Leaders who care too much about the happiness of others and have a strong need to be liked by them often reward people indiscriminately.
When they fail to tie their caring and rewards to measurable goals, a sense of entitlement is usually the result.
Rewarding people without a strong connection to their contributions and merit can distort their expectations and typically creates a demand for more rewards.
Entitlement grows whenever team members feel they deserve more than they have earned. This mentality undermines performance and promotes complacency.
Entitlement is an organizational disease caused by leaders. People learn to be entitled. They don’t show up that way. They simply respond to how they are treated.
Leaders unwittingly create entitlement by the way they reward and recognize team members. Whenever leaders reward and recognize people without a connection to achievement and quality, the disease takes a foothold.
Leaders who fall into this trap often do so to increase morale and job satisfaction. To gain favor, they lower expectations, avoid giving critical feedback, recognize people for mediocre work, and provide special accommodations and treatment to anyone who asks for it.
Because people respond so positively to this approach, they soon offer promotions, pay raises, flexible work hours, and other privileges without tying these rewards to the contributions people make.
The result is a highly entitled workplace.
Once entitlement takes hold, it has a tremendous effect on the attitude and commitment people bring to their work.
Productivity drops like an anchor, while complaining about whatever expectations still exist goes up. An inflated sense of self-importance permeates the team and infects anyone new who arrives to join in the merriment.
The solution, while never easy, is to return to the basics of effective management: transparent goals, rewards tied to measurable achievements, consistent feedback, and the ability to address poor performance with actionable steps.
Entitlement in the workplace stems primarily from organizational practices and poor leadership, and not from the innate characteristics of people. Team members learn to be entitled.
Good leaders avoid setting the conditions that give rise to distorted expectations and unearned demands. Rewards can motivate or corrupt people.
Leaders can care and be liked without recognizing and rewarding people arbitrarily. Entitlement can’t exist when standards and expectations for performance remain high and the most deserving team members receive the hard-won recognition they have earned.
A Daily Dispatch from the Front Lines of Leadership.
