Project Management

How Do You Reward Achievement Within a Team?

Ken Whitaker of Leading Software Maniacs (LSM) has more than 25 years of software development executive leadership and training experience in a variety of technology roles and industries. He has led commercial software teams at Software Publishing (remember Harvard Graphics?), Data General, embedded systems software companies, and enterprise software suppliers. Ken is an active PMI member, Project Management Professional (PMP) certified, and a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM). Sources for LSM's material come from case studies, personal leadership experience, the PMI Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) and Ken's leadership books: Managing Software Maniacs, Principles of Software Development Leadership and I'm Not God, I'm Just a Project Manager.

Even when the economy and company growth remains stagnate, there’s an opportunity to keep your best team members motivated. Traditional top-down management usually employs goal-oriented, personalized techniques to reward individual achievement. For some organizations, managers are held accountable to identify and reward only the top tier of performers. With the shift to a more agile, team-centric organizational structure, singling out individuals can become a cumbersome and stressful task for even the best and most experienced managers.

In this article, I’ll cover how rewards can actually backfire. And I’ll give you three rules of thumb for rewarding your best performers.

Should We Have to Reward At All?
How many times have you heard this from upper management or product management?

“Couldn’t we get the software project out faster if your folks put in more hours?”

…or:

“We’re so dependent on the software team that silly ‘touchyfeely’ team motivation techniques don’t ever work. You can’t tell me that incentives won’t work for everybody. Look at what it does to motivate sales people!”

Motivating software developers and IT professionals, however, is a difficult skill to master with the likelihood of success dependent on a company’s culture. If, for example,…


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