A Kudos Culture

People want to be recognized and rewarded for their thoughts, ideas, and contributions.” Few statements will garner less argument than that. Yet, when we think about “rewarding collaboration“, people tend to gravitate only to material rewards, which most of us don’t have a whole lot of power to change. However, when participating in collaborative environments, it is especially important to remember that psychological rewards are often just as powerful and behavior-re-enforcing as a restaurant gift card or a cash bonus.

People like to feel appreciated

At the risk of noting the most obvious observation ever written, I will go out on a limb and say that people like to feel important. Thinking back to sociology/psychology class, Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs hits on the people’s desire to reach levels of satisfaction beyond material reward to self-actualization. Similarly, Frederick Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory argues that job satisfaction is most closely tied to “motivating” factors like recognition, personal growth, and challenging work (as opposed to “hygiene factors” such as salary and company policy, which contribute more to dissatisfaction, but do not give positive satisfaction).

Getting out of the realm of theory, it is my experience that recognizing people’s contributions, even peer-level recognition, is a great way to reinforce and encourage collaborative participation. Just knowing that our work is useful/interesting/helpful for our peers in many cases is enough to encourage sharing inside of organizations. In environments where it’s difficult to know if people are actually deriving value from work–i.e. most knowledge-creation jobs–positive recognition of utility and value is an important thing.

In particular, I want to call out two groups of people to get more in the habit of recognizing valuable contributions:

• Lurkers: The lurker is a much-maligned creature. Even the name rings of someone stalking from the shadows. Forget the Paredo Princple/80-20 rule for a moment: if there were no lurkers, there’d be no audience! The lurker is an under-appreciated being (I suspect most so in environments without adequate metrics: imagine if newspapers couldn’t detect the number of subscribers and instead calculated readership based on the number of letters to the editor that they received). But in order to encourage people to continue providing information/content, sometimes the lurker has to leave the shadows. Lurkers should realize that there is value in simply thanking a poster if they find information/insight that is useful, even if the lurker doesn’t think he has something substantive to contribute.


I see you lurkin'...with your lurkin' self

• Question-askers: Readers of this blog know that I am a fan of telling people what you want from them. I am a strong believer that asking the question that you want to have answered is the best way to get the answer you want (this post is so full of the obvious, it’s ridiculous). But when we get responses, many times we don’t always take 15 seconds to thank people for their participation/contributions. This is absolutely critical to continued participation, especially in a professional environment.

Reinforcing collaboration

I think that it is important for organizations, in order to build a more collaborative culture, to build a “kudos culture”. People seek recognition and appreciation from collaboration and sharing: so thank people for contributions and reciprocate! Commenting, re-tweeting, sharing links, and answering questions are all valuable behaviors that demonstrate value and utility of information.

Collaboration, Moneyball Style

In the field of sports writing, few names are more familiar than Michael Lewis. Though Lewis has written quite a few books, he’s best known as the brain behind Moneyball, which tracked a new way to create a successful baseball team without spending a whole lot of money. The poster child of the book and the broader movement is Billy Beane and his early 2000s Oakland A’s teams. According to Wikipedia:

Rigorous statistical analysis had demonstrated that on base percentage and slugging percentage are better indicators of offensive success, and the A’s became convinced that these qualities were cheaper to obtain on the open market than more historically valued qualities such as speed and contact. These observations often flew in the face of conventional baseball wisdom and the beliefs of many baseball scouts and executives.

Recently, Lewis wrote an article that basically called Shane Battier of the Houston Rockets of the NBA. This article argues that Battier, despite being “a marginal NBA athlete” and having a reputation as a “replaceable cog”, was perhaps the reason that the Rockets were a “championship caliber team” and not a “bubble playoff team”. For those interested in the complete argument, I highly recommend it. (And for football fans, one of my absolute favorite blogs, Smart Football, take a stab at Lewis’s latest article as well.

So what’s the point?

The business world loves sports metaphors. Everyone knows that. So how’s this for one: someone who’s good at collaborating can be a clear difference maker in an organization. This is not to say that people who are good at collaborating don’t have skills or value to contribute beyond being a good “collaborator” (a word that I don’t particularly like, but will use it…); rather, it’s that someone who is good at collaborating can really take a project to another level. A star performer who’s great at making those around him/her better is better than a star performer that doesn’t play well with others. The best of the best do both.

The catch-22 in business, as in basketball, is that it’s very difficult to understand exactly what it is about somebody who performs like Battier that makes them so valuable to a team. There’s no stat (other than wins and testimonials) that will highlight that value and there’s not an easy way to figure out who these performers are, except by reputation (or maybe social network analysis).

Moneyball Management

Moneyball was all about creating new ways to measure performance and value created by players. And these new measures were created because the old ones weren’t sufficient to tell the story. Collaboration is one of those other things, that if we can measure an individual’s ability to collaborate, could revolutionize the way we evaluate the creation of value. After all, guys who win (even if they don’t have any one great thing they do) will have a job until they choose not to.