There are some things leaders should never pay for. Chief among them is compensating people for being good citizens in the organization or team.
When leaders compensate people for being helpful and collaborative, they rob them of the intrinsic motivation to cooperate with their colleagues. This makes people less collegial and more likely to avoid making contributions to the team that aren’t compensated.
The spirit of supporting and standing by colleagues is an implicitly shared social contract among those who depend on each other in all organizations.
Everyone expects to work together to achieve common goals, which will include discussions, meetings, and other collaborative efforts. To be an effective colleague and team member, people believe their role will require a variety of collaborative activities.
When leaders compensate team members for any of those activities, they turn colleagues into mercenaries. The desire to collaborate is more fragile than many leaders understand.
Incentives destroy the collaborative spirit that people hold naturally.
Good leaders refrain from compensating team members for all kinds of collaboration: sharing ideas and best practices, giving colleagues feedback in formal and informal reviews, cross-selling products and services, participating in team events and off-sites, catching people up on important matters, and commenting on work product quality, among other everyday expressions of teamwork.
Leaders who mistakenly create formalized reward systems to promote collaboration actually get less of it over time. People soon go through the motions of supporting others whenever they aren’t paid to do so.
They often challenge the need to do anything for others that doesn’t have a payoff. Without intending to, leaders who compensate for collaborative action destroy the intrinsic goodwill people have to help each other.
Once team members believe they should be compensated for supporting and collaborating with others, leaders are stuck without any other appeal to action except more money.
This is a quagmire that good leaders avoid at all costs (pun intended). There are a host of ways to promote a more collaborative workplace, including building connections between colleagues, empowering people to own decisions, recognizing team success, and fostering open communication.
Paying for it doesn’t make the list.
Compensating for collaboration creates a sinkhole of expectation and destroys team morale over the long term. Good leaders sidestep the temptation to drive short-term behavior with extrinsic rewards.
They know that paying for cooperation is a recipe for destroying goodwill.
Once benevolence is gone, teams rarely recover it.
A Daily Dispatch from the Front Lines of Leadership.
