Communitywide Reward Celebrations

Frequent work communitywide gatherings whose primary object is to recognize, honor, and celebrate community performance help create and maintain unit cohesion. Celebrations dramatize the leader's commitment to people and to work-community values. They are heartfelt expressions of appreciation. Ensuring that celebrations are directly relevant to specific actions that are in line with the vision, values, and culture of the work community also helps ensure their effectiveness. It is often the fun (Santovec, 2001) aspects of a celebration that make recognition ceremonies positive and motivating experiences. Fun, simple, and original rewards work best to motivate community members (Nelson, 1999). The goal is to make the rewards given clever and unique. The simpler and more creative the better. Informal—spontaneous, even—rewards are often very effective in bonding workers to work-community goals and methods.

Individual Recognitions

Celebrating success can also focus on individual performance. Inner leaders give followers a chance not just to do a job but to have some impact on the work community, its processes, and its products. When a follower does his or her work well, they reward them in a celebration that praises that performance. They know that recognizing extraordinary performance will engender more of that behavior in the individual and also in all other workers. They know that the most motivating incentives from their followers' point of view are based on recent performance. People want something for something—they want recognition for a job well done and they want to see a direct connection to work done and the resultant reward. And, inner leaders have learned that recognition means most when it comes from a leader whom the employee holds in high esteem.

As individuals perform in exemplary ways, some inner leaders create or develop ways to publicly acknowledge that behavior. One corporation created what came to be known as the Golden Twinky when an excited inner leader, seeking for something to acknowledge a coworker's completion of a particularly difficult and thorny task ended up handing the follower a twinky from his lunch with a cordial "Great job. Congratulations!" Over time, the Golden Twinky Award became one of the most prestigious honors bestowed on an inventive employee in that division (Nelson, 1999).

Michlitsch (2000) recommends multiple programs and events to celebrate success. He says leaders should reward employees for doing a good job, that is, for engaging in behavior that achieves the work community's mission and strategy. In doing this, inner leaders find out what motivates their employees, and then provide situations within which they can motivate themselves. The reward is sometimes money but often is things that do not cost anything except time, concern, and recognition. Knowing that you get what you reward, inner leaders make certain that they reward performance that is aligned with the community's values, vision, mission, and strategy (Michlitsch, 2000).

Suggestion Awards Systems

While thought of by many as an old-fashioned and almost meaningless human relations technique, innovative inner leaders use this generic idea to craft programs to recognize and reward creative ideas from followers. Such programs can be focused narrowly on the immediate work tasks of suggesters or broadly engage all followers in proposing ideas for performance improvement anywhere in the work community and the larger corporation. Rewards may be recognition only, be limited to token gifts, or be one-time bonuses or pay increments. In some corporations they are a significant percentage of first year savings produced when the innovative idea is implemented.

Employee of the Month

Rewarding success does not have to cost much money or time. Developing criteria to identify outstanding performance by classes of worker and then measuring actual performance against those standards to highlight top performers is the basis of many recognition programs (Bowman, 1991). Some programs inner leaders initiate to honor a worker involve merely naming that person employee of the month—or week, or year, or other time period. Some inner leaders include a framed certificate attesting to that honor, provide a convenient free parking space, or otherwise give the winner visible special privileges.

Performance Certificates

Recognition for exceeding preset standards or personifying community values can also take the form of easily duplicated certificates honoring outstanding service. It also can entail filing an official commendation in the follower's personnel file to be considered in the future along with other data prior to decisions on raises, promotion, or selection for training or choice work assignments.

Personality Profiles

Profiling the employee in company newsletters or other bulletins or public relations documents also honors outstanding performance and adds to the honored individual's feelings of self-esteem.

Application of Bonus and Incentive Systems

While not always within the sole discretion of inner leaders, implementation of elaborate bonus and incentive awards programs is another recognition technique. Regardless of inner leaders' roles in creating and administering bonus and incentive plans, they use corporation-wide programs to foster their personal professional and work-community objectives as they make decisions about who will be included in bonus distributions and for how much the bonus will be for a given follower vis-à-vis other community members.

Group Bonus Plans

An innovative adaptation of bonus systems is one that focuses on work community as opposed to individual performance. Some inner leaders foster competitions among work units withing their sphere of leadership in which a unit endeavors to save more of its operating budget than other units. The problem with this plan normally is that such savings go back to the general fund and the saving unit reaps nothing but fleeting congratulations. Some inner leaders develop plans where a portion of the annual savings produced by a given unit is retained in its budget as an unallocated lump sum. That unit may keep that money in its budget and apply it to any other part of its work or use it to initiate other performance, quality, or cost-savings activities. Thus, the unit may use the bonus to buy technology, send people to needed training programs, or fund consultants to help propose new or improved systems, procedures, or products.

An Attitude of Praise

Inner leaders communicate an attitude of enthusiasm for the work and the workers (Lombardi, 2000). As inner leaders praise their followers for their values-directed work—whether it is truly outstanding work—they create trust, respect, and commitment within the organization. This kind of action helps build an attitude among work-community members that highlights achievement. Praise is a common virtue that is not as common today as it once was in normal human intercourse. If inner leaders cannot dispense monetary rewards in the same way that top leaders do, they can resort to courtesy, recognition, praise, and respect as incentives to others to behave in desired ways.

A Tradition of Excellence

Success is a matter of the mind as much as it is a matter of performance. Inner leaders use a variety of means to help followers think about success in the same way they do. They consciously project the precise picture of excellence that they have in mind for their work-community members. They embody in their actions and communications the qualities of mental intensity and commitment needed to fashion within their work community trust, respect, and commitment to the tasks and methods needed for success. And they are consistent over time in promulgating these values and behaviors. The result is that the community develops a tradition of excellence such that the members do not simply attain their goals, they maintain them over time. This is the real payoff from leading (Lombardi, 2000).