Increase Sales Blog

Businesses from the entrepreneur to the multi-billion Fortune 100 organizations face challenges every day. Yet, there is one huge looming challenge that is currently not being addressed affecting business productivity.

This week when listening to the news, I heard about New England school districts that are giving As in efforts as part of the overall grading system. As a young child back in the dark ages when classes had 30 to 40 students, the effort (which is totally subjective viewpoint by the educator) was part of the report card. Of course for some students for example who found reading simple and easy, their efforts probably were not as strong as those who found reading complex and hard.

I know this to be true because I consistently scored As in the results from reading and Cs in the effort.  These marks were fairly consistent from third grade to high school when efforts were no longer part of the overall  grading process. (Note:  My father and his entire family were avid readers. By the age of 12, I was reading about 1,000 words a minute with 95% comprehension and all without any formal reading course. So reading for me was literally effortless and remains the same today some 40 plus years later.)

Years ago one of my colleagues Doug Brown of Paradigm Associates made this statement that still resonates with me:

People confuse motion with progress and activity with results.

By just focusing on effort at the exclusion of results, can potentially create a very unproductive workforce. Given right now from employee productivity research (the most recent being a Gallup poll), the majority of employees are not giving 8 hours of work for 8 hours of page (8 for 8), then the future looks very dim indeed if the up and coming workforce believes efforts trump results.

This trend of rewarding effort appears much in line with the other public education trends such as eliminating Valedictorian and Salutatorian or worse yet giving multiple Valedictorian awards because some students or rather their parents are upset that they are not number one or two. Yet, these many of these same parents probably believe in the supporting the best player (number 1) in any given sport and probably engage in conversations with others about who should be ranked number 1 or number two.

As many have argued against this type of behavior is let’s eliminate any playoffs and give everyone the #1 award.  Of course, this would significantly impact performance in future events.

How future American businesses deal with this challenge remains unclear.  However if these small business owners, entrepreneurs to C Suite executives thought they had productivity problems in the past, they haven’t experienced anything yet.

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