Perceived Value

2 09 2009

As leaders and managers we are trained to think of employees in terms of financial value.  We give financial rewards based ideally on merit and performance.  Unfortunately, we don’t use often enough other types of rewards for motivation and morale.

I have two young children who do not yet demonstrate much grasp of financial matters.  We offered them an allowance in an attempt to motivate routine and good behavior. While we understand the value, neither kid  asked for their allowance in the last year since it was initiated.  Clearly, it is not a motivational tool for our children right now.

Both kids, however, love hockey. My youngest often lets me know she does not have as many hockey cards as her “brudder” and her brother often defaults to creating quiet games with those same cards.  It seems only natural to use the cards as a motivational device.  We will have to see how it plays out, but a couple of days in I can already see a marked difference.  What are the financial tradeoffs – the hockey card budget is about 50% of what I would spend on allowance.

  • When was the last time you created a “pat on the back” program?
  • Could you do something different to motivate project completion?
  • When was the last time you walked around the organization with $100 bills and randomly rewarded people doing the right thing?
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Categories : Change Management, Communication, Culture of Action, Incentive Alignment, Initiative Management

Initiative Performance Indicators (IPIs)

8 04 2009

I made the argument that Key Performance Indicators and Key Risk Indicators are really the same thing, yet a nuanceworth discussion is initiative management.  We launch new factories, new products, training programs, marketing material, etc all the time, yet often do a sub-optimal job managing the project.  And execution waters down further as we try to manage the portfolio.

Even though initiatives are different than performance indicators, we need to account for their management within the same framework.  We need to understand our objectives, the priorities, resource constraints, milestones, etc in order to more proactively manage the business to achieve more strategic goals.  We need to enhance our ability to discuss our progress to our goals (both annual and strategic) and how all the KPIs and Initiatives are working together to achieve the end.


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Categories : Initiative Management, KPI, Scorecard & Dashboard, Strategy Management