I stumbled across a podcast of Daniel Pink in my hard drive the other day who is a rewnoned specialist and speaker on human behavioural physics and motivation (fancy that?) who has studied over 50 years of human behavioural research. I found it all fascinating so I wanted to share it here too.
I think it will make businesses think about how they go about motivating staff beyond the rudimentary ‘carrot and stick’ management routine. You need to go deeper…here’s the topline things I got from his lecture:
There are 3 motivational human drivers:
Motivation 1.0: Biological drivers – drink, hunger, sex, shelter, warmth (the basics)
Motivation 2.o: Reward and Punishment drivers - as humans we respond exquisitely to rewards (more of the behaviour you want) and punishments (less of the behaviour) in our environment (aka “carrots and sticks”)
Motivation 3.0: Interesting, Greater Purpose drivers i.e. making a difference, contributing to society, continually striving to be better (this third driver often involves complex creative, heuristic work)
This 3rd motivational driver is however the most powerful. Yet the irony is that too many businesses often stop at the 2nd driver using elaborate systems of reward or punishment (aka management). “We’ll reward or incentivise you for the good behaviour and punish or disincentive the bad.”
Pink argues once you get past “rudimentary cognitive skills” or the basic algorithmic, mechanical, repetitive day to day stuff rewards, or carrots for better performance, don’t work.
“People’s nature is to be active and engaged. That’s our default setting when we come out of the box. Find me a 4 year old who isn’t active or engaged. This is real human nature. It’s our operating system.” says Pink.
He goes on: “We often make assumptions that aren’t true ie. people are fundamentally inert and passive unless we have carrots or sticks. The unequivocal fact is money is a serious motivator at work. If you don’t pay people enough (fairness in pay) the 3rd driver, where the good stuff happens, will never work.”
He believes the very best use of money is to pay people enough so that the issue of money is off the table so they can stop thinking about the money and start thinking about the work.
He argues once you get past the stage of money, there are 3 things that come into play: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose:
1. Autonomy
Humans have a deep desire to be self-directed and manage their own destiny. However majority of management today is about controls and compliance. Ironically management is a technology invented in the 1850s during the Industrial Revolution and very few technologies invented in1850s we actually use today…
Atlassian– an Australian software based company gives their workers 24hrs to work on anything they want. They just have to show the results after those 24 hours. 1 day of pure autonomy they call “Fedex days” because they have to deliver something overnight. 20% time after this has provided breakthrough products. Google has done the same with their team and now devotes the 20% rule out of which came Gmail and Google Talk came out (s0 you might ask what are they doing with the other 80%?).
Zappos – an online shoe company that sells shoes through their call centres (which usually have an annual turnover of nearly 100% i.e. treating people like lightbulbs – when they burn out, screw it). They provide 2 weeks of training and then their staff are invited ti leave now for $2000 using a negative carrot, filter. Otherwise they go to their desk within the call centre witthout scripts or time clocks and simply instructed to “solve the customer’s problem”. They now have an annual turnover four times that of Four Season Hotels.
These types of businesses are using something called ROWE – Results Only Work Environments – who usually dedicate 20% of autonomous time to create something of value. Time to give it a try maybe within your business?
2. Mastery– humans love to get better at doing stuff e.g. playing an instrument at the weekend or nights doesn’t get you paid or get laid. Open source software – Linux, Apache, Wikipedia, WordPress behaviour – are all examples of mastery where people are doing non-paid work on their time and making a contribution. They’re giving their products to people for free because they enjoy the mastery of their craft. They enjoy it so it’s not seen as work, it’s more seen as play.
3. Purpose– humans also drive to be something bigger than themselves. Tom Shoes is a shoe company where if you buy a pair of shoes, they will give a pair to someone in the developing world. Why do they do this? They want to turn customers into benefactors. Disruptive categories. “Purpose motive” aligned with profit motive ok, otherwise good things don’t happen.
The Harvard Business Review states the biggest motivator at work is all about “making progress”. They alos define it as little not necessarily dramatic progress.
Skype states their progress as being disruptive but within the cause of making the world a better place.
“Put a ding in the universe” – Steve Jobs view on progress.
There is a famous “Candle, drawing pins and matches” social experiment by social scientist Sam Gluckburg where participants are asked to attach a candle to wall without wax dripping onto table. What should happen? People take the pins out of box, melt the candles in box then tack the box to the wall. 90% of people don’t get this right. When incentives come into play i.e. being paid, or incentivised, to complete the task faster it becomes the enemy of creative thinking process as participants weren’t picking up on lateral concept of seeing the box that holds the pins is a containment device that can also hold a melted candle. They narrowed their focus as they were more concerned with the reward rather than the process of creative problem solving which give them the outcome they needed.
Crude incentives, like here, limits people’s breadth of thinking – an almost myopic carrot focus – which ultimately affects their performance.
So how can apply this knowledge to the benefit of my business?
The challenge for you is to ask yourself what can you learn from this and apply to motivate your staff or sales teams more deeply and to a higher level of performance and creativity using these Motivaton 3.0 proven areas of autonomy, mastery and purpose?
I like the ROWE (results only working environment) case studies. Might just go and try it out right now…
Here’s a link to the podcast (about 28mins long but well worth it). I hope you like it as much as I did: Lecture on motivation_Daniel Pink (MPEG link)
You can also check out his speech on video via TED
