I keep hearing that it’s become impossible to find or even keep good people. It turns out the major consultancies are hoovering up talent wholesale. Big transformation is going in-house with entire teams cherrypicked straight out of agencies, leaving leaders bereft and bewildered.

At our consulting firm 2Y3X we guarantee to at least double our clients’ revenue. So highly engaged talent is imperative.

I’ve written a book, Scale at Speed: How to Triple the Size of Your Business and Build a Superstar Team, which shows you how to achieve this.

The following anecdote is from the book, and addresses the fundamentals of reward. I hope you enjoy it.

The big red button

One evening I was walking down Charing Cross Road in London towards Trafalgar Square. It was dark and the weather was a bit miserable. Most of the West End of London is pretty well lit, even up high towards the rooftops, and I happened to glance upwards.

Smoke was pouring out of a top-floor window, perhaps four storeys up. Pulling my phone from my pocket I ran into the pub on the ground floor of the building. ‘Fire!’ I shouted. ‘Everybody out! There’s a fire!’ A few customers turned towards me, but otherwise all I got was blank looks. I headed to the bar and shouted again, and again got blank stares from automata staff. They thought I was nuts. Frustrated, I hunted around until I found one of those red fire alarms you smash with your elbow, and did just that. I tried to clear people out, but it took the alarms blaring before a single person reacted at all, and even then they thought it was a huge nuisance. I also called the fire brigade.

Two minutes later the siren came, and seconds later a huge red fire engine was parked diagonally across the pavement, uniforms pouring out of it. A huge man (I’m six feet tall; this guy was enormous) came over to me in his yellow trousers and braces as the orderly chaos unfolded around me. Was I the one who had called it in? he asked me. I nodded, as hoses were unfurled and instructions were being shouted. ‘Here – when I say so, hit this button!’ He pointed to a big red button on the truck. At his word I did so, and the fire engine’s stabilising feet came out and planted themselves next to the wheels. From then on it was swift work for the ladders to be raised, pumps started, the building cleared, and the all-clear to be called.

No-one said another word to me. Certainly nobody who had been in the pub, working or drinking. Nobody asked me what had happened, and nobody acknowledged me.

Except.

Except the fireman. That one man who had given me a tiny role: push the big red button. It’s entirely likely the button was a placebo. I was in my mid-forties; I should have been cynical. Whatever. But by explicitly associating having called the fire brigade with a reward that was at once both trivial and profoundly tied to every boy’s dream of growing up to be a fireman, that man made it an utterly unforgettable life event. That tiny gesture was worth more than all the thanks, praise or reward I could ever have received from anyone else. I will remember that moment my entire life.

It taught me a huge lesson. Two, in fact.

The first and worst was that people are indifferent. Most simply do not care about anything other than their undisturbed pint. So when they do, you should recognise it.

And the second was that if a reward is designed properly it doesn’t matter if it’s big or small. If you design rewards around what is meaningful, they will be worth far more than monetary compensation. It’s like acknowledgement: the right word from the right person at the right moment is usually worth more than gold.

Scale at Speed is out worldwide.