You are struggling to complete the annual ranking of the twelve employees for whom you have reporting responsibility—a new requirement established by your company. There has been a lot of bad feeling and resentment about the new compensation system, and you are in a tough spot. If you use the maximum discretion you are allowed under the new system, you could give some people much bigger raises and bonuses and others much less. You know that you probably should do that, but you don’t want to offend and anger the employees who would get less. There is little chance that the rankings and their financial consequences will remain a secret.

You single out two people—the two who are obvious superstars. You are allowed to give only two A ratings, but you don’t give either employee an A+ rating because it would mean even bigger raises and bonuses, using up much of your discretionary pool. You are also required to give at least half your team Cs, so you split the team in half as best as you can. You are allowed to give C-and B+, but you don’t give any—as it is, you know there will be bad feeling among the Cs, especially because they will get small raises and a zero annual cash bonus.

As you finish ranking your employees, you think to yourself, “My employees can’t complain too much. After all, they receive good annual base salaries, good benefits, even a free membership to a gym. Everybody also gets a decent annual raise just for working here. It’s a pretty good deal and the work conditions are not bad.” Then Sam knocks on your office door and asks if you have a few minutes to discuss his work schedule. Sam doesn’t want to work on Thursdays anymore. You look Sam in the eye and explain that Thursday is a busy day and that you can’t let employees choose their own schedules, because if you did that for one, you’d have to do it for everybody. “I’m sorry, Sam. I can’t make special deals with you. That wouldn’t be fair to the other employees. There’s nothing I can do. My hands are tied.”

How is Sam likely to respond? That depends on what kind of employee Sam is, but here are the three most likely responses.

1. Sam might say, “I’m sorry I bothered you,” and walk away quietly. But that’s probably not what Sam is thinking. He is thinking, “That doesn’t make any sense. Who cares about Thursdays except for me? After all I’ve done for you! Okay, let’s see how much work I get done on Thursdays from now on…and you probably won’t even notice.”
2. Sam might say, “I won’t take no for an answer. You have to give me Thursdays off!” Maybe you’ll tell Sam, “Too bad, go away.” But what if Sam continues to insist? You might get mad and rush off an answer: “You don’t talk to me like that. I’m the boss. You’re fired!” When you call HR, and they ask you if you have any documentation, you have to admit that Sam is a strong performer—and all the paperwork proves it. Now you and Sam are really at odds—and not just about Thursdays.
3. Sam might say, “Well, thanks for everything then, but I’m leaving. I’ve looked into my options in the free market for talent and there are some great employers out there. In fact, your competition across the street is going to give me Thursdays off. So I’m going across the street to work for them.” If Sam is a high performer, he probably knows it and knows that he is worth more than a lower performer. He knows he is valuable.
   In this last scenario, you might tell Sam, “But I’ve worked with you and trained you, and now I really depend on you. You are a high performer, one of the employees

I’d really hate to lose.” Sam replies, “Exactly. That’s what I was thinking. So how about giving me Thursdays off?”

Sam has a point. The truth that everybody knows but nobody likes to acknowledge is that one high-performing employee is worth more to the business than three or four mediocre employees. Those high-performing employees know that they are valuable and want to use their value to earn what they need and want. The problem is that most pay-for-performance systems fail to do the hard work of ensuring high performance; this is tracked and linked directly to increased rewards. That hard work has to be done by managers on the front line who control the daily experience of employees and, ultimately, their access to rewards of all kinds.

If you are Sam’s manager and you can’t afford to lose him or be at odds with him, you might give in to his request. But you’d probably make the same mistake that a lot of managers make in this situation: you’d make a secret deal with Sam. “Okay, Sam, I’ll let you have Thursdays off. But don’t tell anybody.” After employees catch on to your arrangement with Sam, Mary knocks on your door and says, “I understand that Sam doesn’t have to work on Thursdays. He got to choose his own special schedule? Nobody else did! You are favoring Sam. That’s not fair!”

You want to tell Mary, who is decidedly mediocre as an employee, “Fair? Do you want to know why I’m favoring Sam? Because Sam does more work than you do! He gets here early and leaves late and works hard the whole time he’s here. He meets every deadline and takes exactly the right amount of initiative without overstepping his bounds. That’s why Sam gets a special deal. Would you like me to favor you, too? Tell me what you need. Because there are a lot of things I need from you. I need you to start coming in earlier and working harder. I need you to start following procedures and getting tons of work done very well, very fast all day long. Do you want Thursdays off, too? Okay. Let’s take it one Thursday at a time. If you want this Thursday off, here’s what I need from you by this Wednesday at midnight. Let’s spell out the expectations very clearly and let’s write all that down.”

I tell managers every single day: Don’t make secret deals. Put a billboard in the parking lot: SAM DOESN’T HAVE TO WORK ON THURSDAYS. COME TO MY OFFICE TO FIND OUT WHY. Then deal with each person, one at a time, as each one knocks on your office door looking for a custom deal. You can’t do everything for everybody, of course. And why would you want to? That wouldn’t be fair. So you have to negotiate one employee at a time: “What do you need from me? Okay. Here’s what I need from you.”

The Dull Bludgeon of Treating Everybody the Same

Yet in the world of undermanagement, most managers gravitate to “sameness” because it’s easier. Whether it’s hourly pay or a fixed salary, when employees are paid according to a set system, the manager doesn’t have to make and justify difficult decisions, or stay engaged with every employee by making sure she knows what to do to earn what she needs or wants. The manager is more comfortable when employees are rewarded based on a rigid structure, because she can answer her employees’ queries by blaming the “system.”

It is true that ease of administration, false fairness, and litigation avoidance are still the basic engines behind many compensation systems and HR policies. As much as forced ranking and pay for performance are creeping in, there is still a whole lot of nonperformance-based “sameness” in most organizations. Some of it is necessary. There are gym memberships or child care and other shared rewards that benefit all employees. They provide a feeling of belonging and connection to the company. They provide a sense of gratitude on the part of at least some employees. And they contribute to the well-being of employees, which probably creates better employees who provide a greater return on investment to the company over time. But by the time managers are done spending all their resources and discretion on treating everybody the same, there are very few resources left. I cannot tell you how many times managers tell me that they don’t have sufficient resources to provide special rewards to high performers.

But when I dig down deeper, I find a lot of managers who hide behind “the system,” even when they have much more discretion in the system than they actually use. Often managers have discretionary bonus pools and a lot of input on raises, but somehow everybody on the team shares in the bonus pool equally and everybody gets roughly the same raise. The same goes for work conditions and special accommodations. Managers often have a great deal of discretion when it comes to things like schedules, assigning tasks, setting work conditions, allocating supplies, and so on. So why do managers fail to favor some employees and pick on others? So many managers simply cannot or will not dedicate the time and energy necessary to make the tough performance-based distinctions and then follow through to reward people based on what they deserve.

Real Fairness

“High performers and low performers getting the same basic rewards? Now that’s unfair,” said one manager in a large manufacturing company. “You have to reward people based on what they deserve, based on what they earn.”

Yes, you want to get more work and better work out of every employee. For their part, most employees are doing their best to succeed and are trying desperately to earn what they need and want. If you are going to do more for those who deserve more, by definition you must do less for those who deserve less. When they earn more, do more for them. When they earn less, do less for them. That’s only fair.

Of course, you can’t do everything for everybody. And why would you ever want to? Make clear who you are rewarding, how, and why. Maybe others will work hard to earn special rewards, too. That’s why it’s so important to make sure every employee knows how and why she is earning her rewards and what she needs to do in order to earn more (or less).

How do you do that? By defining expectations and tying concrete rewards directly to the fulfillment of those expectations. When every person on your team is managed this way, they are much less likely to wonder why another person is receiving special rewards. Why? Every single one of them knows from experience what they have to do to earn special rewards. They know that if Sam is receiving some special reward from you, he must have earned it fair and square. After all, that’s the kind of manager you are.

If you tie rewards directly to behavior fairly, behavior will follow rewards.

Real Leverage

“The ability to do more, or less, for people is a source of great power.” That’s how one senior engineering manager, whom I’ll call Hal, put it. Faced with a very important project and an urgent deadline, Hal had only one qualified engineer he could assign to work with him. “I needed [this] engineer to do the heavy lifting, basically to work around the clock for about three weeks. It was going to be brutal.” When he approached Ginny, the engineer in question, Hal said, “she was hesitant to drop everything she was working on, get way behind on her work, and basically not see her family for a month. She couldn’t exactly turn down the assignment, but I needed her on board and totally focused on completing the project at a really accelerated pace.” After their initial conversation, Hal realized how much he was really asking of Ginny. So he went to his boss and got approval to offer Ginny a deal she couldn’t refuse.

Hal continues, “I went back to Ginny and told her that we had to have her on board for this project. I offered to send home a letter to her family explaining the project and thanking them for their sacrifice. We would send a gift basket to the family, and we offered her a budget for the four weeks of the project to pay for extra child care. She really appreciated the thought we gave to her family. But the real hook was the money. We needed the project done in four weeks, as in twenty-eight days. So I offered Ginny a large cash bonus on day twenty-eight if the project was done. She was concerned that she might work really hard and miss the deadline by just one day, perhaps, and then not get any bonus at all.” Here’s what they finally agreed on. “Every day she was late, the cash bonus would diminish by ten percent. But she insisted on some upside to beating the deadline. I had to get that approved, but I was able to get her five percent more for every day she was early. In the end, she was six days early. She finished that project with all the bells and whistles in twenty-two days flat. She got this big bonus, plus an extra thirty percent.” Now that’s leverage.

Imagine if you could stop paying people and start buying their results, one by one. What do you think would happen if every manager had the discretion, the ability, the skill, and the gumption to start negotiating with employees as if they were outside vendors? What if you could tie every single reward and detriment solely to measurable instances of employee performance—one person at a time, one day at a time? Think of industries in which individuals are paid an agreed-upon amount for each defined unit of work they produce. Some accounting firms, for example, pay accountants per tax return they prepare or per audit; they pay more for more complex returns and audits, and they pay less when the reviewing accountant finds errors in the accountant’s work. Some hotels pay chambermaids by the number of rooms they clean; some pay more per room if the rooms are cleaner, based on how well they complete a checklist of standards. Labor economists have convincing data that worker productivity increases substantially when pay is directly tied to performance. Why shouldn’t this apply to all kinds of work?

Give every person the chance to meet the basic expectations of their jobs and then the chance to go above and beyond—and to be rewarded accordingly. Create trust and confidence through open communication and transparency so that every employee knows exactly what she has to do to earn rewards—no matter how great or small those rewards might be. Monitor and measure and document it every step of the way. Don’t flinch when it comes to providing the promised rewards and detriments that people earn through their choices and behavior.

When your employees deliver on their commitments for you, you deliver on promised rewards for them. If they fail to meet commitments, you have to call them on that failure immediately and withhold the reward. Ideally, you want to reward people when they deliver results—no sooner, no later. Immediate rewards are most effective because there can be no doubt about the reason for the rewards, providing a greater sense of control and a higher level of reinforcement. Employees are likely to remember the precise details and context of the performance and are, therefore, better able to replicate the desired performance. Plus employees won’t have to spend time wondering if their performance has been noted and appreciated and will therefore be less likely to lose the momentum generated by success.

Years ago, a cutting-edge business leader in the fitness equipment business I’ll call Jon, told me that he looked at every frontline manager as a compensation officer. Jon created a culture in which managers rewarded performance constantly. “I really believe in spot bonuses. Every supervisor had authority to give bonuses to high performers, anywhere from a few hours pay to a week’s pay. We had regular meetings with the supervisors and I would ask them, ‘How many people did you give a bonus to last week?’ If they hadn’t given anybody a bonus, I’d say to them, ‘Do you mean to tell me, you are managing forty people every week, and you couldn’t find any reason to give somebody a bonus? What is the matter with you?’ So these supervisors were always looking for reasons to give the guys on their crew spot bonuses.” And you can be sure that the guys on the crew were doing backflips to be the ones who would earn those bonuses. It worked. Jon says: “In any given year, we were outproducing every other company in the industry with half the number of factory workers, and the spot bonuses were a huge part of that.” When managers become de facto compensation officers, productivity explodes.

Be Generous and Flexible

“You want to be generous and flexible with your employees. Why wouldn’t you? Everybody is working harder. Everybody is under more pressure. Everybody needs more than what they are getting.” That’s what Fred, a manager in charge of a public cafeteria, a food court, and convenience and retail gift stores at a large hospital, told me. “At the hospital, there just were not a lot of ways to reward my people. Most of them were paid by the hour. The salaried employees were on a pretty tight leash, too. For example, there was no paid time off.”

This is where Fred turned from ordinary human being to Super Boss: “In my role as senior supervisor, I had accumulated unused sick days, personal days, and extra vacation days. You couldn’t cash them in for money, but you could keep accumulating them. After twenty years, I had a couple of hundred days I had never used, and the reality was that I just wasn’t going to use them any time soon. I couldn’t just disappear for weeks at a time, and I was getting thirty days a year or something by then anyway. So I asked HR if I could start handing out my days to individual employees as rewards. The HR specialist was trying to convince me to rethink. He told me that if I had enough days at the end of my career there, I might be able to arrange a whole year of paid time off…I didn’t have to think about it again…I was finally able to get them to agree, at least in part. They let me give away twenty-five days a year, which is about two days a month…. That lasted for about four years, and then someone upstairs put a stop to it. But for those four years, I had that great reward in my back pocket all the time and people knew it. And boy, did they appreciate getting those paid days off,” Fred said with a smile of satisfaction.

If you are the boss, one of the most important parts of your job is taking care of your people. Remember, people work to take care of themselves and their families. They want your help. Some managers consistently do more for their employees. If you’re not one of those managers, what is your problem?

Start looking at the discretionary resources that are within your disposal already. Use your power over work conditions; scheduling; recognition; exposure to decision makers; deciding what tasks are assigned to whom, who gets extra training opportunities, where each employee works, and with what coworker; and so on. In my view, if you have a candy jar on your desk and an employee goes reaching for a piece of chocolate, you should stop that person in his tracks and say, “So, you want a piece of chocolate? Here’s what I need from you, by this deadline, and here are the guidelines. Do you understand?”

Have you gone to great lengths to extend your discretionary resources? Get on the phone and beg for more resources, jump through hoops, and bend over backward if you have to. Use whatever resources you can get your hands on as bargaining chips to drive performance and to reward people when they go the extra mile. What are the key elements of every job that employees typically care about, that are often within the discretion of the manager, and that can be used as bargaining chips to drive performance?

The compensation package. What is the base pay and the value of the benefits? How much of the pay is fixed? How much is contingent on clear performance benchmarks tied directly to concrete actions the individual employee can control? What are the levers for driving the pay up or down?

Schedule. What is the default schedule? How much flexibility is there? What are the levers for achieving more or less scheduling flexibility?

Relationships. Who will the employee be working with? Which vendors, customers, coworkers, subordinates, and managers? What are the levers for controlling who the employee has a chance to work with (and/or avoid)?

Tasks. Which regular tasks and responsibilities will the employee be assigned to do? Are there any special projects? What are the levers for controlling the employee’s opportunities to work on more choice tasks, responsibilities, or projects?

Learning opportunities. What basic skills and knowledge will the employee be learning in order to handle his basic tasks and responsibilities? Will there be any special learning opportunities? What are the levers for controlling access to those special learning opportunities?

Location. Where will the employee be located? How much control will the employee have over his workspace? Will there be much travel? Are there opportunities to be transferred to other locations? What are the levers for controlling these location issues?

Help People Earn What They Need and Want

Every employee wants a custom deal that includes some or all of these key elements of the job. They want to know what they need to do to earn more in each of these areas. Help people by telling them exactly what they need to do to earn more.

When an employee says, “I don’t want to work on Thursday,” tell her she needs to do A, B, and C by Wednesday at midnight. You are giving the employee control over her rewards by spelling out exactly what she needs to do to earn them. You’ll have to monitor, measure, and document that the employee completed A, B, and C by Wednesday at midnight. If she has, you’ll have the opportunity to reward her in a very powerful way. Using your power over scheduling flexibility, you will get more work from that employee faster and also provide her with an immediate reward that is valuable to her. In fact, it has unique value for her precisely because she wanted it in particular.

Why? Because when you find out what a particular employee really needs or wants from you, it is like finding a needle in a haystack. As one manager told me, “A big part of the art of rewarding is knowing who to reward with what, when, and how. It’s different for every person. One of my employees needs to leave once in a while to deal with her kids, usually at the last minute with no warning. I let her do that because I know how valuable it is to her. But the flip side is that she is always working really hard to make sure I know she appreciates the flexibility. She has told me plenty of times that this flexibility is what makes the job work for her. She appreciates it so much that she works doubly hard to make sure I really know she deserves the accommodation. And I do, I really do think she deserves it. She earns it every day.” When you identify an employee’s “needle [or needles] in a haystack,” you’ve identified a powerful bargaining chip. The employee will probably be willing to do a lot—to work longer, harder, smarter, faster, or better—in order to get it.

I always tell managers that when your employees make unreasonable demands, don’t be insulted—be grateful. They are telling you exactly what they want. They are handing you that needle in a haystack. It’s so much harder when you have to look for it on your own. If you can find a way to offer this needle in a haystack, then you are in a position to make a custom deal with this individual.

Let me tell you my best needle-in-a-haystack story. Nat, a manager for a large U.S. intelligence agency that employs high-level mathematicians, hired a young PhD from a prestigious university. The young man began working as an analyst, but very quickly, according to Nat, “he was moping around, not talking to anybody, not really doing as much work as he should have been doing. He seemed almost depressed.” Nat tried to engage the new employee, by talking with him one-on-one. “I could tell that this guy had a fantastic mind and a great interest in the work, but he was frustrated and something was bothering him. Finally, he told me it was his workspace: ‘I can’t work here in this cubicle at this desk. It ruins it for me. I need my thinking couch.’” Nat laughed, “The guy basically said, ‘I can’t do math without my couch.’” The analyst explained to Nat that he had a couch in his apartment around which he had his computers arranged on tables. He had apparently had the couch for a number of years, having written his undergraduate honors thesis, studied for all of his exams in college and graduate school, and written his doctoral dissertation sitting on that couch. The new analyst was very attached to the experience of working on that couch.

Regardless of whether this was a small quirk or a huge obsessive-compulsive anomaly, Nat considered the analyst’s rather unusual request. “At first I said no,” Nat explained. “Where would we put the couch? But the analyst had measured it and showed me that it would fit right in the cubicle. We had to take out his chair and trade his desk for a table. We had the couch tested for bomb residue and had dogs sniff it for explosives. We even provided the movers. We let him set up his office just the way he wanted it, including his MP3 player, his two computers, and his bookshelf filled with binders and books. And from that moment on, he was the happiest employee here that I know. He’s here all the time, as far as I know…I think he sleeps on that couch. He never leaves.”

Make a point of talking with your best people to find out what they really want or need—whether it’s a special deal or a small accommodation. If you can fulfill a unique need or want, you will be doing something especially valuable for that person. When you need extra leverage with a particular employee—when you need her to really go the extra mile—there is no better motivational tool than using her “needle in a haystack” as a bargaining chip.

How do you make those needles work for you as supersonic bargaining chips? Leverage them for everything they are worth.

• “You don’t want to work on Thursday? I’m glad to know that. Here’s what I need from you by Wednesday at midnight.”
• “You want your own office? Here’s what I need from you.”
• “You want to bring your dog to work? Great. Here’s what I need from you.”
• “You want to have lunch with the senior VP? Here’s what I need from you.”

Expand your repertoire of rewards and start using every resource you have to drive performance.

Of course, some rewards are just not available. Sometimes, as much as you want to make a custom deal with an employee, you have to say, “I just can’t do that. It’s not available. But maybe I can do this instead.” It’s not ideal, but it’s better than saying, “There’s nothing I can do for you.” We’ve learned from experience that when managers really put their creativity and energy into it, they can often do more than they ever would have guessed. If you are willing to jump through hoops, bend over backward, and go to bat for what you need, you’ll find that you can often get resources and be able to make custom deals with employees that you never thought would be available. Use those custom deals to drive performance every step of the way.

Use Your Discretion Wisely

The corollary to making custom deals for hardworking employees is the case in which an employee makes accommodations for himself without your prior approval. Often managers will say to me, “I have an employee who is excellent and very valuable. But…he is fifteen minutes late every day” or “wears inappropriate clothing” or “makes a lot of personal calls” and on and on. These managers often say, “I’ve been letting this small problem slide because the employee is otherwise so valuable.”

When a manager lets an otherwise high-performing employee off the hook on a small performance issue, the manager is making a custom deal—offering an informal reward—without even realizing it. If this is the case with you, first decide whether you’ve been letting a performance problem slide because the employee obviously appreciates this informal reward. You might use your discretion and continue to allow the special accommodation, but you must make it explicit and, if appropriate, even a formal custom deal. Sit down with the employee and explain: “Doing X is actually kind of a problem. It’s been bothering me. But I’ve been letting it slide because you are such a great employee in every other way. Just how important is this to you? I want to talk about it because you need to know that I am letting the problem slide as a special reward.” Clarify that there are other rewards the employee might earn instead of this special accommodation, or that you are offering this custom deal because there are so few other formal rewards you can offer the person. Whatever it is, don’t let it slide. Make the quid pro quo explicit.

It’s also critical that employees know that custom deals are not to be taken for granted and always remain contingent on your discretion. “I’ve learned to stay away from long-term promises,” said Winny, a manager in a large nonprofit organization with tight resource constraints. “Things are changing all the time. You realize that someone might not be quite the employee you had thought he was or hoped he would be…Once you give someone a raise, or a promotion, or a special schedule, or an office, it’s hard to take it back,” said Winny. “Once you make a special deal with someone, you might get into a situation where you have to start doing takeaways, and that can get ugly. So I stick to onetime rewards. Lots of onetime rewards.”

Winny continued, “When I took over this location, every employee had his own special deal. I mean everyone, including the people who didn’t do a thing. As one of my staff said about a coworker, ‘She doesn’t belong on the payroll. She doesn’t do any work whatsoever.’” And yet she was on the payroll, and she was welcome to the free doughnuts and coffee that were brought in every morning for the employees and lunch on Fridays. She was invited to the monthly pizza night for employees and the annual holiday party. Plus, she got the $200 gift certificates as a holiday bonus, just like the other employees. All of these perks were paid for out of an employee reward fund, which was made available to the manager of the location.

“The employee reward fund wasn’t much,” explained Winny, “about $5,000 all together. When they announced that money was available to each location, the manager who was here before me held a meeting and asked the team how they thought the money should be spent.” Some had argued that the money should be split evenly among all the employees, but the manager resisted this, apparently not wanting to hand out cash bonuses to some of the people who were undeserving. So the manager came up with the idea of spreading the money around while also investing in team-building activities, like the lunches, parties, and shared doughnuts and coffee. “The first thing I did when I took over was to change that system. I was going to figure out how to spend the reward fund in a way that was fair and use it to make some things happen. In the end, I used that money almost entirely for spot bonuses. A hundred bucks at a time. People wanted to earn those cash bonuses. They’d ask me, ‘What do I have to do to earn one of those bonuses?’ So I’d say, ‘Funny you should ask…’”

Everything Is Negotiable (Almost)

Employment relationships are transactional by nature. If you want to get the work done very well and very fast on favorable terms, you have to be very good at negotiating all the terms—schedule, location, resources, and compensation. Is the deadline going to be March 1, or March 15? Will there be bonuses for early delivery or exceptional quality? Penalties for late delivery or work that fails to meet expectations? The ideal bargain is one that clearly defines the deliverables expected and a concrete deadline, as well as specific milestones that need to be reached along the way. Every penny of compensation—financial and nonfinancial—would be tied either to a specific milestone in the project or to the ultimate delivery by the agreed-upon deadline. In an ideal world, if at any point an employee fails to deliver, she doesn’t get paid.

Does that mean that everything is open to negotiation? Of course not. In fact, if you are going to get good at negotiating with employees, the first thing you have to consider is what is not negotiable. What are the basic requirements of the job, the essential performance standards, and acceptable behavior? What are the basics for which employees should expect nothing more than to be treated fairly and paid for their work? Those are your deal breakers. You have to be very clear with your employees and remind them on a regular basis: “Okay. Here’s the deal. For coming in to work on time, for not leaving early, and for getting a lot of work done very well all day long without causing any problems, you get paid. And you get to keep working here!” Those are the basics of the employment deal. Your employees should understand that doing their jobs very well, very fast, all day long is what they were hired to do. That’s why they get paid a basic wage or salary. That’s why they get the basic benefits. That’s why they all get to come to the pizza party.

Once you figure out what is not negotiable, you have to accept and embrace the fact that everything—and I mean everything—else is negotiable. Don’t be alarmed. Don’t your employees negotiate with you all the time on matters of all shapes and sizes? Take control of the ongoing negotiation. Negotiate every step of the way and get really, really good at it. That means constantly answering the questions that are on every employee’s mind: “What’s the deal around here? What do you want from me? And what do I get for my hard work…today, tomorrow, and next week?” Beyond the basic employment deal, employees should know that if they need or want more, they have to earn those rewards through their own hard work.

Understand, accept, and embrace that managing people has become a day-to-day negotiation. Abandon your top-down assumptions of hierarchical leadership and let go of your insult. It’s a job! Employment relationships are transactional. You are the boss. You want to get more and better work faster out of every employee. Meanwhile, your employees work to earn a living and want to get more rewards in exchange for their hard work. Whom do they look to? You, the boss. They should have trust and confidence that you will do your best to help them earn those rewards. The only way you can honor that trust and confidence is by doing more for some people and less for others.