It is vitally important that we allow people and projects to fail, it is the only way forward, but here’s why rewards for failure don’t help anyone.
There is a big difference between reward and encouragement. If someone has improved or is trying hard then they should be encouraged. Personally I would much rather deal with someone who makes the effort and cares than someone to whom things come easily and is at the top of their game but doesn’t care. However rewards for failure are bad and certainly not an effective way of achieving the objective.
We have produced a generation who feel entitled. At school they got a reward for just turning up, a prize for competing even when they came last. This is bad. The people who succeed are devalued and those who have failed still get a reward and are therefore patronised.
The Bank Of England has just handed out huge bonuses despite the fact that it has spectacularly failed to control the economy. They use the “if it works it’s down to me and if it fails it’s down to external factors” excuse. We used to call this “heads you win, tails you win” approach. Another example of reward for failure and that doesn’t help the economy which is supposed to be their main concern.
Degrees and qualifications are getting more and more difficult to fail. Increasingly students consider a bad grade to be the fault of the teacher rather than their inability to learn.
The problem with most of life and certainly the real world is that life is not like that. Sometimes you don’t even get rewarded when things go well and there are definitely no rewards for just turning up.
Lets’ change the approach. To make it effective we must reward success, encourage effort and allow failure so long as the lessons behind the failure are learnt.
Above all let’s stop levelling down.
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