Engage The Whole Team In Designing Their Compensation Even though I retained some core responsibilities—comp plan design, V2MOM/vision planning, annual planning — I still gave everyone the option of getting involved in those functions, if they wanted to. Involving employees (or giving them the option of involvement) in the creation of everything is vital to inspiring them to care about the business as much as you do. For example, at one point several sales team members were expressing frustration about the design of the compensation plan, which had three components: A fixed base salary, A variable commission based on how many qualified (and audited/confirmed) opportunities that person generated in a month, and A variable commission based on how much revenue had been sourced by that person. The complaints were a little varied but ultimately came down to the fact that I hadn’t taken enough time to educate some of the newer sales reps on why we had that system. Rather than even telling them why it was designed that way, I instead set up a process to get the team’s help to revisit and redesign the comp plan. Out of about 15 people at the time, 5 opted-in to help. We had one main session to dig into the issue, to review the team’s priorities and goals (identified through the V2MOM process), and to create a forum for them to share their ideas on how to better shape the comp plan to support the goals. After a couple hours of discussion, which included revisiting even the basic assumptions surrounding how we measured performance and success, and if we should use different metrics, the team came to the conclusion that the current comp plan was the best one. Rather than just telling them why the comp plan evolved into its current form, I