I believe one secret of good leadership is rewarding and punishing the right outputs, or results. Bad leaders tend to fixate on inputs and/or the wrong results.
For example, a business owner complained to me about one of his associates. His gripes were personal preferences. He didn’t like the way his associate did this or that. He asked my opinion. Rather than giving it based on my five minutes with the guy (which I didn’t think would be fair to anyone), I simply asked how are his numbers? I thought it would be good to re-focus the owner on the results. I could read it in the owner’s eyes, good question, I hadn’t thought of that.
My advice to folks who desire to be a successful leader is to grow accustomed and adept at asking and answering …and that resulted in what?
The next step is making sure you hold folks accountable to the right results.
A business professor of mine once told the class his story about bonus structures he experimented with when he owned and operated sandwich shops.
First, he wanted to grow revenue so he tied managers’ bonus to revenue growth. That resulted in high food and staff costs as managers tried to attract business with over portioned sandwiches and always had more than enough staff on hand to handle unexpected rushes. While customer traffic was good, profits suffered because of high costs.
Next, he tied rewards to costs to gets costs under control. That resulted in long lines, under portioned sandwiches and customer complaints as managers tightly controlled staffing and portions to meet the cost targets. Customer traffic slipped with service and product quality and profits suffered.
In both cases, he felt the store managers didn’t pay enough attention to the cleanliness of the store. The owner was spent late hours scrubbing trash can lids and cleaning windows to meet his standards.
Finally, he tried a combination plan. First, he came up with a 70 point inspection checklist that he would use to rate the cleanliness of things like the trash can lids, bathrooms, tables, floors, counters and doors. He told his managers that he would inspect the stores any time, day or night, and to be eligible for a bonus store the store had to score 69 out of 70.
If the manager passed the inspections, then he or she would be eligible for a bonus that was based on year-over-year revenue and profit growth for the month. Further, for each month that staff costs were less than a certain percent of sales, staff would receive a bonus making up the difference.
He was pleased with the results. He said managing the operation became as simple as conducting the inspections.
He no longer spent late nights scrubbing trash can lids. Managers and staff found ways to increase sales and control costs, rather than focusing on one at the expense of the other.
It took some experimentation, but he seemed to have have found the right outputs to reward.