Using More Carrot than Stick at Work

People complain about their jobs all the time as being stressful, underpaid, uninteresting, frustrating, unappreciated etc, but very I'm sure all us vocational malcontents were sufficiently "one-upped" when the report emerged that North Korean former Cabinet official Kwon Ho Ung was executed by firing squad after his poor performance in recent diplomatic talks with their neigbors in the south. While almost nothing could surprise me about North Korea at this point, I'd hate to be the recruiter that's trying to fill that job:

Recruiter: It's a great gig - in addition to lots of travel to exotic places, use of privileged bathroom facilities for government bureaucrats, we have a world-class performance incentive program. Some people might call it stressful, but we like to think of it as "intense". And "intense" is exciting, right?

Recruit: Really? What's so great about it?

Recruiter: Let's just say that people in this position are extremely motivated and some have moved on to positions of great joy... some would say eternal joy.

Recruit: Sounds interesting. What happened to my predecessor?

Recruiter: Oh, after this last review he stood happily before a small assembly which dispatched him to a new role, new world.

But joking aside, I feel a great deal of sympathy and compassion for those who live under Kim Jong-Il's oppressive, if not psychotic, regime. Notwithstanding the easy jokes (track them in the "comments" section after every article about this incident) about how such a performance management system would be great to implement for our own politicians, bankers, etc., I think this again reveals the nightmare which covers this country, pervasive on all layers in society. What's fairly well known is that the poor masses are subject to famine and starvation - and now it's clear that even the educated elite are subjected to a "perform or die" lifestyle. Or put another way, every resident of North Korea, regardless of social standing, has equal opportunities to live a crushed life and die a horrible and brutal death. I suppose that's radical egalitarian communism at work.

I think there's also a lesson here about how people operate under the motivation of "sticks" and "carrots" - the common analogy being used to discuss whether people are more or less responsive to rewards to penalties when it comes to performance. I don't think I speak for myself when I say that I can be incentivized by fear only so much. In a job market which while difficult and soft is still flexible, at some point the threat of losing one's job can only motivate you to a certain degree, and that certain degree is not excellence. As Peter Gibbons observed so astutely in the movie Office Space, "That will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired." or if you're in North Korea "just hard enough not to be executed by firing squad."

But in defense of Kim Jong-Il, given the latest economic sanctions announced by Secretary of State Clinton, losing the ability to dole out cigarettes, exotic food and liquor will only curtail the ability for this despot to provide "carrot-like" incentives. Perhaps he'll have to revert to offering things such as basic human rights, religious freedom, the right to reunite with families across the DMZ, and the freedom to leave this dystopia. We can only hope.