Using Incentives to Influence Change (Influence and Change 7 of 10)
Posted by Tim on May 17, 2011
Which Kind of Carrot Best Helps Your Cause?
External incentives can be a helpful compliment in an overall behavior change strategy, but are often insufficient or even counter-productive by themselves.
First, external incentives do not build an inherent pleasure in the behavior we are incentivizing, which means that when the incentives stop, the behavior isn’t likely to continue long-term either.
Second, introducing incentives can actually reduce the likelihood of a desired behavior that was previously being done because it was inherently pleasurable.
Finally, incentives, even when seemingly appropriate, must be managed very carefully. Creating incentives for one set of behaviors or results often has unintended consequences for other behaviors. Consider a simple example of a typical incentive – the biggest bonus goes to the person who sells the most. Someone who wants this bonus might make unrealistic promises in order to close sales, or even sabotage other sales people. What started out as an incentive to increase sales leaves a wake of unsatisfied customers and angry colleagues. A more subtle example incentive misuse might be a manager who is concerned that her team’s quality numbers aren’t better, but who measures their performance only against the quantity of their output. She has unwittingly created a subtle incentive to neglect quality for the sake of quantity.
So what is a good use of external incentives?
The best external incentives often aren’t huge. Incentives that work well for shaping sustainable behavior are often small rewards that tie directly to the targeted behaviors. These incentives are often non-material, and link to people’s values and sense of achievement. Things like the appreciation for a job well done or recognition for going above and beyond reinforce people’s esteem and help increase the likelihood of the associated behaviors occurring again in the future.
In addition to finding the appropriate kinds of rewards, it’s also important to reward the right things. The results that come from enacting the desired key behaviors are important, but we can’t just reward results. Results are outcomes, and often affected by things outside the control of the people we’re trying to influence. We will quickly frustrate the people we’re trying to influence if we only provide rewards when the results are what we want. What if they have enacted all of the desired key behaviors, but external factors have kept the results from being what we want? To withhold rewards in this case would be counter-productive to creating sustained behavior change. In addition, rewarding only results can motivate people to get those results at the expense of the right behaviors.
In short, the best use of external incentives in creating targeted behavior change is to:
Use incentives as only one part of a multi-pronged influence strategy
The best incentives for encouraging sustained behavior change are often small, non-material, and liked to people’s values
Focus rewards on the right behaviors, not just results
(1 of 10) Decrypting the “Impact Gene”
(2 of 10) Find the Behaviors that Matter
(3 of 10) Communicate Key Behaviors
(5 of 10) Building Necessary Capabilities
(6 of 10) Enlisting the Right Support
