Rewarded for Good Behavior

Photo by Eric Ziegler

In my last post, I talked about removing an expert from a team to make the team more effective. Obviously, the wrong behavior from an expert can be bad for a team. But not all experts are bad for a team and not all experts exhibit bad behaviors. In addition experts are definitely not bad for organizations as a whole. And that is what this blog post is about - experts rewarded the right way can be invaluable in an organization.

Employees are often rewarded for being the expert at something - Java development, financial analysis, trader, vendor product integration, sales person, etc. The question is, how are these "experts" rewarded. Does the reward influence behaviors and make the individual better, the team better, or the company better? Ideally the reward is influencing to have a positive impact on the individual, the team and the company. But more often than not, the reward is not given as a reward that enhances the team or the company directly and is directed at the individual. In some cases, these rewards could have a negative effect to the team or the company.

Rewards are often given to the expert for some type of heroics. Saving the day when the system blows up or bringing in the big dollars at the end of the quarter, or delivering functionality after spending 20 hours one day implementing or delivering on a major project. It is easy to find reasons to give rewards under these circumstances. But experts are much more valuable to an organization than heroics and rewarding employees and experts for the material things we see everyday.

Experts and employees can provide much more value in an organization by sharing their knowledge and information about their expertise. They are much more valuable when they help others, educate others, and coach others. And experts should be rewarded for these good behaviors. Experts and employees should be rewarded for sharing their knowledge to their team and rewarded even more for sharing their knowledge to other parts of the organization.

Enterprises typically do not have reward systems in place that account for the team sharing or the organization sharing. In addition, there are little to no expectations set by organizations for employees to share. While rewards and expectations are great, there is another issue. Employees are not provided any guidelines on what, how, when, where, and why to share. Employees are also not given any guidelines or expectations on who to share information with. Even if an organization has rewards for this type of behavior, without help, the employees will flounder and in some cases share in ways that are not as effective as possible.

As organizations change and start thinking about how their employees can share information more freely, they will need to not only setup expectations they will need to tell the employees what sharing looks like so the employees can mimic these good behaviors. Lastly, to reinforce these good behaviors, a little reward does not hurt.

Who moved the expert?

Photo by Eric Ziegler

You are the manager of a team. Your team is good at what they do but you believe they could do even more. They are just not clicking and getting as much as you would have expected. As you review how the team is doing you also notice that some of the employees on the team are not learning the material / topic / technology / etc. as well as they could. If you were to characterize the team, you could almost say that they have stagnated their knowledge grows slowly, and they appear to just walking aimlessly through each work week.

As you start to observe the team closer, you realize that one person is viewed as "The Expert" on the team and everyone on the team goes to this one person for support and direction. While this does not happen in every situation, it happens in so many situations that you realize that "The Expert" is considered by the team as indispensable. "The Expert" is invaluable and the team raves about the person. The Expert is the go to person and answers all questions, helping the team get to a solution quicker.

But how invaluable is "The Expert" really? How indispensable is "The Expert" really?

If you remove "The Expert" from team, what happens? Do new people step up and become an expert? What are the short and long term implications to doing something like this? Short term things slow down, no doubt. But long term, do people start to step up, do they start to lead and does the expertise that was with one person start to be dispersed into the team? Does the team get smarter and the team starts to click like a well oiled machine, getting more done than when "The Expert" was part of the team?

Is removing the expert from a team a risk? Absolutely. But, remember, it is a risk to not make a change also. The risk is that the team is not growing, learning, and being as effective as they could be as a team.