Motivation 3.0

September 8th, 2010

Tweet

OK, I’m already enthralled with behavior and social science. I want to know what makes people tick, especially what motivates them. I suspected some time ago, a lot of what we were using in the corporate world (mostly carrots and sticks) wasn’t getting it anymore. It seemed contrary to what social scientists tell us about human nature. For instance, rewards can have a negative effect on performance! So there is a mis-match between what science knows and business does.

A great book came out last year that explains why reward and punishment systems no longer serve this new world of work. The book is by Daniel Pink–Drive,

Packed with interesting studies, this book shines a light on what motivates the people of today: our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. He calls it Type I, a way of thinking and an approach to business, grounded in the real science of human motivation.

Type I behavior can improve performance and deepen our satisfaction by employing three elements: autonomy (our desire to be self-directed), mastery (our urge to get better and better at what we do) and purpose (our yearning to be part of something larger than ourselves).

The old operating system, Motivation 2.0, was based on the assumption that the way to improve performance, productivity and excellence is to reward the good and punish the bad. Kinda like training animals. It worked very well until it didn’t.

Intrinsic motivation always trumps extrinsic motivators. We need to create an environment where our innate psychological needs can flourish. Notice the new kind of thinking in the positive psychology movement? A few months ago I wrote that the Happiness course at Harvard was it’s most popular course EVER. Many businesses are going beyond “flexible hours” to a ROWE (results only work environment) where employees are totally responsible for their results, not hours worked, meetings attended, or at the office time. Results, autonomously. Many companies like Zappos and JetBlue are also part of a movement to restore some measure of employee freedom in jobs usually know for a lack of it by offering jobs at home, unmonitored (“Homeshoring” vs. Offshoring”). The world is moving to greater freedom. Down with micromanagers!

When you move your employees from compliance to engagement, the results speak for themselves. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (don’t ask me to pronounce that), wrote about “flow”, that balanced place when we live deeply in the moment, so utterly in control with no sense of time, place or even self. And he says people are more likely to experience that state at work rather than leisure! This is where innovation and creativity reside, the very characteristics organizations need to survive in a world where transactional business can be easily done by computers.

Our current operating system has become less compatible with how we organize what we do, how we think about what we do and how we do what we do!

I could go on and on about this new world coming, including the new corporate legal structures forming that focus more on purpose than profits, the open-source projects of some of our most popular products (Wikipedia and Mozilla) –all done for FREE by people who are this new kind of motivated beings.

Got any comments about this?

0 Responses

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.