One of the most powerful formulations in the persuasion arsenal is, “I used to think x. Then I learned about y and it completely changed my mind.”
In that vein …
I used to think business leaders had five primary motivators at their disposal. Then I saw Dan Pink’s video on the subject (see “Why small is beautiful,” KJR 10/4/2010).
While it didn’t completely change my mind, it did cause me to seriously re-think the subject.
A quick review: Marketers recognize five “primary motivators” they can use to push your buttons and pull your levers in order to induce you to buy what they’re selling: Fear, greed, guilt, the need for approval, and exclusivity.
If marketers can use them to motivate buying behavior, business leaders should be able to use them to motivate on-the-job performance, or so my logic went (see “The best and worst motivator,” KJR 10/6/1997 plus the next three columns).
Leader use differs from marketer use in an important respect: Marketers have one goal — to make the cash register go ching! For business leaders, motivation isn’t such a one-dimensional affair.
Fear, for example, does an excellent job of providing energy and a sense of urgency. It also makes people stupid — a significant drawback (if you’re a business leader; arguably it’s an advantage if you’re a marketer).
If what you need is hard work, fear is a useful tool. For creativity, thorough analysis, careful and balanced research, or some other version of intelligence, fear is the worst motivator you can use.
In my old way of thinking, the need for approval was the workhorse motivator. It costs nothing, and encourages the best work. So long as it’s specific and based on high standards (so it means something) it has no serious drawbacks.
In my old way of thinking, appealing to greed had limited value for business leaders. One disadvantage is habituation — receipt of a bonus quickly shifts from being appreciated to being an entitlement, so bonuses have to escalate to retain their motivational power.
A second: When a business leader dangles a carrot in front of an employee to encourage strong performance, he/she has redefined the leader/employee relationship to the one between a farmer and a donkey. If you think you’ve hired donkeys to work for you, fire yourself for doing such a bad job of hiring.
That was my old way of thinking. Pink’s video introduced me to a new vocabulary: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Put them together and I’m pretty sure they equal what I’ve called “achievement” — the desire to contribute something important to the world.
Achievement requires autonomy because without it employees don’t own their successes. It requires mastery because without that, employees won’t be capable of achievement. And it requires purpose because without purpose employees won’t be in a position to achieve anything important.
In our leadership seminars we include achievement as an important motivator — one you can appeal to in your best employees, and look for as an internally-driven motivator in every candidate you interview for open positions.
I hadn’t thought of it as being anywhere near as universal as the Big Five, and beyond hiring for it and creating an environment that doesn’t stifle it, I hadn’t figured it was anywhere near universal enough to rival them, no matter how desirable it is.
Here’s the new view:
The need for approval is still your workhorse. Achievement without approval feels, for all but the most inner-directed souls, hollow. For most of us, when we accomplish something important we want others to notice it.
We’ve already talked about fear. It makes people energetic but stupid.
Greed is even worse than I’d thought, actively damaging cognitive performance in addition to its other undesirable characteristics. My guess: When money is the motivator, fear of failing to earn it lurks nearby, explaining why greed damages cognitive performance.
Exclusivity? It’s as useful and as dangerous as when I first wrote about it. “The few, the proud, the Marines,” is highly motivating … if you’re a Marine. That’s the upside. The downside is what it tells the rest of the armed forces you think of them: Quite a lot less.
Guilt turns adults into children. Don’t use it.
What’s changed? The emphasis. Many, and maybe even most employees do have a strong desire to achieve. It’s widespread among employees, and appears to be a cross-cultural trait.
Create an environment that encourages achievement, recognize it when it shows up (taking advantage of the need for approval) and you’ll be amazed at how often you’ll see it in action.
I believe this to be correct, and it points to an issue of resource management. The resource is time and, for lack of a better term, empathy.
If you can’t make the time to establish an emotional understanding of the employee’s need for achievement, you can’t effectively motivate them.
I worked for ten years in a company where the pay was just this side of OK, the hours were long, the building “charming”, meaning it was about to fall down around our ears, but we had VERY low turnover, even when the economy was booming.
One difference was, the boss pushed people to learn something new, and was quick to publicly praise people when they did. In every yearly review, I could point to learning at least one new skill, and usually two or three.
It may not sound like much, but can you go down the list of your employees, and list major skills that they’ve learned in the last twelve months?
If you can, can you rememember how you acknowledged that accomplishment?
Can’t remember? Be prepared to lose that employee as soon as a better deal can be found.
One thing that strikes me as funny is that while financial compensation is painted and thought of as Greed, and thereby driving negative thoughts about it, I think of it like a “table steak” item in motivation. It’s hard to be motivated to stay at a job if I can’t put food at my family’s table. Giving someone “autonomy” is not an excuse for underpaying them, or “staying at market rates”.
Some deride the idea that some needs are more valued than other, but Maslow’s work needs to be kept in mind, even if to entertain the idea that there may not be just three motivators, or that there may be precursors to Dan’s three.
Another thing is the various types of societies. Japanese culture is much more collectivized than individualized, thus “autonomy” may not be a good motivator?
In parallel to that, there are studies that show that work that requires teamwork may not benefit from the same drivers than those that don’t have a lot of coordination necessary. Individualized rewards work well for piece-meal work.
Basically, I think this idea that Motivation can be summed up into the “3-5 bullet points per Powerpoint slide” is very dangerous.
Agreed: Failing to pay enough to cover basic needs is de-motivating. I’ll disagree that the inverse (or is it the converse?) is also true – that this means paying enough to cover basic needs is motivating. I’d say this motivates people to show up and nothing more.
If you accept the fact that all motivation is internal and that it may well vary by individual and clture, then there is nothing any manager can do to motivate anyone.
On the other hand (in my experience) there are many things that managers can do to reduce and/or redirect someones internal motivation.
For example, if the managers job is to make sure that employees are “working” then it may well be the employees job to “not be working” so that the manager will have something to do.
Quibbles: That all motivation is internal hasn’t been established as a fact.
As I point out in Leading IT: The Toughest Job in the World, there’s no question that employees demonstrate more motivation working for some leaders than others. Whether this is because the best leaders de-motivate the least rather than motivating the best isn’t certain. I’ll tell you from first-hand experience that the techniques I’ve described lead to higher levels of motivation, across at least a few different cultures within which I’ve served in leadership capacities.
@Ray: I don’t think if motivation varies by individual and culture then there is “nothing any manager can do to motivate anyone”.
But, I definitely think that it is more complicated than some people present it to be. You can’t apply the same three magical bullet points to every individual or team.
(OTOH, it is great for managers that go about it all wrong.)
It’s interesting to look at “motivation” from a different point of view. Such changes of viewpoint and emphasis are interesting.
I imagine reality as an n-dimensional construct, of which we can observe “slices” of dimension n-m, where m is a positive integer. The easiest way to imagine this: reality is 3-dimensional, and we can observe only 2-dimensional slices, or snapshots. All the snapshots refer to the same fundamental truth and are accurate as far as they go. Combining multiple snapshots taken from multiple points of view (or multiple ways of thinking/multiple conceptions), leads to wisdom. It also leads to humility as we realize that it appears that no one of our conceptions is by itself whole and infallible.
That’s all kind of airy-fairy and definitely not original (draws heavily from Locke & others).
What isn’t airy-fairy is that your 5 factors and the 3 factors in the Pink video Drive: The Surprising Truth about what Motivates Us are just two of the ways of looking at this topic.
A third one, the one with which I’m most familiar, comes from Erich Fromm. He postulated 4 “pan-human needs” which people will satisfy one way or another:
* Relatedness – relationships with others, care, respect, knowledge
* Transcendence – creativity, develop a loving and interesting life
* Rootedness – feeling of belonging
* Sense of Identity – see ourselves as a unique person and part of a social group
Fromm’s interesting wrinkle is that if an individual doesn’t get their need met in a positive/healthy way they’ll find a way to fulfill that need in a negative/destructive way. The example I best remember is “Transcendence” which sounds highfalutin but isn’t. Fromm said that we can transcend by creating; part of the process of creation is going beyond (transcending) the “raw materials” we start out with. The parallel to Bob’s writing is obvious.
Persons who for whatever reason (such as economic distress or authoritarianism) are not allowed to, or don’t have an opportunity to, create, will instead destroy. Vandalism is an obvious way to transcend. There were nice shop windows in the storefront before I heaved bricks through ’em and now there are cool-looking shards. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with vandals or vandalism but the emotion they feel at the time is a hugely powerful and intense glee combined with great excitement.
Another “office” parallel could be that when communication is stifled it takes other forms such as rumor and gossip.
When I read the “old 5 motivators” and Pink’s “new 3 motivators” I of course think of Fromm. He can’t be distilled into a comment; there are good treatments of his material on the web. But he wrote “popular” (as opposed to academic) books which were best-sellers, including The Sane Society and Escape From Freedom. A couple of the decent web treatments:
* http://www.maccoby.com/Articles/TwoVoices.shtml
* http://www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/frommnotes.html
Those are for people too busy to read much Fromm but he’s vitally and thoroughly covered the ground Bob explores. He goes way beyond, too – he’s very much the ethicist and social philosopher. So he touches on what’s probably the most important moral question involved in Bob’s column: What are the ethics of studying human beings with an eye toward manipulating them for the good of the corporation?
A few observations and items to note…
There’s another, very similar talk, by Dan Pink at TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design). His talk there is presented in a bit more of a logical case format. For anyone doing a bit of thinking on this topic, it is certainly worth watching.
Getting back to Bob’s presentation, I’d simply add, “Beware of the false dichotomy.” Motivation, when talking about a consumer, may well be sufficiently modeled by the Marketer’s five levers. However, that doesn’t mean that a consumer and a producer (in the guise of a leader or an employee) must be driven by the same motivational levers. As they are different roles, they must have some set of things that bound those differences and set one apart from the other.
Lastly, with reference to motivation, it seems to me ‘play’ or phrased another way, ‘fun’ is missing from the motivational list and yet, that driver, accounts for a huge amount of energy any individual will be willing to invest in something.
Thanks for emphasizing that we shouldn’t use guilt. It’s a lever that gets pulled too often.
Not all motivation is internal. If I meet an angry bear while hiking in the woods, I will feel highly motivated to get my butt out of the reach of the bear.
In this case, Fear isn’t stupid, it’s self preservation.
I wouldn’t advocate hiring bears for management, although some organizations have a knack for doing so.
An employee running away from you is probably not adding forward energy to the organization.
@Leo:
Given your inclinations, you may be interested in the Chilean economist Max-Neef’s writings on fundamental human needs.
I loved this column. It’s interesting and thought provoking. Now, if only there was some way these ideas could be applied to our welfare system that has gone from the great humanitarian idea of a “hand up” to what’s become a self-perpetuating “hand out?” Yes, I digress, but these concepts apply in more than just the business community.
There’s a great response / amplification on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc ( RSA Animate – Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us ).