1.Situation

This article goes to special category ”Only who does not work, does not make mistakes ”.

In this category I am including personal professional experiences with erroneous judgements, wrong decisions, poorly articulated projects that generated results contrary to expectations.

2.Task

Worth but not granted bonuses are the subject of this article. What are you doing as a manager when you face such a situation?

3.Action

In MYPRODUCT28 I underlined that defining the target-bonus system is one of the main responsibilities of any manager.

In my opinion, any target-bonus system implemented in the company beyond the form or the way it has to meet several critical points: to be transparent and clear, goals must be achievable, calibrated and adapted and adapted to

clear, measurable and fair criteria, to allow the agent at any time to calculate himself his own bonus and most important individual bonus to be granted when agent / team fulfilled his performance in accord with the target-bonus system implemented in the company, no matter the overall company performance at local / regional level as long as the announced target bonus system did not include any link between sales agent / team and overall company performances.

I developed and implemented various target-bonus systems, bonuses being granted to the team according to the announced and assumed coordinates.

With only one exception, situation when the general manager for reasons that I do not detail took the decision to cancel the bonuses of the commercial team, even the team fulfilled the objectives of the target-bonus system implemented in the company.

I had a lot of discussions with the general manager on this topic, bringing all the arguments related to the fairness of giving bonuses to the team.

4.Results

I succeeded in changing the decision, context in which I announced in writing that the bonuses will be awarded in a certain amount of time.

Unfortunately, the subsequent evolution of this topic was not the one assumed at the management level (here including me) and the bonuses have remained unacceptable.

5.Key Leanings

Even if my team appreciated the determination with which I fought for bonuses, I still perceive this exception described above as one of the most important professional failures because in a critical point of time I did not correctly manage to one of the most important responsibilities: rewarding the team for work and achievements.

But I had the chance to collaborate with an exceptional team that still credited me and supported me with confidence, respect and involvement, so the good times came back.

Notification: MYPRODUCT reflects my real professional experience and expertise as well as my subjectivity. I do have a profound respect for all the companies I collaborated to and for all the people I worked with. It is not my intention to approach any sensitive, confidential or offending information related to companies, projects or people. If you the reader deduct or recognise companies, projects or people in my examples, I kindly ask you to respect MYPRODUCT and my professional and ethic approach and to not share any detail, information, situation, name, company.