No Matter What You Think This is NOT a Post About Incentives and Motivation

Paul–
Love the line “Remember – incentives are your worst first solution.” Agree with you that incentives need to work in concert with good management, clear goals, training and communication. If incentives are the only tool the manager has in his or her belt, it’s not going to end well. Incentives are a complement, not the silver bullet.
Any post with a “Shining” reference is awesome.

Gotta find that classic flow chart of Geary Rummler’s on the Performance Model, maybe 30 years old by now or older. Anyone seen it recently? Dealt with those who simply CAN’T and those who just WON’T do what you wish.
Correcting Deficient Performance may have been an alternate title, since it starts out focusing on the performance deficiency and runs thru the entire cycle: properly communicated, understood, has done it before and demonstrated past proficiency, good timely/accurate feedback, no task interference, no competing tasks, adequate resources (time, cost, $, support) … before eventually finally reaching the biggie… BALANCE of CONSEQUENCES where motivations and incentives are addressed.
Most issues are not solved by training or yelling about motivation but by the other points above, particularly those dealing with those who CAN do it but WON’T because … (I’ll skip the specifics but you all know them…)
Seems it was in my (first) childhood I learned the biggest problem with incentives is not that they won’t work but that the DO work all too well. People only do what THEY find to be most rewarding.

God bless you, thank you, thank you, thank you…. that IS it, but just not in the simpler flowchart branching into CAN’T and WON’T paths that I used to teach in my OD days in the 1970s. I could probably recreate it from those refresher cues. That version mostly simply lacks the options recommended when the answer is NO; and neither training nor rewards are usually useful corrective/remedial methods for those issues.
Bottom line, though: I had to spend my years as a compensation specialist before I had the credibility to be able to disprove and dismiss pay as the universal solution, so folks could get down to the REAL root causes of performance problems. Until you can eliminate compensation as the fast quick fix, you waste much money and solve few problems.

I see great relevance to teaching here. Performance pay, the way many non-educators think about it, would fall into the exact trap you’re describing here. Underperforming teachers aren’t waiting for an incentive or bonus to be dangled in front of them – they’re usually short on time, resources, or training, and they are under-served by a system that often operates in scarcity mode. And it’s only getting worse.

Someone should republish my classic Personnel Journal article on “The Merits of Merit Pay for Teachers” from February 1984 that nails it, if I say so myself. The conditions that support and permit effective performance pay are always very difficult to achieve in private industry and almost impossible to achieve in education. Until the environment is proper, merit pay will not work anywhere.

cold-cold winter!!)