Being a parent is a wonderful thing. It was an amazing experience watching my kids learn to crawl, pull their weight, get on all fours, take their first tentative steps. They are older now but I still look back at those days and wonder, what motivated them to try so hard ? Are they biologically hardwired to walk / talk ? May be!
Just the other day my wife and I bought our 7 year old son a wave board. He was thrilled and spent the rest of the day practicing and watching tutorials on YouTube. He skipped TV time and hurried through lunch to get back on his new toy. By the end of the day he had mastered the art of balancing a wave board, though turning was still a challenge.
Learning to talk or walk may be hardwired but surely wave boarding was not part of our evolutionary history and certainly not an essential skill for evading danger. It has no evolutionary importance. There was something else at play here.
I couldn’t help but contrast it with my work environment. At times I needed a push here , a nudge there and appropriate rewards in the form of incentives and promotions. My peers and teams members were no different, they worked with a firm eye on incentives / promotions and feared the consequences of not performing well.
It is not all doom and gloom though. Over the years I’ve enjoyed some roles more than others, and some tasks more than others. What is more, the roles and tasks I enjoyed were neither thrust on me nor incentivised better.
Why are we motivated to do some tasks and not others ? As managers why do we feel the need to use incentives and threats to elicit good output from our teams ? How can we motivate ourselves and our teams better ?
It turns out there are two types of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic. Extrinsic motivation occurs when we are pushed to behave in a certain way or engage in an activity in order to earn a reward or avoid punishment. Incentives, promotions, stock options are all extrinsic motivators.
Intrinsic motivation involves engaging in behaviour because it is personally rewarding; essentially, performing an activity for its own sake rather than the desire for some external reward.
Finally I was able to piece it together. My son was intrinsically motivated to learn the wave board, for him learning was its own reward. Looking back I realise, jobs that I enjoyed most were ones that helped me learn and improve my knowledge.
Daniel Pink says, intrinsic motivation depends on three elements: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.
Autonomy: Humans are, by nature, curious and autonomous creatures. Fostering autonomy in schools and work places can only make us more creative and productive. There are essentially four aspects of autonomy that people care about. What they do, when they do it, how they do it and with whom do they do it.
Four Ts that form the basic pillar of autonomy. Their Task, Their Time, Their Technique and Their Team.
Mastery: Mastery is the second dimension of motivation. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10,000 hours of practice required to achieve perfection in any endeavour. Can you imagine putting in 10,000 hours of effort with a gun behind your back?It is impossible to achieve mastery through external motivators. The opportunity to achieve mastery is a reward in itself.
Flashes of my son repeatedly falling, in an attempt to master the art of balancing on a wave board comes to mind. I didn’t bribe him, there was no peer pressure either (since none of his friends had mastered it yet). I now understand the motivation behind his attempts, mastering the wave board was its own reward. A self-reinforcing cycle of Failure – Experimentation and Success.
Purpose: If intrinsic motivation were a tripod with Autonomy and Mastery being the first two legs, Purpose is the all-important third, without it the system would be out of balance. The big picture of where their efforts and work fit in the larger scheme of things is a motivator.
3 Tips to motivate your team
- Give your employees autonomy by allowing them real control over various aspects of their work — be it deciding what to work on or when. Set general guidelines that allow them flexibility. Policies like work from home enable the ‘When’ aspect of autonomy. Involving them in role assignment helps the ‘What’ .
- Assign them tasks that challenge and stretch them a bit without pushing them over board. The key is to understand each person’s abilities and not assign tasks that fit his/her exact capabilities. Remember to give them space and support to reach a little higher and foster improvement, continual mastery, and growth
- Help your team understand the big picture, show them where the subsystem fits in the final product. Share real customer feedback and videos. Show the impact their work has on sales figures.
Change is happening companies are giving employees more freedom in crafting their roles. They are dumping traditional appraisal systems in favour of continuous feedback. Deloitte and more recently Accenture have joined the list of pioneers making this change.
I internalised this book by relating it to my experiences as a father and as a manager. I hope you found this summary useful.
