By Luke Murray
Andy Cox manages our art gallery, fixes up our art studio, and is just an all around handyman. He is great! Andy's most recent project was to install a "Victory Bell" - an idea we got from Gray Construction - a local construction company here in Lexington that rings a giant bell mounted near the roof of their building at the closing of each contract...one ring for every million dollars the contract was worth. We decided this idea was awesome...so we replicated it for ourselves and put it in the same room as our failure dashboard.
Almost as important as encouraging failure is rewarding & celebrating success. Celebrating success is easy to do as long as you remember to do it. You don't have to mount a bell to a 4"x4"...just throw a party (or do whatever your company culture would consider 'fun').
Rewarding success, however, can be a little tougher because it typically requires more resources than taking an extended and festive break (aka. 'party'). Since Awesome Inc. isn't flush with cash right now (or really any other resource besides great people like Andy) we have to get creative in the ways that we reward success. Luckily we have found that most of the people that help out around here are happy and self-motivated by the intrinsic reward of doing something they consider awesome...and they stay that way. Lots of this has to do with the fact that this place is already filled with happy people, but the other part (we'd like to think) is that we've consciously made sure that those that did good work and/or succeeded in their endeavors were appreciated.
There are several ways in which you can 'positively motivate' people. In Jack Welch's book "Winning" he notes that the three main ways are: 1. Money 2. Training 3. Recognition/Reward. Some incentives (i.e. promotions) are a combination of both money and recognition. The more you are aware of what types of rewards motivate people, the more effective you can be with your resources to do so.
As I look back on the tools we've used to motivate people thus far, we really haven't used much of #1 or #2, and in the classic sense, we haven't done much with #3 either. I'd like to say that the main reason we have yet to use these tools as motivators is because we don't have the money to, but the more I look at it, the more I realize that we haven't done a very significant step. One of the most important things that needs to be in place before we can start rewarding people via #1, #2, or #3, or ringing our victory bell is that we have to have clear metrics/measurements of their success.
At Gray Construction it's very simple: One ring for every million dollars of a closed contract. At Awesome Inc. each person is working on a different project (The Interactive Touchscreen in Labs, The Awesome Inc. Experience, The Awesome Space, events, and then you have the individual companies) and while each company has clear goals and milestones, we have yet to pick which ones are important enough to be celebrated or rewarded with a party, a bell ringing, or anything else. We need to define 'celebratable' success for each department or project. Maybe we should only ring it for every million dollars we make as well? The point is we have to define which success should get celebrated before we can start throwing parties just yet.
Up to this point we have done a very good job with giving people recognition informally in weekly meetings, or giving small gifts or (and this is hands down the most important and most effective) being frequently and sincerely appreciative of people's help. But as we move forward, we need to crystallize our definition(s) of success so we can apply more principles of motivation to encourage it...and so do you, that is, if you expect to motivate your team towards awesomeness as well.
Just remember that when you do throw that party, follow rule #17...
"Bring the Fun"
