The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage Their Employees, Retain Talent, and Drive Performance [Hardcover]

Adrian Gostick (Author), Chester Elton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2, 2007

Newly updated to include information for the UK, The Carrot Principle illustrates how ordinary organizations have made themselves extraordinary through the use of strategic employee recognition. The authors show how great organizations and great managers succeed through living the Carrot Principle. Featuring case studies of effective recognition in some of the world's most successful organizations, such as DHL, Avis, Pepsi, etc and demonstrating how recognition has led to improved employee commitment and bottom line results in these companies, the book also shows how a Carrot Culture is not created by the CEO, senior leadership team or HR department, but manager by manager. The book provides examples of leaders - from around the globe - who lead through the Carrot Principle: providing plentiful how-to's for managers wishing to get started or hoping to enhance their recognition abilities. Overall, there has never been a book in the recognition or motivation space that has had this type of quantitative or case study support.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1 edition (January 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743290097
• ISBN-13: 978-0743290098
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #565,964 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Important Stuff in Depth, but Nothing New, August 1, 2007

By 

Walter H. Bock "Wally Bock - Author, Blogger,... (Charlotte NC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage Their Employees, Retain Talent, and Drive Performance (Hardcover)

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.

20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Guide to the Reasons Why and How to Provide Employee Recognition, April 24, 2007

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 109,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage Their Employees, Retain Talent, and Drive Performance (Hardcover)

More than 10 years ago, an organization that I headed, Leading Division Presidents 100, looked at the question of how to improve employee motivation and effectiveness. From that research, it was clear that improving employee recognition could be an important element among many. Since that time, I've looked in vain for a book that described how to implement such a recognition program. I'm pleased to say that The Carrot Principle fills that void. Congratulations to the authors.

The authors begin by making the case for why recognition works in making organizations more successful:

1. Where employees feel more recognized, return on equity is higher (2.4 percent in the lowest quartile compared to 8.7 percent in the highest quartile. (This finding did raise a question in my mind -- why are the companies in this research study all so unprofitable in ROE?)

2. Where employees rate managers highly for recognizing employee contributions, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and retention are usually higher.

3. People with high work motivation almost all (94.4 percent) say that their managers are effective at recognition.

4. 79 percent of those who quit jobs cite lack of appreciation as one reason for leaving.

How much are companies spending that provide good employee recognition? Basically, it's about $1,000 a year per employee. Many of the employers cited in the book report feeling that they enjoy economic payoffs that are more than 20 times that cost.

The authors offer a Recognition Effectiveness Model on page 178 that captures the essence of how they see the cause and effect working:

1. Where employee recognition is higher, goal setting, communications, trust, and accountability are higher.

2. These benefits are accelerated by recognizing what matters most which helps with alignment, reinforcing the desired culture, company values, and business objectives.

3. These benefits can be further accelerated by doing recognition in the right way, increasing impact by being inclusive, meaningful, and performance-based.

4. Business results improve because the program is relevant to manager tasks and improvements in employee engagement that lead to better employee retention, productivity, customer satisfaction, and profitability.

The methodology for putting this model in place begins with measuring, then assessing, designing, training, executing, and then reiterating those steps.

The statistical findings are described in detail in appendices B, C, and D which I recommend you read.

But a lot of people have reported that recognition is important. You probably already believe that or you wouldn't be considering this book.

I found the most beneficial parts of the book concentrated in how to create a carrot culture (of recognition) and details of how to manage by carrots (recognition). Before leaving that subject, let me say that I found the carrot metaphor troubling. Recognizing people isn't the same as dangling a carrot in front of an employee's face. Recognizing people is more about respect, caring, gratitude, and paying attention.

Basically, most managers don't provide much recognition. Why not? Although this book suggests all kinds of false beliefs are the reason, my research shows that the primary reason is that managers who don't get recognition don't give recognition. So the good example has to begin at the top. That's counter to most company cultures where the CEO is viewed as some kind of superman or superwoman and the rest of the organization's people are expendable.

With training and guidance, that circumstance can be changed. I found the materials in chapters 9 and 10 to be most helpful in explaining what kind of recognition is appropriate for what kinds of accomplishments and 125 recognition ideas. I was also pleased to see that the authors understand that recognition is individual; each person has a different idea of what they want. You need to provide what's wanted . . . or it doesn't work.

It's not easy to provide meaningful recognition. When you do, the results can be magical (for everyone). When you do it badly, you are often worse off than where you started (having made people feel like they are unimportant rather than simply ignored by a busy manager).

My main fear about this book is that some readers will see this as just another way to provide low-cost benefits for which employees will put forth very valuable efforts. In that context, recognition can become another kind of manipulation, and that always backfires.

Let me leave you with two words of warning:

1. Recognition doesn't work alone. You also need to provide opportunities for people to learn, grow, accomplish, feel fulfilled, and achieve many other important satisfactions. In that sense, this book is too narrow to be totally useful.

2. Recognition takes time and consistency. Don't start unless you intend to continue or you'll eventually make matters worse.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Boring and redundant, July 28, 2008

By 

Dextra L. Suggs (Augusta, Georgia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage Their Employees, Retain Talent, and Drive Performance (Hardcover)

As global market competition increases, the focus on retaining effective and productive employees is ever more intensive. Consequently, the premise of this book revolves around empowering employees with substantive rewards as a powerful and meaningful method of achieving concrete results. Although, The Carrot Principle, by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton, was well researched and offered concrete evidence for an often overlooked aspect of work place satisfaction, it was a boring and redundant piece of work that could've been shortened.