t these individuals be rewarded?
We love to see high-achieving individuals rewarded. But our first loyalty is to the overall success of the company. Remember the fable of the golden goose? As long as the golden goose was healthy, it produced golden eggs. The first priority is the health of the goose.
So too is the first priority the health, or success, of the company. When the company is healthy, we have the means to reward everyone. So, we like to see the first and major reward based upon achieving the company goals, thus helping create a culture where everyone works together to do so.
However, we also always want to encourage our high-performing people, so we like them to have a reward for achieving their individual goals. As a general rule, we like this reward to be less than the reward that can be earned from achieving the company goal. For example, if an employee might earn $10,000 when the company achieves its goals, she might also earn an additional reward for achieving her individual goals, but this would be something less than $10,000.
The notion here is that the company goals are paramount. When the company is successful, everyone shares in the success because everyone contributed to this success.
A similar story took place with another of our clients. At an early GMT meeting we outlined the goals that we believed the company could achieve for the coming year, and the CEO responded, “That would be amazing to do.” We asked the CEO at that GMT meeting, “If your Goal Management Team accomplished these goals, would you take the team and their spouses on a Carnival cruise to Nassau and give all the employees a percentage reward?” He said it would certainly be worth that—so, yes!” The team achieved the goals, and everyone went on that Carnival cruise, first class!
In both of these cases, as well as in many others, it was the ingenuity, creativity, enthusiasm, and hard work of the GMT members and the members of their teams that made this happen. They created and executed the strategies that achieved these ambitious, and perhaps seemingly impossible, goals. And they reaped the rewards.
This stuff isn’t magic. It’s the Winning Manager’s Playbook. You can do it with your group or company, and we hope you will. It works.