Agility is Team Sport

What counts is the per­for­mance of the team. How can indi­vid­ual per­for­mance be assessed then? And should one do so at all?

Those who mea­sure indi­vid­ual per­for­mance con­tri­bu­tions and dis­trib­ute vary­ing rewards depend­ing on them, not only receive demon­stra­bly poor­er results for any non-triv­ial task, but also dis­rupt the team struc­ture in par­tic­u­lar. Each team mem­ber is then pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned with his or her own area of respon­si­bil­i­ty. This loose group of mediocre soloists does how­ev­er not make a good orchestra.

Yes, but …

What about “low per­form­ers”? And what about key play­ers? How can the for­mer be pun­ished and the lat­ter reward­ed? The only cor­rect answer to this ques­tion was giv­en a long time ago by Dou­glas McGre­gor: Not at all or at least not for the pur­pose of motivation.

The answer to the ques­tion man­agers so often ask of behav­ioral sci­en­tists „How do you moti­vate peo­ple?” is, „You don’t.”

Dou­glas McGre­gor, 1966. Lead­er­ship and moti­va­tion: essays