Thought Leader Interview
Your second element is mastery. What is that and why does it matter?
Mastery is our desire to get better at something that matters. It’s a fundamental human drive and often ignored in the workplace. There’s some great research from Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile showing that the single greatest motivator day-to-day on the job is ‘making progress in meaningful work’. The big problem is that progress depends on feedback – and most workplaces are feedback deserts.
What do you mean by that?
We live in a world of rich, regular, robust, meaningful feedback in every area of our lives – smartphones, games, texting, search engines. Then we stick people inside large organizations and how do we give them feedback? An annual performance review. Once a year! It makes no sense. That’s why many companies – including large public companies like Adobe – are eliminating performance reviews. Companies are replacing these outdated approaches with things like weekly check-ins, weekly one-on-ones, peer-to-peer evaluations, and all sorts of other innovations. The key is for the feedback inside the organization to have the same swift metabolism as feedback outside the organization.
You last key motivator is purpose. Is that possible in every job?
Yes. But we have to understand two different kinds of purpose. One is what I call “capital P” purpose. That’s doing something big and transcendent for the world – solving the climate crisis, feeding the hungry, and so on. But as you say, that’s tough to do in every job. That “small P” purpose also matters. That means, “Am I making a contribution? Am I doing something that contributes to what our organization is trying to accomplish?” That’s important, too.
There’s a mountain of research showing that both types of purpose are incredibly effective performance enhancers and they’re essentially free. Managers would get a lot more motivation out of their employees if they had two or three fewer conversations each week about ‘how’ and two more about ‘why’.
This all seems to make perfect sense. So why do so many businesses continue to follow the ‘carrot-and-stick’ method of motivation when it clearly isn’t effective?
There are a few reasons, all of which connect. One is that this is how we always have done things. And both people and organizations tend to think the status quo is somehow "natural" and that change is weird and dangerous. Another is that external rewards are easy. They're easy to structure, easy to implement, easy to measure. Intrinsic motivators are a lot tougher.
And the third is that carrots and sticks often seem to work in the short-term -- almost like a sugar rush seems to ‘work’ in the short-term. People respond. These ‘if-then’ motivators cause activity. They just rarely lead to creativity.
One more thing. One's approach to this topic depends, in part, on one's belief about human nature. If you believe that human beings are fundamentally passive and inert -that but for the threat of a punishment or the threat of a stick - human beings would just sit there and do nothing, that takes you down one path.
But if you begin with a different premise -- that human beings are active and engaged, that they want to do good work - that points you a very different direction. And this direction isn't just more humane. The science shows it's also more effective.
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