Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

by Patty McCord

The prevailing philosophy of management today is that if you want great productivity from people, you must first motivate them with incentives and then make sure they know you’re looking over their shoulders to keep them accountable. So many companies have department objectives and team objectives and individual objectives and a formal annual review process for measuring performance against them. That structure, that waterfall, is very logical, very reasonable. But it’s no longer remotely adequate. Saying to employees, “If you do X, you’ll be rewarded with Y,” assumes a static system. Yet no business today is static. More fundamentally, while rewards are great, there is no better reward than making a significant contribution to meeting a challenge. I’m a big fan of goals. Couldn’t be a bigger fan. It’s the usual management approach to achieving them that is so wrong. Typically, the time frames we set and the complexity of the structure created for leading teams and monitoring results make achieving goals harder than it needs to be.