Internal staff heroes

In one of his articles Steve Blank talks about going to an awards ceremony to congratulate a member of staff for going above and beyond. Nothing out of the ordinary so far. This staff member was being rewarded for forcing an innovation on the business, fighting to get the organisation to push it through and finally forcing the innovation to succeed, for which they were celebrated.

On the face of it this seems like you are rewarding the behaviour you want to see, backing up the culture of the company. However what is actually shows is how broken the organisations culture actually is. They are rewarding a staff member for having to fight against the company itself to actually do something useful.

When you take a step back you realise just how crazy the situation is. Staff should be encouraged to innovate and have nothing in their way to do so. Not be rewarded for breaking through the walls the company put there in the first place.

Praising people for hard work is a part of leadership that is often overlooked, it is too easy to get used to the high performance of staff and keep expecting more. You should take time to recognise hard work, but they should be following the systems the company has put in place, not fighting against them.