لطفا منتظر باشید ...
Len: Excellent Team Motivator
With degrees from Harvard, both an undergraduate degree and an M.B.A., Len had a successful career in investment banking. He was articulate, pleasant, and insightful. Len had a rich emotional vocabulary and could parse complex emotions into component parts. When dealing with important issues in his team of investment professionals, Len was quickly able to generate and then to evaluate different emotional scenarios. In the previous fiscal year, his team had received one of the largest bonus pools in recent memory. However, it was now the year after the tech bubble had burst, and the current bonus pool was less than 10 percent of the pool from the height of the market. And yet his team was just as hardworking and as dedicated as the year before. In many cases, group members logged even more hours as they chased fewer and smaller deals. The formula was being written for a huge morale problem: work harder, earn much less money, and perhaps lose your job. Len knew that springing the news of a tiny bonus pool on his team at year’s end was guaranteed to create a mutiny among his staff. At the same time, if he simply let everyone know that no matter how hard they worked, they’d be making a lot less money, there would be a major, negative effect on productivity. He had to reason his way through this complex motivational issue. Len recognized that people wanted to be treated honestly and fairly. So the first decision he made was to let his people know about the bonus pool situation. He shared the news with the entire group and followed up with each person individually. He managed their expectations and noted that as the economy turned around, they’d bring in more deals and, he hoped, increase the size of the pool. He then reserved a small portion of the pool for an incentive bonus to reward those employees who went above and beyond expectations. The criteria for such rewards were clearly spelled out and understood by everyone in the department. Even with his belt-tightened expense budget, Len managed to eke out a few dollars to hold recognition lunches for each employee; he would take his direct reports, as well as their reports, to lunch as a way of thanking them for their dedication and hard work.As the economy came back and organizations began hiring again, Len’s group had the highest retention rate in the bank and, in the next year, one of the most productive teams. Such outcomes were due to many factors, but one was Len’s sophisticated understanding of emotions.
