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MYTH: PEOPLE WORK MAINLY FOR MONEY

People don't win the Super Bowl because they are working for money. If they did, the highest-paid team in the league should win it every year.

Most people don't work strictly for money. In case you think that's a misprint, let me say it this way: Your work means the most to you not on the day of your new raise but when you've accomplished something besides good sales and more money. Your performance isn't a function of your salary, but your salary should be a function of your performance.

Of course, you won't put in time without getting paid. But money alone won't keep you working well and hard once you show up. You can buy someone's time, but not his soul. Or his performance.

Chuck Tanner, major league baseball manager, put it this way: "You can have money stacked to the ceiling, but the size of your funeral is still going to depend on the weather." That's also true of the commitment you bring to work. What keeps you working is involvement. What gets you involved is accountability. And what keeps people accountable is the scoreboard. It works in football and the same in business. Let me tell you why.

One of the most gratifying things in sports is the scoreboard. In football and basketball, you look up over the arena and you know exactly how you stand. In golf, you carry the scorecard in your pocket; in tennis it's in your head or on the umpire's pad. Leads can change, but good effort (and a little luck) is instantly rewarded with points on the board. When you are behind, you are therefore driven to catch up; when ahead, to hold on. And when time runs out - or the final ball is hit - everybody knows who won and who lost.

How do we keep score in business? After all, business is the game where the clock never stops and the score can change every day. There is no great scoreboard in the sky that you can look up to during a lunchtime huddle or at the end of the day and know whether you're winning or losing. In manufacturing and sales, very few people can leave at the end of the week and say, "I won" or "I lost."  They just don't know.

And yet we all like to know how we're doing. I would hate to have to play in a sport with no score-keeping system. It is difficult to stay excited during a game if you don't know who is winning. During my playing years, that big scoreboard was a pretty reinforcing thing to those of us down on the football field.

And I think a lot of people in America see business as a game. I even agree with Ted Turner, the rough-riding Atlanta sportsman and television mogul, who once compared running a traditional business to operating his baseball team, the Atlanta Braves.

"To me, business is a game," he said. "It's like a poker game: you're playing for chips, but the most fun is the game. You keep score with dollars, to a degree. But it's like there are two kinds of points. Money is like hits in a baseball game. They're great, but the runs are what really count. And the runs are just being successful and having a good time. It takes a lot of hits to win a game. You can have more hits than the other team and still lose the game. The dollars are one way of keeping score, but not the primary way."

If dollars are not the primary way of keeping score in business, what is? Sure, dollars are one way of measuring your success in your business. When your salary goes up, you feel you've made progress. You're successfully climbing the corporate ladder. When sales are up, everybody feels good. But one of the most important things I have discovered, both as a professional athlete and as a businessman, is that people don't work for money: they work for satisfaction, for community, for participation, for a sense of productivity.

I first discovered this when I started making a lot of money in football. My salary with the New York Giants was about $50,000, and during my five years there it rose into six figures. But a funny thing happened: my salary went up, but I played some of my worst football in my last years with the Giants, even though I was more experienced, knew more about strategy and was more confident simply because I was making a lot more money. The point here is that making more money did not make me perform better. My performance improved markedly when I was traded back to the Minnesota Vikings - but that had everything to do with the quality of the organization, not with my salary, which remained the same.

It's the same with one of the greatest athletes of our time: Reggie Jackson. I've admired Reggie's career for a long time, from his days with the Oakland A's to the New York Yankees and then back to the California Angels.  During all those years, Reggie's salary made meteoric leaps. But I noticed that Reggie's performance didn't double every time his salary did. Reggie was great at Oakland, great at New York, and great again at California.  Reggie's salary had nothing to do with how well he played the game. He was "Mr. October" before he made the big bucks. He won play-off games simply because he wanted to win. It was love of the game, love of the limelight, dislike for George Steinbrenner - whatever put a smile on Reggie's face and drew that superior performance out of him; not his salary. On the contrary, salary was a function of performance, not the other way around.

I never made anything like the money Reggie made as an athlete. Yet I was trying just as hard for quarterbacking perfection as Reggie did for hitting greatness. He will go down as the man who hit three home runs in a single World Series game and I will stay in the record books for quite a while as the man with the most passes, touchdowns and aerial yardage.

We were both driven by the same impulses, but they had nothing to do with the desire for money. This is true of people working at any level. Of course, most people will tell you they are working to support themselves and their families. But our training projects in plants all over the country have shown us that performance increases not when you give people more money, but when they are offered the chance for visible, measurable satisfaction.

Perhaps the best proof that money alone won't enhance productivity lies in the American automobile industry. It fell into its worst slump during the very period that workers' salaries were rising the most. When the industry began concentrating more on the workers' roles and quality circles, productivity increased even though some labor groups took pay cuts. Job satisfaction seems to matter more than the tangible rewards of cash and benefits.

The bottom line is that people work for the score; they work to win, to beat their own records. Their success breeds success. The doffer in a textile mill who is suddenly producing over 200 pounds of yarn per hour instead of 140 or 150 is performing better just for the sake of performing better - because it feels so good. And it often comes about just because someone bothers to ask the doffer about his performance and pay attention to how well he does. He's then working for approval and has a score-keeping system (pounds of yarn per hour) to measure himself by. That's when doffing becomes a game.  "Can I beat yesterday's performance?" he may ask himself in the middle of the shift when he notices he has already reached 180 pounds per hour. "What happens if
I cut short my coffee break a few minutes?" The doffer has now become self-motivated and is like the quarterback whose adrenalin level varies according to the numbers he sees on the scoreboard.

Now, where does money come into this score-keeping system? It is just like the example of Reggie Jackson. This doffer's salary may go up as a function of increased performance - and it should. A 1983 poll showed that half of American workers see no relationship between how hard they work and how much they get paid. More than 60 percent said they wanted their jobs tied to performance.

But when we have studied cases where management tried to raise performance by raising pay first, we have invariably found that it doesn't work. Productivity is not a function of salary; salary must be a function of productivity.

The corollary to this rule is: You can't buy performance - you've got to manage performance.

FACT: Performance is not a function of salary; salary is a function of performance.

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