Common Mission and Goals

A common mission helps unify effort. Purely monetary goals do not, particularly if they pit individuals and groups against each other for rewards. The mission has to be more important than personal advancement -- most of the time. Competitiveness can't be completely suppressed, just subordinated.

Salary and contract competition are major problems for managers of highly-paid professional sports teams. It impedes teamwork even though all want to be on a winning team.

Likewise, simple bonuses in business can produce desired results, to a fault. For example, sales commissions can produce booked orders, but stories of cleaning up the messes behind star sales personnel are legion when they say and promise whatever it takes to book a sale. 

A bonus system to reward balanced, long-term outcomes is complex, and apt to backfire. The convoluted formulas used to calculate payouts to top level executives of many big companies are hard for anyone to understand, and the classic case of them being incomprehensible to outsiders is the bonuses paid out at large banks. 

It's hard to imagine a large bank today seriously adopting a mission compatible with Compression, and if it did, the bonus system would undermine it.


RELATED ARTICLESExplain
Compression Thinking
Vigorous Learning Organizations
Common Mission and Goals
Commitment
No Phonies
Developing a Vigorous Learning Organization
What is a Vigorous Learning ENTERPRISE?
Behavior for Collective Learning
Leadership for Learning
Meta-Vision
Rigorous Learning Systems
Graph of this discussion
Enter the title of your article


Enter a short (max 500 characters) summation of your article
Enter the main body of your article
Lock
+Comments (0)
+Citations (0)
+About
Enter comment

Select article text to quote
welcome text

First name   Last name 

Email

Skip