Rick Hause shows how a flawed compensation plan can kill a product launch. If your incentives reward maintaining old products, salespeople won't push the new one. Redesigning the reward structure to align with launch goals is how you fix it.
We need to be able to look at the business through a talent lens, predict what's going to happen, identify the root cause, which is constraint-based modeling, and then prescribe what needs to happen to relax that constraint. And if we get really good at doing that from a human capital perspective, we will in fact unlock business. What does that look like? I have an entire new product launch in the west part of the country. And my entire compensation plan supports kind of care and feeding for my current products. I've now identified a constraint. I've looked at that and said, unless I change the way I deliver rewards for my salespeople, I will kill my new product launch on the vine because the incentive structures have reverse gravity towards what I want them to be doing. Now, what do I go do about it? Rick Hause has the comp plan, and now I can prescribe some things that we can adjust. And that's where it's a lot more fun as a human capital leader to figure out what's the right way to engineer the architecture that drives the behavior.
From Stuck to Leading, Episode 2 — Meet the 5 Inner Fears Destroying Your Leadership
