Page 115 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Getting Great People on Board 105

them to you), you need to communicate them to your team. Sometimes
these are well understood or may be part of an employee handbook and
on-boarding orientation. Usually, however, the incentives philosophy is
somewhat opaque, with people making assumptions about what it takes to
be rewarded or to get ahead. And in the absence of common understand-
ing, people will be surprised, disappointed, or hurt when they receive their
compensation decisions or talk with you about their career prospects. On
the other hand, if you do make the basis for incentives as clear as possible,
your people will have a pretty good idea ahead of time what to expect and
will know what they need to do in order to do better.
In short, your job as a leader is to make the principles of rewards and
incentives as clear as possible. Talk to your team as a group about the phi-
losophy and what it means. Then talk to each person individually, long
before compensation or reward decisions are made or announced, about
how the philosophy applies to them. Is there a behavior that they need to
work on? Do they need to temper their expectations for a raise because the
overall company is not doing so well? Do they need to gain some other kind
of experience in order to advance to a higher level?
The key point is that everyone in the organization needs to know the
principles and how they apply to them. Even more importantly, once these
principles are articulated, they need to be followed. If you and other leaders
are seen as talking a good game, but not following through, it will damage
your credibility and diminish people’s commitment to your organization.

Shaping a culture for executing your strategy

Culture is one of those words that is used all of the time, but its meaning is
not always clear. The dictionary definition is that an organization’s culture
is the sum of attitudes, beliefs, customs, and behaviors that distinguish one
group from another. That culture develops over time as groups of people
work together and create repeated patterns and habits. Eventually these
patterns become informal rules or norms that most people in the group
adhere to, and to which new members have to adapt. In this way, organiza-
tional culture has intense power to promote certain behaviors and actions.