A short spoken segment (Simon Sinek) arguing that organizations should reward behaviors—like initiative—that lead to innovation, not just final output or performance. Sinek illustrates the point with a personal anecdote from early in his marketing-career where junior employees prepared a pitch deck, their initiative was used by seniors, and he was promoted despite the team losing the pitch.
Chapters
We want to reward behavior like initiative, but very often, we only reward output, performance. I'll give you one simple example. So I was young in my career. I worked for a large ad agency, a large marketing firm, and we had a big new business pitch in the new year. This was December. And what was traditional is all the senior executives would do their business pitch, but it was Christmas time, so they all went on their vacations. And me and one other junior person were left back at the office. And they told us, prepare the war room for when they get back so they can do the pitch. Which basically means hang the research on the walls. That took an hour. We still had a week. And so we decided to do the pitch ourselves, which is we went through all the research, we combed through it, we found some insights, and we wrote the deck. We wrote the pitch deck. And when the executives came back, we presented our work, and they used our deck in the pitch, which was amazing. They actually used our strategy, and we lost the business. We didn't win the pitch. And I got a huge promotion. My boss promoted me two levels up. I skipped a level because he wasn't rewarding my performance. He was rewarding my behavior because he saw the initiative that I took and he wanted more of that. So I think that's a large part of it as well. If you want innovation, you have to reward the kinds of behavior that that begets innovation. But if we only reward output, all you're going to get is people taking safe roads because they want the output. So I think you have to recognize or reward the kind of behaviors that you want.
