You Get What You Pay For: 'I' vs. 'We'

"There is no 'I' in team," people often say to me.

"There is no 'we,' either," I reply with a mischievous grin.

This wordplay points up a critical tension in working on a team, part of what one researcher called the "paradoxes of team membership." He defined a paradox as "a constant struggle between apparently opposing values."[1] In The SuddenTeams Program, I list the first of these as "Being an individual versus being a team member":

"Each team member has to express his or her strengths as an individual to create the skill mix the team needs, but at the same time you have to put the team's needs first… A team member put it bluntly: 'You have to be able to let go of your own ego. You have to relinquish ideas to the team—let the ideas be the team's, not yours. This is tough.'"

It becomes tougher if you are not being paid to be a team member. Most companies talk about teamwork but pay people to be individual performers. One teamwork researcher has pointed out, "Talking about teamwork and cooperation and then not having a group-based component to the pay system… signals what the organization believes is actually important—individual behavior and performance."[2]  No company should be surprised that people follow their own agendas when the company pits employees against each other for raises. You get what you pay for.

Often people are really only paid to show up. If your organization pays a salary or hourly wage with annual raises and no bonuses, you're really only paying for time, even if the adjustments are partially based on performance. Humans are far more motivated by immediate needs than long-term rewards, unless the rewards are so great they lead to self-motivation, like the goal of getting a college degree. The promise of an extra percent or two of pay many months from now is rarely going to have more power than more immediate psychological pressures.

If your company wants maximum productivity from your group, at some point it is going to have to reward the teamwork behaviors that maximize productivity. Notice I said reward the behaviors, not just the results. Tell somebody to improve some measure by 10% but don't tell them how, and they probably won't be able to do it. Reward the needed behaviors to get the behaviors, and assuming you've chosen the right ones, the results will follow.  There are various ways for doing this, quoted below with an example of each from the book.

• "Raises for new teaming skills or knowledge, and/or work skills learned as a result of the team's efforts." For example, one company "implemented a skill-based system for setting base pay. Workers could receive on-the-job training in 13 skill areas including technical and people skills… With each skill came a pay raise of a set amount."[3]
• "Bonuses for efforts—as opposed to results—tied to achievement of milestones." A software company "paid out pre-announced bonus amounts to product development teams in two parts. Half was paid if and when the team hit the target deadline. The other half was paid only if quality targets also were met. Those targets were measured by customer satisfaction surveys, responses of pre-identified focus groups, and technical support calls as of 90 days after the release date."[4]
• "Bonuses for successful suggestions." A company created a program where employees earned credits that could be used to buy goods from a catalog. The amounts were based on how much money was saved. An impact of $5,001–$10,000 earned a $150 credit, for example. The program created $16 million in savings in three months.
• "Gainsharing—If team activities result in measurable cost savings or revenue gains, (give) some of the extra money to the teams." One company encouraged each team to create "a plan identifying measurable improvements it hoped to make in one of three areas: safety, financial results, or operational results. If the team was able to show bottom-line gains from the effort, it received a percentage of the dollar savings."

Of course, if you are a "worker bee" or team leader in a larger organization, there may be little you can do to change the pay system. If you have control over your team's budget, you might be allowed to carve out a portion for team-based rewards. And anyone can suggest a change to upper managers. You may not want to personally, especially if you typically do well under the current system. Think, however, about the stresses of the typical salary review process. You don't need a researcher to tell you, as one team of them wrote, that typical processes "absorb vast amounts of management time and resources, and they make everybody unhappy."[5]

Carefully designed and implemented pay systems based on individual and team performance are more satisfying to people because folks know exactly why they got the pay they got and how to get more. These systems also take the burden off of managers trying to be fair despite having to use subjective measures, and reduce the company's legal risks by limiting the impact of hidden biases all humans have. I believe such systems are a win-win-win approach, and the most powerful way to get a company what it actually wants: the kind of performance that increases profits.  

Action Item: Business owners, take time in the next week to find a compensation consultant in your locale with experience in performance-based pay, and set an appointment. Everyone else, set an appointment with HR, the company owner, or your boss as appropriate to discuss the possibilities for your team.