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The 1980′s business culture in the USA and internationally put a considerable emphasis on personal reward on the basis that highly motivated individuals could transform organisations and societies. The extreme example in film was Gordon Gekko in Wall Street stating that greed was good. The 90′s, however, have seen companies traumatised and bankrupted by the inappropriate use of remuneration as a motivator. Yet major corporate successes have been built on reward based remuneration systems. Phones4U recently and Allied Dunbar in the financial services market is an earlier example.

The notorious Barings Bank had individual traders on bonuses in the millions yet in the long term these motivated individuals were not fulfilling the company’s objectives. Moreover even when an individual’s reward system is based on entirely appropriate performance indicators, resulting in the organisation’s success and he or she is rewarded, there may still be problems arising from the large differential between salaries of senior people and those of middle management. A payment system that depresses or demotivates 10 people for every one it motivates may not be the best for the organisation.

Wise organisations are therefore trying to reward and motivate all staff so that staff act energetically to further the corporation’s interests both short and long term and feel they have been treated fairly. However there must be properly in place the link between the items on which they are being rewarded and the actions they are able to take to influence the desired outcome.

A wise organisation accepts that:

• It is reasonable for the individual manager to act in his or her own interests.
• Managers work for people not organisations and want to please the superiors closest to them, or failing that, their peer group.
• Managers want to achieve and will be attracted to those tasks at which they know they can succeed, usually favouring the short term at the expense of the long term.

The clear implication is that an organisation should lay some groundwork before relying on a remuneration structure to change performance and behaviour. In other words the management and organisation system must be in balance with the remuneration system.

There are 5 major pre-conditions to the installation of an effective reward structure.

1. Measurement: “If you don’t measure it you won’t get it”. There are various measurement systems of which Balanced Scorecard, which sets multiple objectives and is used by Tesco, is perhaps the best known.

2. Monitoring: If the performance measures are not monitored properly or only monitored in a review at the year end, it can give the manager signals that they don’t really matter or, worse still, that failure is acceptable providing all the managers fail together.

3. Control of the tools for the job: The organisation must ensure that the individual is not over dependent on factors outside his control to achieve the performance measures set out (this is the ‘how’ part of the equation).

4. Consistency: Ensuring that short term organisational factors don’t over-influence managers or drive them from their real objective. The organisation must also ensure that its own design (be it bureaucratic or loose) is appropriate to what is being asked of managers.

5. Reward and strategy in line: An organisation’s achieving a clear strategy is not an event that will take place in the future; it is a journey. A remuneration system can be put into an organisation even when it has a relatively muddled strategy providing that organisational and management disputes are resolved by reference to strategy and the “balanced score card”. Only then will there be pressure on the organisation to refine its strategy, structure and remuneration systems.

Based on these 5 pre conditions, there is a checklist of 10 factors that the effective remuneration and reward structure must achieve:

1. Support the business strategy
2. Encourage the desired behaviour
3. Reward relevant performance
4. Be fair
5. Be substantial
6. Be tax efficient
7. Be timely (The reward must take place close to the achievement)
8. Incorporate non financial rewards (Recognition can be as important as cash)
9. Be firm (A bonus lost through missing target should not be recoverable whereas a salary increase should only be delayed until target is reached)
10. Be crystal clear

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“He Hate Me” was the nickname of Rod Smart, a leading rusher in 2002 for the Las Vegas Outlaws of the now defunct XFL pro football league. Looking for an edge, the XFL allowed players to put nicknames on their uniforms.

“I was always saying, ‘he hate me,’ all through camp in Vegas,” Smart said. “If I didn’t get the ball, I’d talk to the other running backs and say, ‘He hate me, man; this coach hate me.’ I was always saying that.”

Smart put He Hate Me on the back of his number 32 jersey, and now the name lives in lore, though XFL has been out of business for years.

When I first saw Rod Smart play and his “He Hate Me” jersey, I thought, “Forget about football. That’s a leadership lesson!” That’s because “He Hate Me” and leadership often go hand-in-hand.

Clearly, leadership is not about winning a popularity contest, it’s about getting results — not just average results but more results faster continually. To lead people to get the latter, you often must challenge them to do not want they want to do but what they don’t want to do.

That’s where “He Hate Me” comes in. When you move people from being comfortable getting average results to being uncomfortable doing what’s needed to get great results, strong feelings, hatred and anger, are often triggered. Having people resent you, even hate you, comes with the territory of being a leader. In fact, if you are not getting a portion of the people you lead angry with you, you may not be challenging them enough.

This does not mean you consecrate their anger and let it fester. You absolutely must deal with it. After all, you can’t motivate angry, resentful, “He Hate Me” people to be your cause leaders.

Here is my four-step process to help you deal with angry people you lead. (1) RECOGNIZE. (2) IDENTIFY. (3) VALIDATE. (4)TRANSLATE.

RECOGNIZE: Recognize that if you don’t face up to the anger of the people you lead, that anger will eventually wind up stabbing you in the back.

Many leaders could care less about people’s anger. They say in effect: “People should do what I tell them to do. Period. Their feelings are irrelevant.” If ‘my-way-or-the-highway’ is your way of leading, don’t engage in this process. I submit, however, that such leadership is far less effective than the leadership that motivates people to be your ardent cause leaders.

Making motivation happen involves first understanding if people are angry with you or not. Often, people won’t tell you they are angry. They’ll try hide it from you either out of embarrassment, trepidation, or wanting a sense of control.

Here are ways you can recognize that people are angry with you. The first is that you can see it on their faces or their body language. The second is that you can tell it in a drop off in their performance. The third is that you hear from other people they are angry. The fourth is they actually show you and tell you they are angry.

IDENTIFY: Identify the causes of their anger. This may not be as simple or as easy as you think. They may be angry, but they may not want to talk about why they are angry or even admit to you that they are. Don’t back them in a corner. Don’t make judgments. Don’t get angry yourself. Get interested. Don’t say, for instance, “You’re angry … ” Instead, ask open-ended questions like, “Are you angry with me?” — a question that seems on the surface only slightly different but that will make a big difference in the consequences of your interactions with them.

Once you and they have identified that they are angry, come to an agreement as to the actual reasons why. Drill through superficial reasons to the bedrock of why. They may say they are angry because you are giving them more work to do. But digging further, you may find out that they believe the supposed extra work will set them up for failure, and they might lose their jobs. So, they are really angry not simply for work-load reasons but for job security reasons.

VALIDATE: Validate their anger. Their anger is real and important to them. It’s who they perceive themselves to be (at the moment they feel angry) in their relationship with you. Many people embrace their anger. They may see it as the one thing that they can control in an environment in which they feel out of control. If you try to ignore that anger or belittle it, they will feel you are belittling them.
Tell them that you know they are angry and that you want to find out why. Avoid saying things like, “I know you’re angry … but … ” That “but” can harden them against you. Saying, “Help me understand why you feel angry about what I’m doing.” can get you farther than the “but.” This is not to condone their anger nor approve of it but simply to come to an agreement with them that it exists and that you intend to do something about it in a way that will be mutually beneficial.

TRANSLATE: Their anger is your opportunity, an opportunity to translate their anger into your results. Because, as you’ll see, their anger can be great raw material for results.

People get angry for many reasons. * Their time is being wasted. * Their individual worth is not respected. * They feel threatened. * Their efforts are not appreciated. 5. They are not given voice or choice in their work. * Their values are not recognized or given credence. * Their leaders cannot do their jobs well. * Their leaders focus on their own needs. * Their leaders don’t understand and acknowledge their needs. * Their leaders don’t provide clear direction. * They are being overworked. 11. They are being set up to fail.

Here is a process for translating their anger into your results.

I call it the problem/solution/action process. The key to this process is that people’s anger usually stems from an unresolved problem. A. With their help, identify the problem. B. Come to an agreement with them as to the causes of that problem. C. Help them find a solution. D. Challenge them to take action to solve the problem. E. Link that action to increases in results.

You can apply this process to any of the aforementioned reasons people get angry. As an example, let’s apply it to the first reason. Often, a key challenge in getting others to take new action is their complaining you are wasting their time.

A. Draw up two lists, one composed of the aspects of their job they believe waste their time, and the other of the aspects they feel are crucial.

B. Come to an agreement with them on which aspects are truly a waste of their time and which aren’t. Without such agreement, they may remain angry with you. For instance, they may feel that their having to complete a particular report or aspects of that report wastes their time. If you think that such reports are absolutely essential, you cannot continue this process unless you convince them that the reports are essential or that you will change them to make them essential.

C. Once you come to that agreement, work on each aspect in the “waste of time” list by applying this analytical tool: Decide if you want to leave it alone, change it, or eliminate it. There is no fourth choice!

D. If you have chosen to change it, have them suggest actions they will take to do so. Note the sequence here. Your first step in changing an aspect is to elicit from them what needs to be changed and the actions required to affect the change. If need be, you can always veto their choice. But if you first let them make that choice, you may find that they have delineated actions that tap a new vein of results. At the very least, they will be committed to those actions, since they go right to the heart of solving the problem of their anger.

E. Link those actions to increases in results. For instance, now that they have reduced, eliminated or changed a particular aspect of their job that was a problem for them, how will that translate into money saved/earned?

Be advised: You may be confronted by “professionally angry” people who will be angry and stay angry no matter what you do. Just being you or just being a leader or just being you as a leader gets them angry, and nothing you can do or say seems to change that. But keep working the four-step process. It’s your best way of remedying even the “professionals” anger.

There is no denying in the tremendous increase in the number of online businesses in the past 10 years, not only in the USA, but just about any place where computers can be accessed easily. As we all know that, among many online businesses run by good and honest people, there are some online businesses run by bad and unscrupulous people whose primary objective is to con money out of unsuspecting naive people who are desperately looking online for jobs due to their circumstances such as being a stay-home-parent with kids, wheelchair bound, or whatever their unique circumstances could be that made them think that online jobs made more sense. I decided to look around online, about 2 years ago, after seeing so many popups about home based jobs such as paid online surveys, freelance jobs, etc to see if they were another one of online schemes to rip you off. After I signed up with many of them, of course I couldn’t check all, and receiving hundreds, if not thousands, of junk emails from them I was able to tell which ones were good and bad. As in real life, we have to be careful and take some precautions by finding out if there is a physical address of business or a phone number or even by checking it out on BBB.org (Better Business Bureau) online before typing in our sensitive information.