A colleague of mine is the CFO for a mid-size service company. One day, his administrative assistant phoned me. He had tasked her with revising the company's employee incentive plan. After a few minutes of vague direction, he asked her to take her best stab at it and then fax the result to me for review and approval.
The problem was, of course, this very competent administrative professional had no experience in reward design and she didn't know where to begin. She spent an hour surfing the web looking for ideas, then - stumped - called me to ask for help.
It took all I could draw from my relatively shallow wells of tact and diplomacy to steer this dialogue back to her boss and help him see his error without either stigmatizing her or jeopardizing my relationship with him.
My point? Simply that reward design is no job for amateurs. Read more about the reasons why at my Compensation Cafe post today.
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