Motivation

As a leader, how do you motivate people? This is a perennial question of leadership and the starting point is that even in a commercial environment the one thing that is not a motivator is money. Dan Pink addresses this in the RSA Animate video “Drive – the surprising truth about what motivates us” (see YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc). His review focuses on the use of bonuses in organisations and finds that they only work “as they should do” when they are applied to “routine mechanical tasks”; however when the task requires “even rudimentary cognitive skills”, bonuses do not work: in fact, larger rewards lead to poorer performance! He then goes on to cite various studies which show that there are three main things that actually motivate us.

Here’s how to motivate people followed by further considerations (“et alors”):

Motivation

According to the author who synthesises a multitude of studies, there are three main “drivers” that motivate people:

Autonomy

This is our desire to be self-directed. The point here is that “conventional” management is typically about compliance; however if you want better engagement (which leads to better performance), then “self-directed” has been proven to be better. If you want people to achieve, the idea is that you “get out of their way…”

Mastery

This is our desire to getter better at doing things. The argument here is that when the tasks are technically sophisticated and accordingly require highly skilled persons to perform them, the motivation will be the desire to get better at doing it. This extends to people working for free (e.g. Wikipedia) and even providing services for free (e.g. Linux).

Purpose

A sense of purpose is perhaps the key driver! The author asserts most of us are “purpose maximisers, not just profit maximisers” and that the organisations that have a clear sense of purpose tend to “flourish” not least because they attract the “best talent.” An example is Skype whose goal is to be “disruptive but in the cause of making the world a better place.”

Et alors

The 11 minute video is very well presented and provides a good summary of a lot of studies into motivation. There is an overlap with some of the key schools of psychology when it comes to motivation: the need for achievement (which links with both “mastery” and “autonomy”); and the need for purpose (c.f. Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”). A key motivator which does not feature above is the need for affiliation (in other words the need to be included in a group or otherwise to be liked). What about money itself – one thing is bonuses, but what about salaries? The author asserts that the best thing to do with money to pay enough to “take the issue off the table.” This goes back to Herzberg’s two-factor theory of motivation where there are “motivator” and “hygiene” factors. The former can motivate positively whereas hygiene factors motivate negatively if they are not present.

Back to bonuses: I presented the video at a seminar last week to a group of leaders, one of whom was a senior trader working in a commodities business. After the screening, I was therefore interested to hear his opinion about money and bonuses as a motivator. He had two interesting insights. Firstly, trading appears to be a different context because profit can be a purpose and the business itself is about making money so it’s difficult to “take the issue off the table”; secondly, for traders, the reward can never be large enough! But here we get into a different type of motivator, potentially not a very positive one: greed! Evidently there are other motivators but Dan Pink has managed to capture three drivers that seem to work for the collective good in organisations: leaders should take note!