Rewarding

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Rewarding PunishingKnowledge Sharing
Exploring Transformation The Deming Forum 14 May
2003
David Gurteen
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TheHow do we make them use it?Story
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How do we make them share their knowledge?
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The Question!
How do you make people share?

• Assumes US and THEM
• Assumes THEY need to be MADE to share
• A better way to phrase the question

How do we better work together?
Sally, Id like to talk to you about how you
could improve your knowledge sharing.
Sally, Id like to talk with you about how we
could better work together.
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Knowledge Sharing

• Most of the literature most people think that
  you need to reward people to share their
  knowledge!
• I am not convinced!

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Knowledge Sharing

• Share your Knowledge
• credit to somebody else
• passed over for promotion
• depression
• alcoholism
• marital breakdown
• destitution
• die a bum

• Reasons for Sharing
• ego
• money reward
• guilt

Is this really true?
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Quality Management
Many of the familiar principles of Quality
management amount to an elaboration of this
simple truth an innovative, healthy organization
requires that we work with people rather than do
things to them. Alfie Kohn
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How do we better work together?
Many of the familiar principles of Quality
management amount to an elaboration of this
simple truth an innovative, healthy organization
requires that we work with people rather than do
things to them. Alfie Kohn
How do we better work together?
How do you make people share?
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For Best Results, Forget the Bonus

• Rewards punish
• Rewards rupture relations
• Rewards ignore reasons
• Rewards deter risk-taking
• Rewards undermine interest

Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn The Trouble
with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise,
and Other Bribes
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My Purpose

• To encourage us to think about the role of
  rewards in organizations
• Especially in relation to knowledge sharing
• To pose the questionHow do we really
  encourage knowledge sharing?

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On Doctrine!
I have to tell it again and again I have no
doctrine. I only point out something. I point out
reality, I point out something in reality which
has not or too little been seen. I take him who
listens to me at his hand and lead him to the
window. I push open the window and point
outside. I have no doctrine, I carry on a
dialogue. Martin Buber
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What is Knowledge Management?
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Knowledge Management
Knowledge Management is an integrated,
systematic approach to identifying, managing and
sharing all of an enterprises information
assets, including databases, documents, policies
and procedures, as well as previously
unarticulated expertise and experience held by
individual workers.
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What is Knowledge Management?

• A more descriptive definition
• its about people sharing knowledge and
  information with each other across an
  organization
• its about working together more collaboratively
  learning from each other and creating new
  knowledge
• its about making knowledge productive meeting
  business objectives

Working, sharing, collaborating learning
achieving together!
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Knowledge Sharing
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Is Sharing Natural?

• Some say
• sharing is human comes naturally
• Other say
• knowledge is power and sharing is not natural

What do you think?
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Do we share?

• At work we ALL help each other to a greater or
  lesser degree
• Within our department
• Within our project work
• With friends and trusted colleagues

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Why do we share?

• We share because
• it is in our interest
• we have something to gain
• We do not give our knowledge away
• We TRADE things
• often our TIME!

Our most precious asset is our time
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Trading Knowledge
We help people when they approach us for a
variety of reasons (often implicit)

• we need to do our job
• we are afraid of the consequences if we dont
• we like them
• we want to look good
• we want them to like us
• we enjoy it
• we are looking for promotion

• we are looking for a new job
• we want them to be indebted to us
• we want to build a potentially useful
  relationship
• they pay us or give us some other tangible reward

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Sharing
There are good and bad reasons why we share we
are human after all ...

• We should think about improving the way we
• share for several GOOD reasons
• to do our job better
• to build relationships
• to learn
• for the enjoyment!

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The Desire to Learn

• By sharing our knowledgewith others
• WE learn
• we learn from them
• we make our tacit knowledgemore explicit
• our assumptions are revealed
• we are forced to simplify things
• We can often learn more thanwe teach!

If we want to learn we should teach! Stephen
Covey
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The trick to sharing more

• If we approach someone
• help make clear the benefits
• If we are being approached
• look for the benefits
• Especially the learning benefits

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Benefit Time
Time Availability
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Should organizations reward knowledge sharing?
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Here is what Alfie Kohn has to say about praise
For Best Results Forget the Bonus!
To the best of my knowledge, no controlled
scientific study has ever found a long-term
enhancement of the quality of work as a result of
any reward system
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Rewards Punish

• Threats coercion destroy motivation and so do
  rewards
• Rewards are manipulative
• Do this and you will get that is not much
  different to Do this else here is what will
  happen to you
• When people do not get the reward they hoped for
  they feel punished
• The more desirable the reward the more
  demoralizing it is to miss out

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Rewards rupture relations

• Excellence depends on teamwork
• Rewards (especially if scarce) destroy
  cooperation
• Incentive driven employees will not ask for help
  from their manager when they need it
• They will conceal problems from their manager to
  appear infinitely competent

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Rewards ignore reasons

• To solve problems people must understand the
  causes
• Each situation calls for a different response
• Rewards tend to blindly promote a single solution
• They ignore the complexities of the problems

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Rewards deter risk-taking

• People are less likely to take risks to explore
  possibilities to play hunches
• The No. 1 casualty of rewards is creativity

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Rewards undermine interest

• Loving what you do is a more powerful motivator
  than any goody including money
• Rewards are controlling!
• If people focus on getting a reward they tend to
  feel their work is no longer freely chosen and
  directed by them
• If they have to bribe me to do it - it must be
  something I dont want to do!

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And what about praise? As managers should we
praise people when they do a good job or share
their knowledge?
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Here is what Alfie Kohn has to say about praise
Five Reasons to Stop saying Good Job!
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Its is manipulative

• Sugar-coated control
• Like tangible awards its a way of doing
  something to people to get them to comply with
  our wishes

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It creates praise junkies

• Rather then bolstering someone's esteem, praise
  may increase dependence on us
• People start to rely on our evaluations of what's
  good or bad

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It steals a persons pleasure

• When we tell someone Good job! we are telling
  them how to feel!
• Good job! is as much an evaluation as Bad
  job!
• People do not like being judged

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It causes people to lose interest

• Research shows that the more we reward someone
  for something the more they lose interest.
• The point is no longer to do a good job but to
  get the goody!

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It reduces achievement

• People start to worry about getting the praise
  and less about doing the job
• Praising ignores the motive behind the act such
  as to suck up to the boss verses do a good
  job and actually rewards the less desirable
  motive!

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So whats the solution?
How do we make people share?
How do we make people do anything?
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Alfie Kohn

• Pay people well
• Pay people fairly
• Then do everything possible to take money
  (rewards) off peoples minds

Incentives, bonuses, pay-for-performance-plans
and other reward systems violate this last
principle by their very nature!
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How Children Fail
Children do not need to be made to learn to be
better, told what to do or shown how. If they are
given access to enough of the world, they will
see clearly enough what things are truly
important to themselves and to others, and they
will make for themselves a better path into that
world then anyone else could make for them
John Holt
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Changing Peoples Behavior

• We cannot change other people's behavior - only
  they can do that!
• Threats, rewards and praise do not work
• We don't need to be told what to do. We just
  need to understand the world better and then we
  will see what needs to be done for ourselves
• So how do we better understand the world?

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How do we understand better?
Through open conversation and dialogue!
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Business is a conversation
Business is a conversation because the defining
work of business is conversation -
literally. And 'knowledge workers' are simply
those people whose job consists of having
interesting conversations. David Weinberger The
Cluetrain Manifesto
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Conversation is a meeting of minds
Conversation is a meeting of minds with
different memories and habits. When minds meet,
they don't just exchange facts they transform
them, reshape them, draw different implications
from them, engage in new trains of
thought. Conversation doesn't just reshuffle the
cards it creates new cards. Theodore
Zeldin Conversation
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Summary
Better understanding through open conversation
Rewards and Praise
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