Five Bucks per Goal

Do you use incentive programs to get people motivated? Do you use rewards as the path to excellence? Have you ever had unintended consequences from your reward systems?

A kids hockey team had enjoyed some early success in the season, but it was largely due to the heroic efforts by a few of the better players. As the season progressed, the individual heroics were not enough, and the team started losing repeatedly to other teams that were becoming more cohesive, more organized, more cooperative.

So, in practice, the coaches worked on passing drills, on positional play, on group tactics. In practices, the team became very effective, with good understanding of their roles, and really effective team tactics. In practice, the team worked well together. But in games, they completely fell apart.

In games, the players reverted to their heroic ways; trying to stick-handle the puck from one end of the ice to the other, taking wide angle shots with no chance of success, and generally playing desperate, selfish, ineffective hockey. The team was getting demoralized. They continued to lose. What was going on?

It turns out that the main problem was the kids' parents. In their desire to help their kids succeed, many of the parents had offered their kids cash rewards for scoring goals - one kid would get five bucks from his dad for every goal he personally scored. Don't get me started on how distorted this is (whatever happened to playing a game just because you love it and want to have fun playing hard with your friends!?), but think of how damaging this "reward" system was to the team, and the kids.

In game situations, most of the kids were thinking only about themselves, about how they, personally, could score a goal. Not how the team could do well, or how the team could score, but how "I" could score. Because of this selfish thinking, the team was not playing as a team, they were losing out to teams that were, and they were on a long, painful downhill slide. The kids were stressed, the parents were stressed and on their cases, and the kids had to choose between two opposites - either play as a team and be effective, or play selfishly to try to please their parents and get the cash rewards. It ended up that this strategy wasn't making them much money anyway, since they weren't scoring very many goals against teams with better collaboration.

Rewards hurt. They damage internal motivation, and replace it with a dangling carrot. That in itself is reason enough to be cautious. But rewards inevitably produce unintended consequences, distortions and distractions from what you'd really like to have happen. Why not work on developing the love of the game, on the joy of working together to face challenges, on the intrinsic pleasures of a job well done, of becoming excellent. The research shows that this approach produces more success anyways. So next time, keep your five bucks in your pocket, and enjoy watching your kids' team play hockey. And, in business, keep your dangling performance incentives in your pocket (slightly disturbing image?), and work instead on helping the team enjoy their work, pull together, and win - together.