The Great War

some thoughts on carrots and sticks and how to get shit done

No matter what the problem is, it's always a people problem.

- Jerry Weinberg

I’ve written a lot of code in my career. Product code, driver code, test code, and more. If there’s really such a thing as full stack developers, I’m a “phat stack” developer - I’ve done at least a little of all of it.

But it’s all pretty damn easy compared to the actual hard part of software development and delivery - the people.

Carrots and Sticks and People

The pro and con of computers is that they do pretty much exactly what you tell them. Humans are, obviously, more complex. They have feelings, emotions, motivations, and behaviors that are nuanced and fluid - yet sometimes we will expect them to behave predictably.

The carrots and sticks idiom says that you reward some behaviors (carrots), and punish - or threaten to punish other behaviors (sticks). This method works - sort of - until it doesn’t. While I admit to often saying, “reward the behaviors you want to see more”, since sticks/punishment often smell a lot like blame, this path often ends up being a more difficult tool to use in a psychologically safe organization.

Paul Marciano wrote a whole book on why Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work. No surprises in this book - but it’s a quick read and worth it. Marciano stresses the importance of culture, and describes a model for increasing (no surprise again), employee engagement and the importance of culture.

culture drives behavior and behavior reinforces culture

Perhaps more directly to the point is Alfie Kohn’s book, Punished by Rewards. I used to loan this book out around review time at Microsoft to help people understand why they felt like crap no matter how the process went for them. Highly related material, of course in this post from a few weeks ago.

The Inevitable Dan Pink Reference

There is a noticeable overlap in Marciano’s work with the work of Dan Pink in Drive. You don’t need carrots and sticks - you need an environment and culture where people are engaged in their work and want to succeed. Another of my often stated quotes is, “Give people an environment where they can be successful, and get out of their way.” Pink’s research shows that autonomy is critical for engagement and success (along with mastery and purpose). Perhaps more famously, Pink discovered that money (the carrot) is only important to a point. People want to be paid fairly, but after that, it’s rarely a more-is-better scenario. Humans are driven by autonomy, self-determination, and a sense of belonging and purpose. These things are the real motivators - not rewards or punishment.

Regarding rewards - and perhaps an explanation for the behavior I described in the Mean post, this quote is highlighted in both my Kindle and hard-cover version of Drive.

The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road. Indeed, most of the scandals and misbehavior that have seemed endemic to modern life involve shortcuts.

The Difficult Choice

It’s important to be clear about this topic. Offering employees who perform well a “prize” via cash or recognition, and punishing employees who don’t do as well is the vastly easier approach. The simple road for lazy managers is to just give a few rewards to the good people and let the rest fight it out. A big problem here is that for your top performers especially, the rewards aren’t enough to keep them engaged. They’re humans, and they want more. And when you don’t give them more, they go find a job with someone who will. On this point, I have personal examples as well!

The more difficult choice - and one I hope we can agree is the far better choice is to build a culture where autonomy, psychological safety, trust, teamwork, integrity, accountability, mastery, transparency, and purpose are a daily part of the way the team works. All kinds of research shows that organizational health and culture are highly correlated to high quality products and high performing teams. I’m not going to sugar coat it - building a strong culture and an organizationally healthy team is fucking hard. But in my experience, at least, it’s the only way to create an organization that can deliver for any sustained period of time.

Start Now

If you’re lazy, you probably already stopped reading (or you’re scrolling down for the comment block so you can yell at me). If you want strong organizational health, you have to start working on it today, and you have to work on it every day. Talk to your team not only about what they need to get done, but how they want to get it done. Ask, “when other organizations describe the way we work - what do we want them to say?” - and then encourage open and respectful dialogue on the details. Pay attention to where people may have skill gaps - or give people opportunities to learn beyond their current levels of expertise. Get to know them as people and build trust and respect. It’s substantially more work than throwing some money at a few folks, but I guess it just depends on what you want your organization to accomplish. You do you.

No more carrots. No more sticks. Just awesome organizations that get shit done and enjoy doing it.

-A