(This post is published post-dated.)
Yesterday I was exposed to a kind of management thinking that was quite strange and foreign to me. It started with a strange request for a performance review that seemed quite hastily put together and I sat down with my boss and we chatted about how things were going at work and work in general. It wasn't exactly quite clear what he was driving at, and after some hemming and hawing suddenly he dropped the bomb.
He was giving me a raise. No criteria, no promotion, no new responsibilities, just a raise. Interesting.
As a management practitioner, I found it a little strange. What? Why? Why would you increase your cost just to provide more salary to someone who wasn't asking for it?
He answered, "From past experience, people perform better, and it's cheaper to raise people when they aren't asking for it, opposed to waiting until they ask for it."
Wow. That's interesting.
But actually, it's consistent with a fundamental management concept. Take good care of the people around you, and they will stick around and perform well.
So simple, but yet so rare.
Thankfully, I work with one of the best teams on earth.
