The Pay Off in Merit Pay (Not)

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know how I feel about compensation systems that claim to motivate better performance with differential pay. For example, A Compensation Story in 2006, It’s What We Know That Ain’t So and Pay for...

Estimating hard-to-measure benefits

Last week, I wrote a post about decisions that look only at easy-to-count costs and ignore hard-to-count benefits.Here’s one method for estimating hard-to-count benefits, subjective impact analysis:1. Identify the proposed course of action.2. Determine what’s...

Diluting Appreciation

Mike Kelly has a nice post on diluting the power of appreciation.   My experience is that genuine appreciations can transform many situations. A couple of years ago I led a year-long project with a distributed team–no two members were in the same timezone....

Competence in Context

Bob Lee & Keith Ray both commented on my post comments on my post Unskilled and Unaware of It. Bob says: The other interesting point in the article is that competent people *assume* that others are as competent. “It’s easy (for me) so it must be easy...