Likes to think

Development, be it personal or professional, is a process. This means that we can identify distinct areas of development and use this information to better understand what is required.

Cause For Development.

In order to stave confusion, we’ll focus on professional development. Most people are familiar with professional development, in that at some point they have been subject to reviews, one-to-one meetings and monthly “team” meetings.

Once we’ve discovered that there is cause for development, and want to do something about it. We need to consider the reason that development is required. It’s important to note here, that development is an issue concerning skill – not motivation. An incentive does not produce skill, maintain skill, or increase it.

The Flow

As with any process, there is a flow. Meaning that there is a start, a middle and an end. You must rule out steps that are not required, as well as aim to move forward to the next if needed. Decision making is also built in.

Always start from the beginning.

Step one: training
Step two: mentoring
Step three: coaching

Each of these steps are entirely different functions, but for some reason, they get mixed up. In some work cultures, training and coaching are lumped together – but they are distinct. Not only do they operate differently, but they also require independent initiatives to ensure they perform.

Training.

Training is all about acquiring the right skills for the job. New employees need training when they arrive. Old employees need training when a new product, service or process is introduced – or after periods of extended absence.

If an employee doesn’t have the right skills, they need training.

If successful, your fresh-faced employees can come out of that dinky room that’s tucked out the way to engage with their new working environment.

There is loads out there on training, so I won’t go in to it too deeply. Suffice to say, it involves experts transferring expertise. It’s not just about reading the manual and letting them get on with it. Training requires someone that can put energy and life in to what is normally quite dull material and importantly – the heads up on what goes on in the workplace, not in the books.

Mentoring.

Mentoring is all about context. Now that you’ve got your new resource nicely spread out around the office or factory, they are going to need looking after.

You’ll be surprised to hear, that the best mentors are NOT managers! Mentorship is about learning the job, and making sense of all your new-found but completely misplaced know-how. A mentor doesn’t just show you how to do your job, they should you how THEY do it.

Where do the habits come from? Where does the voice of experience come from? Who says, “Don’t worry about that, just give it a kick and it’ll start back up again”? - a mentor that’s who.

Crucially, this tells us something about how to pick a mentor for your new lot. If you don’t want someone to catch certain habits, or you’d rather have your younglings sat away from the naysayers, or if giving it a good kick isn’t actually what you want your new people doing – then make sure you pick someone appropriate for the task.

Personality is also a good indicator for mentors. A friendly voice, and caring smile and a patient disposition go a long way.

Coaching.

Right, now you’ve crossed the Is and you’ve dotted the Ts – no wait, okay you know what I mean. Your employees now know what they’re doing. They have the gist of what they are doing, and they’ve been doing it for a while. Coaching, is all about getting more.

An important thing to remember here, is that coaching is about self-development. It is not the job of the coach to tell someone how to do their job, it’s to ask them if they can do it better. A coach says, “do you have everything you need?”

The role of a coach centres on engagement. Very often, the role is perverted in to one of pushing and cajoling someone in to doing better. This then leads to instigated performance, what I mean by that is – the coach instigates the improvement, not the individual. Consequentially if you remove the coach, you remove the improvements.

Helping an employee engage, is about exploring their intrinsic motivators and using them to encourage internal changes. It’s about saying, “what’s holding your back?” or “what would it take for you to raise your game?”

Coaching is about taking your good, experienced and knowledgeable worker and making them an expert.

Recap.

If you would like to change skill level, you need to train, mentor and coach
If you would like to change behaviour you need to use incentive

Stage one: training
Acquiring basic skills to perform job

Stage two: mentoring
Acquiring experience in using skills in context

Stage three: coaching
Increasing expertise

When you decide an individual needs development, you put them in to the appropriate category. They, either do not have the right skills, thus need training. Or, they are struggling to put their skills into practice, thus need mentoring. Or, they have come to a head with their development and have stopped progressing on their own, thus need coaching.

Many businesses use productivity incentives, but do they actually work?

Well, quite frankly – in a world were skill, experience and motivation are the key actuators in performance, it’s unlikely. Where it does have a benefit, it’s hard to prove and usually isn’t very significant. The ratio of productivity to incentive doesn’t seem to be very much, and the correlation coefficient will be erratic.

Now, give me my money

Bonuses do motivated for a while, but there are many shortcomings. If it’s late, not enough, withdrawn, doesn’t satisfy expectation or is in some way offset by a negative experience unrelated to it – its benefit is destroyed. If you do it once, it’s is expected again and again. Then, when a decision is made to move away from an incentive – those who benefited from it feel neglected, lost, hard done by and more importantly; they feel that they are now supposed to work less.

Those who don’t realise the direct benefits of incentives – ie those not earning through performance; feel left out, downgraded, disrespected and more importantly they feel – “well, I’m not getting paid more so why should I work harder?”

Incentives don’t last

An unobserved fact about incentives is that they don’t last. Let me clarify: even if the incentive is still administered – eventually it’ll be the norm to be paid an extra £100 per month. It’s no longer an incentive – it’s a deterrent. If I don’t work hard enough, the money I get will be taken away. So, the positive nature of an incentive is mutated in to the negative nature of a deterrent.

When they do create an increase in performance, they mask any other facilitators of development. Good coaching, great training and awesome leadership get confused and can’t be pinpointed. When the motivation derived from incentives build skill and experience – you then start paying bonus for no reason – your now highly skilled worker could perform just as well without the bonus; yet you’d never know. Your hands are tied so you can’t take it away, and they’re still stressed under the pressure to keep earning.

Time to normalise

Reciprocal normalisation is the response to an action that reflects the original action’s nature. Whereby, a positive response is elicited by a positive action, and a negative resonance for a negative action. Transferring to a paradigm that takes advantage of reciprocal normalisation reverses causality, also transferring obligations. Instead of the business being obliged to reward productivity, the employee is obliged to be more productive.

Potentiality is the way forward

Although incentive causes problems when attached to productivity, it can be used for other aspects of a working relationship. Instead of incentivising productivity; incentivise potentiality. This means rewarding those that have the potential to be highly productive – leaving the true productivity factors to be address more effectively with coaching, training and relationship building.

Someone who arrives on time, stays at the workstation and doesn’t have days off sick all the time has much more potential to be productive than someone who is never at their desk, wakes up late and who’s grandma dies every two weeks for 3 years.

This frees up your time to really focus on analysing skill sets, the dynamics of workflow management and ergonomics.

Giving bonuses for being on time, being at your workstations or not being absent is great.
Those who don’t receive their bonuses are highlighted and replaced if changes aren’t made – and as an added bonus the bane of management [shrinkage control] takes care of itself.

Happy workforce

Free of worry, about if they can earn their bonus, staff can become much more introspective and managers don’t have to fight a barrier of ‘bonus depression’ every month.
It’s a big change

I know the above recommendations might sounds ridiculous, but change often does. Waves will be caused, risk will rear its ugly head – but once you’re there, you’ll never go back.
Your big earner, change his pay and say, “right, you’re no longer getting a bonus – that extra £100 that you get every month anyway – is now in your wage”. The pressure comes off and now you’re free to work on focusing on skill – not effort.

Be warned though. By making these changes, you’ll expose any floors in coaching, mentoring, training and leadership – and if you don’t fix them, all the changes will have been in vain.