REWARDING EXCELLENCE IN THE WORKPLACE IS ONE OF THE PRIMARY CONCERNS OF GREAT MANAGERS. THUS, THEY FOCUS THEIR EMPLOYEES ON DEVELOPING WORLD-CLASS EXPERTISE IN CERTAIN ROLES.

The manager’s responsibility is to guide their employees to roles where they can get up steam and meet with success. Such roles motivate the employee to do more and more of what he or she is mentally and psychologically wired to do. Thus, the manager ensures that the employees’ combination of strengths defined by their skills, knowledge and talents hold with the distinct demands of particular roles. So, when an employee approaches a manager with a desire for promotion, it is still the responsibility of the manager to help the employee to find the right fit. This might mean different things to different employees. For one, it might mean a promotion to a supervisor role; for some, termination; for another, encouragement to grow within a current role; for others, a trip back to a previous role. All in all, the effective manager supports all processes aimed at rewarding excellence in the workplace.

The effective manager ensures that the employees are promoted to their level of competence, not incompetence. They don’t buy into the assumption that one rung of a career ladder necessarily leads to another. They understand that the fact that one person excelled at one rung of the ladder is not a sure sign that he will get up the same success on the rung above even with some training.

To curb unhealthy competition and resolve conflict, great managers make prestige more available not just to those few rungs high up on the career ladder, but to all rungs including those labelled as lower.

Conveying meaningful prestige on all roles performed at excellence, they fashion out alternative career paths and create heroes in every role. They make a respected profession out of every role performed at excellence.

To encourage their employees to approach world-class performance or excellence in the workplace, some companies do one thing: they create processes that define graded levels of achievement for every role. Law Firms often champion this process by encouraging the young lawyer to stick to the corporate law, criminal law or tax law and develop an enduring expertise along with a specific career line. Graded levels of achievement are often found in companies that value excellence.

The ability to remember the name of regulars and their matching drinks is an enduring trait of great bartenders. In this instance, the graded levels of achievement, that encourages excellence at bartending could break into categories or clubs of 100, 200, 300, 500, 1000, 2000 and 3000 respectively, corresponding to bartenders who can remember the names of 100, 200, 300, 500, 1000, 2000 and 3000 patrons together with their matching drinks. Naturally, the remuneration matches the level of proficiency.

It has been found that if you calibrate or measure a role and reward excellence at it, people will try to excel at it.

Some companies have devised the broadband method of rewarding excellence in the workplace as a version of the graded levels of achievement. They define pay in broadbands or ranges for each role. Usually, the top end of the lower-level role overlaps the bottom end of the role above. Thus, in a certain situation, if a senior financial consultant wants to switch to a managerial role, he or she might have to sustain a substantial pay cut and start at the lower end of the managerial line. He may eventually enjoy some significant financial rewards if he or she demonstrates excellence in managing people.

Broadbanding focuses employees on developing excellence or world-class expertise at certain roles that hold up to their talents since that is the only way of getting ahead. It curbs the mindless pursuit of promotion for the sake of financial gains or prestige.