If you read "The People Who Make Organizations Go-- or Stop" you may be better able to understand this post, but hopefully if I do my job well it won't be necessary.
Where I'm from people don't work for Corporations or usually in offices for that matter. We used to have factories which employed large numbers of people, but that's long gone, so the max number of people a semi-well educated person from my hometown might work with is 10. With that being said, reading articles like the one mentioned above is painful. How are we or am I expected to relate when most of the paper is focused around medium to large companies? But thankfully I was able to come away from this article with some interesting ideas that hopefully we'll all be able to apply elsewhere.
In a nutshell a somewhat large focus of the paper/article was about Connectors, not from your K'nex set but the people who all the other people go to when they need help/information/moral support. In my view there are two main issues that arise when either you are the Connector or have to manage and motivate a Connector.
1. Spreading the Connector thin
2. Rewarding the Connector (monetarily) without having a profit trail to follow
1a. This is where I can give you a real (from my)-life example. At my office business and profits revolve around technology and as any business tech person could tell you, the big-wigs don't ever want to give the tech department money. So due to this, for 30+ CSM's 5 CSD's 4 PM's and other assorted individuals there is but one stop on the IT train when you need help/information/(but definitely not moral support), this is my boss, John. He tends to get spread thin most days by the unending trail of CSM's wondering why reports from A are higher than reports from B etc etc (always the assumption is that we've coded incorrectly--but that's a different post). So what happens in our office when John is not at his desk? Sometimes all hell breaks loose, people run around looking for him like chickens with their heads cut off, some people even resort to asking me for my "expertise". Another downfall of having one main Connector is that John's task list can only be so long per day. I've watched issues/needs get pushed aside one after another due to a few "emergencies", those low priority requests turn into past-due ones quickly when this occurs day after day
2a. This second mini-topic reminded me of Elementary school, where we had a program called "Caught you Being Good", basically when a teacher noticed you doing something nice/good (picking up someone's trash, holding a door, other random things) you got a little gold slip with your name written on it deposited into a large hard-pretzel drum (empty of course) once a month your teacher would draw a name out of that drum and if your name was chosen you got to have lunch at McDonalds with the Principal and the other kids whose names were chosen that month. It was a huge deal for us and as the authors of "The People..." suggest, doing something similar for employees will have them giddy as school children. The authors suggested a similar program, where when someone notices you going out of your way to help your co-workers, your name is entered into a drawing for not lunch with the CEO, but a modest cash bonus. This idea seems useful for the pure fact that those naturally helpful/kind/deserving employees finally get the recognition they deserve, but also, it would probably encourage those who wouldn't normally go out of their way for others, to do so. Win-Win.
I'm not good at ending writings, so this is the official end of this one.
