Story

Are you rewarding your people correctly?

Are you rewarding your people correctly?

We often need to reward our children and team members.
Do we do it correctly. Let us check.
A group of students is given a set of puzzles and then they are divided in two groups.
Group A is prized for their ability and intelligence e.g. Wow, you got x number correct. That is a really good score. You must be good at this activity.
Group B is praised for their efforts. You must have worked really hard on these tasks.
During the next round, the students are given a choice of tasks.
They could choose an easier task or a challenging task from which they could learn a lot. What do you think will be the results?
Which group will choose the easier task and which would choose the challenging task? What are you rewarding your people for?
Photo Adaptation/Pixabay/sinisamaric1-3044277/
Share on

Your Comments

Similar Stories


The mistakes we make in our everyday life

• We are hardwired to make these mistakes • Few biases are simply evolutionary • These errors affect all of us including the bright ones • Experience is just not enough to overcome • but expertise is required to recognize and overcome

Few of biases as below · Anchoring - When an individual depends too heavily on an initial piece of information during decision making · Fixed pie - When we assume that our interests conflict with the other party's interests and we play adversarial · Framing - When we decide on our options differently when the options are presented with positive or negative connotations · Vividness – When we pay attention to strong features at the expense of less, that could be more impactful · Over confidence – When our subjective confidence is greater than the objective accuracy · Escalation – When initial decision is followed up with an irrational decision to justify the initial decision

Few ways to mitigate these biases are · Learn to recognize the bias · Use slow, effortful and logical thinking (System 2) · Avoid fast, automatic and effortless thinking (System 1) · Avoid negotiations which are thrust upon when not ready · Learn through use of stories, examples, exercises · Bring an outsider perspective