Its Own Reward

Something is only “its own reward” if you want to do it. If you’re doing it because someone else is making you, they have to incentivize it.

A common thing I see in the business world is that senior leaders try to make mid-level managers do all this professional development, but they don’t reward it or support it. “You have to attend this manager training,” they say, but they don’t carve out any reduction in their work duties to go to it, they don’t promote people who take it, they don’t even make successfully completing it part of what they get evaluated on, let alone actually implementing it.

When the mid-level managers show up to those trainings as disengaged zombies, it’s no wonder. Senior leaders get angry, saying: “Don’t they want to invest in themselves professionally? That’s its own reward!“

Professional development is great. I do want to do it, because I want to be better at my vocation. But I want to be better at my vocation because my vocation is an input that generates other resources. So if I’m “investing in myself professionally,” it’s exactly that – an investment. I want it to pay off. And it will – one way or another, boss.

If you make your mid-level managers attend mandatory training in the way I’m describing, you get only one of two outcomes. Some people gain nothing from it and are annoyed, stressed, and less productive because of the experience. Others gain a lot from it and leave when you don’t reward them for it.

There’s no third person, the unicorn that says, “I’m so glad someone else decided my professional development path for me, made it mandatory, and then didn’t support or reward me in any way for doing it!”

But a lot of senior leaders seem to assume their staff is nothing but those unicorns. Do better. Because the reward is real: a team that works.