Better and betterer

I was never a fan of incentivised pay schemes. You meet such-and-such a target and therefore get such-and-such a bonus. Being now self-unemployed, I no longer have to rage against that particular machine. A very good thing.

I understand that goal-setting is a fact of modern working life and that success-criteria need to be measurable to make this particular 'management bollocks' work (there is an acronym for this (measurable goal setting I mean, not management bollocks). SMART if I recall. So it is obviously subscribed to by some learned acronym makers. I just can't help thinking that it is silly. 'Success' is generally a child of the environment in which the work is done and over which the goal setter or goal seeker has little or no control. It is more often happened upon than 'achieved'.

You can be the most talented, hardworking and motivated person just to find that things outside of your control gang up on you to pee on your strawberries. At the same time, someone else, perhaps less able, less hardworking and less motivated, walks backwards into the pot of gold and is showered with praise and promotions by their acronym-loving organisation for their by-chance , and therefore unrepeatable, 'success'. Who said I was grumpy 😊.

There are, I believe, only three credit-worthy things you can personally do in work (or life, come to think of it), the rest (what happens as a result) is happenstance. The three things are:

• Work hard (put the effort in),

• Use the gifts that God gave you (lever your talents),

• Don't repeat mistakes (get better by learning).

Note that this last one does not say don't MAKE mistakes, quite the opposite.

Full disclosure, I admit that I believe that by doing these three things, worthy, perhaps even measurable, achievements (successes if you like) are more probable over time than they would be if you don't/didn't do them. Actually, I rather think that consistently exhibiting these qualities IS the 'achievement' worthy of rewarding in the workplace.

Rudyard Kipling (not often cited as a management consultant I know) did sort of lay a rhyming (as in familiar rather than phonetic) word-egg on this topic in his poem 'If'. He says "... If you can meet Triumph and Disaster and treat both those imposters just the same .... You will be a man".

What a word picture! Success and Failure (measured using management acronyms or not) are imposters - same as Triumph and Disaster - accidents of a chaotic world and as significant to actual worth as a fork in a world of soup.

Goal Setting - yes. Incentivised Pay - yes (if you must) but as reward for the way people act rather than for the happenstance of the compliance of the environment in which they find themselves in. Just like Darwinian theory, its not succeeding in a gracious environment that guarantees the ongoing (repeatable) survival and growth of a particular species (or animal within that species), it's more not failing as badly as the rest when the world dumps what it ate yesterday on that same gracious environment from a great height.