The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter

by Michael D. Watkins

Employees have incentives to do the wrong things. The best predictor of what people will do is what they are incentivized to do. Effective leaders seek to align the interests of individual decision makers with the interests of the group as a whole. This is why placing more emphasis on group incentives is effective in some organizations: they focus everyone’s attention on the ability to work together. Problems arise when measurement and compensation schemes fail to reward employees for either their individual or their collective efforts. Problems also arise when rewards advance employees’ individual interests at the expense of the group’s broader goals—for example, when multiple employees who could serve the same set of customers lack incentives to cooperate. This was the problem confronting Hannah in the story at the beginning of the chapter.