All Posts in Leadership

|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

I recently enjoyed the privilege of hearing Nigel Barley, an anthropologist with the British Museum, give a wide-ranging talk about the importance of non-communication.

Yes, that’s right. With all the emphasis on swifter communication, better communication, error-free communication, and the rest of it, Barley spoke about how good communication can mess up a perfectly good situation.

For example, the British East India Company embodied the British Empire for centuries. According to Barley, the home office finally collected and tabulated the accounts from all of its far-flung field operations (sound familiar?) in the mid-1800s. Like Wiley Coyote running off a cliff but not falling until he looks down, the directors discovered their company had been bankrupt for more than 200 years.

My own recent communications with InfoWorld’s readers — four columns on how to motivate employees — led some correspondents to conclude that I’m morally bankrupt.

Readers expressed concern in three areas: 1) using fear, greed, and other “negative” emotions is unethical — managers should appeal to employees’ better natures; 2) when managers analytically decide how to motivate employees they’re being manipulative, which is also unethical; and 3) I’m endorsing situational ethics, and that encourages unethical behavior, too.

A profound discovery of modern management theory is that managerial ethics matter to employees, and they matter a lot. This has been a major revelation to a generation of business leaders who previously figured morality belonged in the home and that including ethics in business decisions was somehow immature and idealistic. (Yes, I know there’s a difference between ethics and morals; it’s subtle enough to ignore in this discussion.)

Ethics matter. They matter from the perspective of self-respect, they matter from the perspective of employees trusting you enough to follow your lead, and they matter from the perspective of business success, because in today’s competitive labor market success depends on the talent you can attract and retain. The best talent will abandon you without regret if you reveal yourself to be an immoral weasel.

Ethics isn’t, however, reducible to a simple formula. If it were, philosophers would have long ago tired of the subject. It is, instead, both complex and highly personal. So here’s my personal perspective on the issues you’ve raised.

Last point first: I do believe ethics are situational. So does our legal system, which, for example, accepts self-defense as justification for killing someone. Opinion: How you motivate an employee (instilling fear of unemployment) has less impact on the ethics of an action than does your intent (wanting to save his job).

Issue No. 2: Manipulation? My own opinion is that honesty and intent differentiate motivating employees from manipulating them.

Look at it this way: You’re responsible for successfully achieving the mission of your organization. You can’t succeed in this with unmotivated employees. As a manager, you have an impact on employee motivation. You have to decide whether you’re going to do it consciously, through analysis and planning, or whether you’re going to rely on your instincts being good enough to do the job.

Issue #1: Appealing to negative emotions … what’s a negative emotion? Fear? Anger? Both are important to your survival.

Instilling fear is, in my mind, completely ethical if the employee legitimately has something to be afraid of, such as becoming unemployed due to poor performance. Failing to instill fear when there’s something to be afraid of — failing to create a gut-level understanding of the consequences — is as unethical from where I sit as letting a drunk friend drive.

Bullying employees — an act of self-indulgence, not motivation — is entirely different, and always a bad idea.

Humans aren’t Vulcans. Emotions drive human behavior. That’s reality. When managers and executives make decisions based on wishful thinking instead of reality, they make the right choices by accident when they make them at all.

Comments

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

A favorite topic for wannabe philosophers is what makes humans unique.

There is, of course, a level of arrogance in this question — it assumes we are unique. Usually, people who point out the obvious answer (our DNA sequences) are excluded from the rest of the conversation.

The socially acceptable answers fall into two groups: the self-congratulating (we’re intelligent, we’re self-aware, we have language, we use tools, and so on) and the self-flagellating (we kill, torture, rape, and enslave our own kind).

Both groups are wrong — the animal kingdom includes examples of all of these except possibly self-awareness, which is hard to demonstrate. I’m pretty sure my dog is self-aware. The cat may be also; cats just don’t bother telling you.

Humans do have one unique characteristic: We need to be unique. We need to be unique as a species, we need to be unique as a group, and we need to be unique as individuals.

With 5 billion people on this planet, that takes some doing, too.

We’ve spent the past three weeks reviewing how we as managers can use the five great marketing motivators — fear, greed, guilt, need for approval, and exclusivity — to motivate employees. Fear and greed, we’ve seen, each have a role to play, but their roles are limited, and you have to use them carefully or they’ll backfire. Guilt has no place in the workplace at all.

You can use employees’ need for approval very effectively as a motivator — it’s an easy, useful, and appropriate way to reinforce desirable behavior. It’s ethical, too; withholding approval when an employee has excelled sounds unethical to me, in fact. Best of all, it’s free. The hard part about giving approval is striking the balance between being overly easy and impossible to please. You need to demand excellence but not insist on perfection.

When you give approval you’re reinforcing behavior. The last motivator, exclusivity, is nonbehavioral. By recognizing every person’s desire to be unique among the 5 billion, you gain something more enduring: loyalty.

How do you use exclusivity to motivate employees? There’s nothing easier in the world than this: Simply recognize them as individuals. Get to know them. Remember their names, the anecdotes they tell about their children and pets, and what hobbies they enjoy.

Professionally, spend some time figuring out how to best express each employee’s unique contribution — something you’d lose that you couldn’t replace if that employee left. “You’re a hard worker, McGee,” satisfies McGee’s need for approval, but it doesn’t touch his need to be unique.

It’s when you say, “You’re a real sparkplug for this group, Travis — it isn’t something I can measure, but your ability to get people laughing when things get tense really makes a difference,” that you make him feel that you value him as an individual.

Think back. You undoubtedly had some managers for whom you gave the proverbial 110 percent. I’ll bet they all knew you personally and gave you a sense that they cared about you personally.

Now think about the managers you’ve disliked the most. Among their many unlikable traits, I’d put money on one: They treated you and your co-workers as replaceable parts. Managers who act this way do so for a simple reason — they’re motivated by a feeling of exclusivity, too. In their case, they gain it by feeling more important than the people who work for them.

Exclusivity is simultaneously the easiest and hardest motivator to use. It’s easy if you’re interested in your employees as individual human beings. If, on the other hand, you think of exclusivity as nothing more than a new technique, it just won’t work.

Employees are too good at spotting a phony.

Comments