The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage Their People, Retain Talent, and Accelerate Performance

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.

"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." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

New York Times bestselling author Adrian Gostick is the leader of O.C. Tanner Company's recognition training and publishing practice. His books The 24-Carrot Manager and A Carrot a Day are sold in more than fifty countries around the world.Chester Elton is coauthor of the bestselling Carrot books, a popular lecturer on motivation, and an influential voice in global workplace trends. He is O.C. Tanner's lead recognition consultant and researcher and works with numerous Fortune 100 clients.