March madness is upon us…

USA Today writes that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says schools not on track to graduate at least half of their basketball players should not be allowed to compete in the NCAA men’s and women’s tournaments. If such a standard were in place now, three women’s teams and 10 men’s teams, including traditional powers Syracuse and Purdue, would not be in the tournaments.

The point is schools exist to educate first and then do some other things. What does your compensation program look like? You may tell me safety, training, customer service and financial performance are all elements of the bonus program but when you only look at financial performance you are saying the other ones really do not matter.

When these schools that don’t graduate players are allowed to compete the NCAA is saying graduation rates don’t really matter. Until they back up the importance of graduation rates with real consequences they will not matter.

Same with your employees. You want them to pay attention to something..pay them for it…or at least talk about it and praise them for it if you cannot pay them for it but don’t give them a free pass.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 18th, 2011 at 8:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.