High Ground Isn’t Always The Right Ground

Hey sorry it took so long to respond (I wasn’t ignoring you on Twitter, I just got caught up in work ; )

I understand your rebuttal, and I’m not unsympathetic to your position, but ultimately we disagree. 

You do yourself and your argument a disservice by using the pejorative, negatively-connoted term “ivory tower” in conjunction with the term “high ground”. By doing so you imply – and then explicitly confirm that implication later – that the idea of doing what’s right is only for pampered isolated intellectuals who have no understanding of “reality”, and that really serious actual professionals understand that sometimes you have to do whatever it takes to get the results, even it requires using means of lesser morality. 

In short, you’re making the Jack Bauer argument: there’s not enough time to do it right, so we’d better torture the hell out of the bad guy to get the answers we need.

The “fine line between doing something that will have results in the short term even IF they may go against the ‘perfect’ solution” is a very, very thinly veiled apology for the idea that ends justify the means. And if there’s one thing we can ALL agree on (I hope) it’s that a policy whose sole goal is expedient short term results is the mother of a brood of unintended consequences. 

The people looking down their noses at the charter school are doing so for a good reason. Paying students to attend school is utterly idiotic and counter-productive. It sends entirely the wrong message and will harm those students more than it will help them, on a number of levels. 

The short term goal they serve – getting butts in the seats – is placed far ahead of attempting to solve the larger problems that keep the kids out of the seats in the first place while blithely ignoring the very likely, obvious unintended consequences. At the end of the experience, the only true lesson taught is “If I do nothing (or act counterproductively) long enough, then someone will compensate me monetarily for doing the bare minimum requirements.” What kind of employees and parents will these people grow up to be, if this is the lesson they learn? 

At some point, there must be some self-responsibility. If your employees do not have enough base-line self-responsibility to do the basic requirements of the job with special motivation, that you must rely on this kind of short-term focused, anti-”high ground” policy, then go back to my previous post – you need to re-examine your situation and see what needs to be changed. How did these losers get here? Why are they still here? What am *I* doing, if anything, that’s de-motivating them further? Are they even really losers, or are they not performing well for some other reason?

Those are important questions that NEED answering. Changing the way you incentivize your employees will not address the core issues the organization may have.

Incentives do NOT change culture. They do NOT solve problems. They are NOT primary motivators. Incentives ARE, with appropriate design and applied in the right time and manner, are very good at positively reinforcing desired behaviors. 

Sorry for the Tolstoy here, but I wanted to come at you with a complete response, worthy of your time and the energy you devote to your blog and your readers. We may disagree, but I’m glad you put this out there to start a discussion! I think this is an important issue for businesses of all sizes. Hopefully our debate is food for thought for others, too : )