I recently had a conversation with a senior executive manager at a large multi-national organization about the difficulty in finding appropriate ways to motivate her staff and the managers in her organization. We both had similar backgrounds and had grown up in very results oriented, you do this and you get that, organizational environments. She found it hard to understand why those standard ways of motivating people, were not working and people were not achieving the goals each one was setting out.
We spoke at length about what was at the core of motivation and what seems to have changed so drastically, that now these tools do not seem to be working. In a review of the history of how we were taught to motivate as managers, you discover that the ‘carrot and stick’ approach of motivation was originally designed for an economy that produced products, with a clear set of rules and a single set of solutions. For the most part, the manufacturing economy has completely shifted in North America, replaced by a much more innovative and creative economy, where solutions are not singular and the rules are not clear at all.
It goes to follow that since the playing field has changed so dramatically, so should the rules to motivation. And the more I looked into this area of motivation, the more research I found that described the formula for motivation to be quite simple, yet very different from the incentive approach of the past. Daniel Pink describes this approach to motivation in his TED talk from 2009. He talks about the only things that really work when it comes to motivating for this complex, creative environment that we find ourselves in, is to provide employees with the following:
Autonomy – urge to direct our own lives
Mastery – the desire to get better and better at something that matters
Purpose – the yearning to do what we do in service of something greater then ourselves
Think of this the next time you are working with someone that, no matter what you're offering in commission or incentives, they don't seem to be getting the job done! I also believe that the these three things are at the foundation of the values that the next generation of employees are embracing. And in order to attract and retain the best talent, we'll need to understand how we can offer more Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose, into our corporate cultures.