Product Description

Since its original publication in 2007, the New York Times bestseller The Carrot Principle has received rave reviews in The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and The New York Times, and has helped a host of managers to energize their teams, and companies to dramatically boost their business results. The book was even adopted by the prestigious FranklinCovey International training and consulting group for its leadership training. This updated edition couldn't come at a better time, as the economic downturn requires us all to come up with creative and cost-effective ways to stimulate growth and productivity.

Revealing the groundbreaking results of one of the most in-depth management studies ever undertaken, The Carrot Principle shows definitively that the central characteristic of the most successful managers is that they provide their employees with frequent and effective recognition. With independent results from HealthStream Research, and analysis by bestselling leadership experts Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, this breakthrough study of 200,000 people over ten years found dramatically greater business results when managers offered constructive praise and meaningful rewards in ways that powerfully motivated employees to excel. These managers lead with carrots, not sticks, and in doing so achieve higher:

- Productivity

- Engagement

- Retention

In a new chapter, Gostick and Elton report on the results of an extensive study, conducted by leading research authority Towers Perrin, that confirms the extraordinary effectiveness of the Carrot Principle approach all around the globe.

Drawing on case studies from leading companies including Disney, DHL, KPMG, and Pepsi Bottling Group, Gostick and Elton show how the key to recognition done right is combining it with four other core traits of effective leadership. Gostick and Elton walk readers through exactly how to use the simple but powerful methods they have discovered all great managers use to provide their employees with this effective recognition, which can be learned easily and will produce immediate results.

Great recognition can be done in a matter of moments -- and it doesn't take budget-busting amounts of money. Following these simple steps will make you a high-performance leader and take your team to a new level of achievement.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17622 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781439149171
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Book Description
Got carrotphobia? Do you think that recognizing your employees will distract you and your team from more serious business, create jealousy, or make you look soft? Think again.The Carrot Principle reveals the groundbreaking results of one of the most in-depth management studies ever undertaken, showing definitively that the central characteristic of the most successful managers is that they provide their employees with frequent and effective recognition. With independent research from The Jackson Organization and analysis by bestselling leadership experts Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, this breakthrough study of 200,000 people over ten years found dramatically greater business results when managers offered constructive praise and meaningful rewards in ways that powerfully motivated employees to excel.

Drawing on case studies from leading companies including Disney, DHL, KPMG, and Pepsi Bottling Group, bestselling authors Gostick and Elton show how the transformative power of purpose-based recognition produces astonishing increases in operating results--whether measured by return on equity, return on assets, or operating margin. And they show how great managers lead with carrots, not sticks, and in doing so achieve higher

* Productivity
* Engagement
* Retention
* Customer satisfaction

The Carrot Principle illustrates that the relationship between recognition and improved business results is highly predictable--it's proven to work. But it's not the employee recognition some of us have been using for years. It is recognition done right, recognition combined with four other core traits of effective leadership.

Gostick and Elton explain the remarkably simple but powerful methods great managers use to provide their employees with effective recognition, which all managers can easily learn and begin practicing for immediate results. Great recognition doesn't take time--it can be done in a matter of moments--and it doesn't take budget-busting amounts of money. This exceptional book presents the simple steps to becoming a Carrot Principle manager and to building a recognition culture in your organization; it offers a wealth of specific examples, culled from real-life cases, of the ways to do recognition right. Following these simple steps will make you a high-performance leader and take your team to a new level of achievement.

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"The Carrot Principle: How Great Managers Use Employee Recognition"
An Essay by Adam Gostick and Chester Elton
For organizations that do it right, it's a bit like discovering gold in your backyard. Employee recognition, long considered a benefit that costs money, can actually be a management tool that makes money. At first blush, the idea is counter-intuitive. As leaders, we've become accustomed to viewing recognition programs as a cost of doing business. But employee recognition is evolving. A groundbreaking research study of 200,000 employees, unveiled in our new book The Carrot Principle, presents a new paradigm: Applying employee recognition techniques within a context of goal-setting, open communication, trust and accountability, (what we have come to call the Basic Four) accelerates the impact of all of these critical management skills.

Continue reading "The Carrot Principle: How Great Managers Use Employee Recognition"

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More to Explore

The 24-Carrot Manager

Managing with Carrots

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From Publishers Weekly
Gostick and Elton, consultants with the O.C. Tanner Recognition Company, have made a career out of promoting the idea of employee recognition as a corporate cure-all. (Their previous books include Managing with Carrots, The 24-Carrot Manager and A Carrot a Day). Here, they cover familiar ground, showing how many managers fail to acknowledge the special achievements of their employees and risk alienating their best workers or losing them to competing firms. They advocate creating a "carrot culture" in which successes are continually celebrated and reinforced. Dozens of recognition techniques include the obvious ("When a top performer is going on a particularly long business trip, upgrade her ticket to business class") to the offbeat ("Hire a celebrity impersonator to leave a congratulatory voice-mail message on an employee's phone"). But the authors pad the pages with unsurprising survey results, the umpteenth recapitulation of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs and long anecdotes of questionable relevance (e.g., three pages about Charles Goodyear's rubber-vulcanizing technique in order to introduce the notion that a transforming force—like employee recognition!—can produce surprising results). Gostick and Elton's philosophy is appealing, but could have been explained in a long magazine article. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"Gostick and Elton are the undisputed thought leaders in employee motivation and recognition. In The Carrot Principle, they not only provide the statistical proof that recognition will drive business results, but show how great organizations are using these tools to inspire performance." --John Mullen, Global Chief Executive Officer, DHL Express

"To succeed in today's ultracompetitive workplace, it is imperative that you have highly motivated people. "The Carrot Principle" provides managers with an exceptional tool to recognize people for their contributions to your success while outlining a process to perpetuate a culture of recognition throughout your entire organization." --Corey A. Griffin, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, The Boston Company Asset Management LLC (A Mellon Financial Company)

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Customer Reviews

Smart Lemming Review: a Must-Have Book for Middle Managers, Leaders, and Knowledge Workers
The Good: It's a "soup to nuts" management system providing the fundamentals of the Basic Four of Leadership model and leadership acceleration application. For skeptical managers who don't believe in rewarding employees, this book will change your mind and management style.

The Bad: At times, this book feels redundant, with survey data sounding identical in each example; however, the data is compelling and differences are subtle but significant.

Action Item: Managers and leaders should buy this book to learn how to educate and motivate their workers to achieve desired goals. Knowledge workers should buy this book to discover what they may be missing in their current work relationship with their managers and leaders.

How the Best Managers Deliver Extraordinary Results: Most business books are based on conventional wisdom or someone's personal work experience. In contrast, The Carrot Principle is based on a ten-year study of 200,000 managers and employees. There's a strong correlation between companies that acknowledge excellence and bottom-line financial results, and Gostick and Elton use this data to build the case that an effective workplace is one where employees are recognized for their contributions. It also has high rankings for customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and retention - companies with these attributes have higher Return on Equity and Operating Margin metrics, compared to companies that do not have formal recognition programs.

Gostick and Elton explain how managers and leaders can use the Carrot Principle to improve their bottom line. Managers should become competent in the Basic Four of Leadership by using goal setting, communication, trust, and accountability.

1. Goal setting: employees need to understand exactly what tasks they should accomplish individually, as part of a team, and corporation.
2. Communication: managers must explain corporate goals to employees, keeping them informed about company initiatives or developments.
3. Trust: managers earn trust by listening to employees, honoring commitments, and admitting mistakes. They should be more interested in the team's success than their own.
4. Accountability: companies should fulfill the promises they make to their employees and customers, while managers need to find a healthy balance between identifying employees' mistakes and acknowledging their successes.

In today's environment, employees no longer expect to spend an entire career with one employer. Altruistic managers, who firmly grasp their employees' "desire for self-realization" work, create an environment that enables staffers to develop skills, assume added responsibilities, and receive recognition for achievement. The employees' trust level rises in this setting. Even managers want to be effective, eager to attract and develop talent for their company. To be successful, managers and leaders must develop a style that is "less focused on tangible outcomes and become more able recognizing the overall impact of employee contributions."

How Great Organizations Create World-Class Results: Executives establish their organization's core values, but middle managers reinforce these values so that the workforce can internalize them. Culture is critically important, since it establishes ethics and principles followed by employees. Long-term success requires a strong corporate culture. Celebrations and appreciation make employees feel like integral parts of the company. Gostick and Elton define the building blocks of a Carrot culture:

* Day-to-day recognitions: these are frequent, timely acknowledgments of hand-written notes, thanking employees for extra effort in helping customers.
* Above-and-beyond recognition: achievements that merit personalized rewards with managers presenting in front of the honoree's co-workers. This recognition should be used when someone saves the company time or money, offers a great innovative idea that the firm adopts, or exceeds a sales goal.
* Career recognition: these awards are typically associated with the traditional gold watch presented upon retirement, but Gostick and Elton also recommend using them to recognize employees on their first day of work, one year of employment, etc.
* Celebration events: company celebrations are a perfect opportunity to allow every employee to share in acknowledging corporate achievements.

Gostick and Elton offer Carrot templates, like the Recognition Frequency Log and Employee Needs Chart, creating the necessary infrastructure for employee recognition efforts. Manager Tools, such as Newsletters, white papers, case studies, and other recognition tips, are also available at their website.

How to Manage by Carrots: Managing by recognition sounds intimidating if you haven't done it before. Fortunately, Gostick and Elton provide ideas on how you can recognize your employees, even with a limited budget. Some rewards are free, while others are a little expensive. They provide appropriate levels of recognition, matching the reward with the employee accomplishment: thank-you notes, bronze, silver, and gold awards.

* Thank-you recognition is for the daily, ongoing encouragement of small steps that lead us to success
* Bronze awards recognize one-time above-and-beyond behaviors related to your core values.
* Silver awards reward ongoing above-and-beyond behaviors.
* Gold awards recognize behaviors that produce bottom-line results.

Conclusion: The Carrot Principle is a must-read for middle managers and upper-level executives. Gostick and Elton demonstrate that employee recognition is a fundamental management practice that helps companies achieve its goals. This book provides a complete management program, helping middle managers understand the basics of leadership; how to create a Carrot culture; how to create an employee recognition program; and how to maintain your new Carrot culture. Knowledge workers should also read this book to learn how they can improve their job satisfaction by working with their manager on goal setting, communication, trust, and accountability.

Important Stuff in Depth, but Nothing New

Here are the big ideas from this book.

Positive consequences, such as praise and recognition, are great tools for encouraging people to try new things and to continue desired behaviors. They send a message about what managers value.

In work teams where people say they have been praised recently, productivity, morale, and measures of engagement are more likely to be high and people are more likely to stay with the organization.

In teams where people say they have not been praised recently, productivity, morale, and measures of engagement are more likely to be lower and people are more likely to want to leave.

Companies with high productivity, morale and engagement and low turnover are more profitable.

Managers rate themselves higher on giving praise and recognition than their subordinates rate them.

There are no breakthrough, thought-leader ideas here. There is nothing really new.

The jacket blurb implies that this is based on exciting new research. It's not. It's based on research by the authors' firm that reinforces other research, including Gallup, Blanchard, a boatload of academic researchers and my own study of top performing supervisors. So if you're looking for new or breakthrough stuff, you don't have to buy the book and you don't need to read any further.

That doesn't mean that you won't get value from the book. The points the authors make are worth making again and again. Praise in all its forms is the most powerful and most underused tool for growing great, engaged teams.

Because the book is devoted, essentially, to a single idea, you get lots of depth on that idea. Some of those are just small insights.

On page 84, the authors make the point that in service industries, the perceived value of the product is tied to the behavior of the person that the customer comes in contact with. I knew this at some level, but seeing it in print got me to reflect on it and what it means.

Other things are more substantive. The authors provide details on different types of recognition: Day-to-Day; Above and Beyond; Career; and Event. They offer forms and lists and charts.

If you haven't read much about the power of praise and recognition this is a good place to start. The book covers most of the basic research, puts it in context, and gives you tools for putting it to use.

Remember that the authors wrote this book to sell their services and products. Sometimes they try way too hard to stretch their single bed blanket of product over the double bed of the subject. Sometimes they struggle to name things "carrot" or paint them orange, when simple description would do just fine.

If you're looking for a tool to use with managers at our company or in your peer group to increase the amount and effectiveness of legitimate praise, this is a good book to buy and use. You may also want to investigate the authors' other products.

Carrots Aren't Just for Horses!
Amazing ... 79% of employees who quit their jobs indicate their key reason for leaving as a lack of appreciation. More money? No. Less benefits? No. Nasty coworkers? No. They leave because they feel unappreciated.

Enter my department ... Human Resources. We conduct exit interviews and try to figure out why the eager applicant we hired a few months (or years) ago is now sitting on the other side of the desk, happy to be "getting out." We begin recruiting again, hopeful the next person will stay longer than this one did.

In the meantime, we are reminded of the cost of turnover, and are charged with the responsibility of finding a better hire. And so the cycle begins again. While many companies, like mine, believe turnover to be mostly caused by poor selection, a 200,000-person study by HealthStream Research found that managers who do a better job with employee recognition have lower turnover, as well as better business results.

Most of you who are reading this review are well aware that turnover eats up a chunk of a company's resources, but perhaps you don't know turnover is estimated to be a $5 trillion annual drain on the U.S. economy. The only way to break this cycle is to keep our outstanding performers engaged.

Let the drums roll ... enter The Carrot Principle, a book which can save the day for businesses all over the world. Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton teach us how to create a carrot culture, how to determine whether employees are engaged and satisfied, and how to calculate the level of reward to give. And their 125 recognition ideas will give your managers the tools they need to spread the carrot culture faster than the spread of the flu.

Whether you're a manager, a district manager, or a CEO, you need to learn that it is statistically impossible to be considered a "trusted, communicating, team-building, goal setting" manager unless you are effectively using praise and recognition. Don't be one of the 74 percent of leaders worldwide who still don't practice recognition with their employees.

So what are you waiting for? Buy this book to propel your company to a "world-class" organization, and end this cycle of costly turnover once and for all.