Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

  MOVE FIVE STEPS CLOSER TO MASTERY

  One key to mastery is what Florida State University psychology professor Anders Ericsson calls “deliberate practice”—a “lifelong period of . . . effort to improve performance in a specific domain.” Deliberate practice isn’t running a few miles each day or banging on the piano for twenty minutes each morning. It’s much more purposeful, focused, and, yes, painful. Follow these steps—over and over again for a decade—and you just might become a master:• Remember that deliberate practice has one objective: to improve performance. “People who play tennis once a week for years don’t get any better if they do the same thing each time,” Ericsson has said. “Deliberate practice is about changing your performance, setting new goals and straining yourself to reach a bit higher each time.”

  • Repeat, repeat, repeat. Repetition matters. Basketball greats don’t shoot ten free throws at the end of team practice; they shoot five hundred.

  • Seek constant, critical feedback. If you don’t know how you’re doing, you won’t know what to improve.

  • Focus ruthlessly on where you need help. While many of us work on what we’re already good at, says Ericsson, “those who get better work on their weaknesses.”

  • Prepare for the process to be mentally and physically exhausting. That’s why so few people commit to it, but that’s why it works.

  TAKE A PAGE FROM WEBBER AND A CARD FROM YOUR POCKET

  In his insightful book Rules of Thumb, Fast Company magazine cofounder Alan Webber offers a smart and simple exercise for assessing whether you’re on the path to autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Get a few blank three-by-five-inch cards. On one of the cards, write your answer to this question: “What gets you up in the morning?” Now, on the other side of the card, write your answer to another question: “What keeps you up at night?” Pare each response to a single sentence. And if you don’t like an answer, toss the card and try again until you’ve crafted something you can live with. Then read what you’ve produced. If both answers give you a sense of meaning and direction, “Congratulations!” says Webber. “Use them as your compass, checking from time to time to see if they’re still true. If you don’t like one or both of your answers, it opens up a new question: What are you going to do about it?”

  CREATE YOUR OWN MOTIVATIONAL POSTER

  Office posters that try to “motivate” us have a grim reputation. As one wag put it, “For the last two decades, motivational posters have inflicted unimaginable suffering on the workplaces of the world.” But who knows? Perhaps the first one was a thing of beauty. Maybe those cave drawings in Lascaux, France, were some Paleolithic motivational speaker’s way of saying, “If you know where you’re going, you’ll never take a wrong turn.” Now you’ve got a chance to fight back (or perhaps to reclaim that ancient legacy). Thanks to a number of websites, you can create your own motivational posters—and you no longer have to settle for photos of kittens climbing out of baskets. You can be as serious or silly with this exercise as you like. Motivation is deeply personal and only you know what words or images will resonate with you.

  Try any of these sites:Despair Inc (http://diy.despair.com/motivator.php)

  Big Huge Labs (http://bighugelabs.com/motivator.php)

  Automotivator (http://wigflip.com/automotivator/)

  To offer you some, er, motivation, here are two posters I created myself:

  Type I for Organizations: Nine Ways to Improve Your Company, Office, or Group

  Whether you’re the CEO or the new intern, you can help create engaging, productive workplaces that foster Type I behavior. Here are nine ways to begin pulling your organization out of the past and into the brighter world of Motivation 3.0.

  TRY “20 PERCENT TIME” WITH TRAINING WHEELS

  You’ve read about the wonders of “20 percent time”—where organizations encourage employees to spend one-fifth of their hours working on any project they want. And if you’ve ever used Gmail or read Google News, you’ve benefited from the results. But for all the virtues of this Type I innovation, putting such a policy in place can seem daunting. How much will it cost? What if it doesn’t work? If you’re feeling skittish, here’s an idea: Go with a more modest version—20 percent time . . . with training wheels. Start with, say, 10 percent time. That’s just one afternoon of a five-day workweek. (Who among us hasn’t wasted that amount of time at work anyway?) And instead of committing to it forever, try it for six months. By creating this island of autonomy, you’ll help people act on their great ideas and convert their downtime into more productive time. And who knows? Someone in your operation just might invent the next Post-it note.

  ENCOURAGE PEER-TO-PEER “NOW THAT” REWARDS

  Kimley-Horn and Associates, a civil engineering firm in Raleigh, North Carolina, has established a reward system that gets the Type I stamp of approval: At any point, without asking permission, anyone in the company can award a $50 bonus to any of her colleagues. “It works because it’s real-time, and it’s not handed down from any management,” the firm’s human resources director told Fast Company. “Any employee who does something exceptional receives recognition from their peers within minutes.” Because these bonuses are noncontingent “now that” rewards, they avoid the seven deadly flaws of most corporate carrots. And because they come from a colleague, not a boss, they carry a different (and perhaps deeper) meaning. You could even say they’re motivating.

  CONDUCT AN AUTONOMY AUDIT

  How much autonomy do the people in your organization really have? If you’re like most folks, you probably don’t have a clue. Nobody does. But there’s a way to find out—with an autonomy audit. Ask everyone in your department or on your team to respond to these four questions with a numerical ranking (using a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 meaning “almost none” and 10 meaning “a huge amount”):1. How much autonomy do you have over your tasks at work—your main responsibilities and what you do in a given day?

  2. How much autonomy do you have over your time at work—for instance, when you arrive, when you leave, and how you allocate your hours each day?

  3. How much autonomy do you have over your team at work—that is, to what extent are you able to choose the people with whom you typically collaborate?

  4. How much autonomy do you have over your technique at work—how you actually perform the main responsibilities of your job?

  Make sure all responses are anonymous. Then tabulate the results. What’s the employee average? The figure will fall somewhere on a 40-point autonomy scale (with 0 being a North Korean prison and 40 being Woodstock). Compare that number to people’s perceptions. Perhaps the boss thought everyone had plenty of freedom—but the audit showed an average autonomy rating of only 15. Also calculate separate results for task, time, team, and technique. A healthy overall average can sometimes mask a problem in a particular area. An overall autonomy rating of, say, 27 isn’t bad. However, if that average consists of 8 each for task, technique, and team, but only 3 for time, you’ve identified an autonomy weak spot in the organization.

  It’s remarkable sometimes how little the people running organizations know about the experiences of the people working around them. But it’s equally remarkable how often leaders are willing to do things differently if they see real data. That’s what an autonomy audit can do. And if you include a section in your audit for employees to jot down their own ideas about increasing autonomy, you might even find some great solutions.

  TAKE THREE STEPS TOWARD GIVING UP CONTROL

  Type X bosses relish control. Type I bosses relinquish control. Extending people the freedom they need to do great work is usually wise, but it’s not always easy. So if you’re feeling the urge to control, here are three ways to begin letting go—for your own benefit and your team’s:1. Involve people in goal-setting. Would you rather set your own goals or have them foisted upon you? Thought so. Why should those working with you be any different? A considerable body of research shows that individuals are far more engaged when they’re
pursuing goals they had a hand in creating. So bring employees into the process. They could surprise you: People often have higher aims than the ones you assign them.

  2. Use noncontrolling language. Next time you’re about to say “must” or “should,” try saying “think about” or “consider” instead. A small change in wording can help promote engagement over compliance and might even reduce some people’s urge to defy. Think about it. Or at least consider it, okay?

  3. Hold office hours. Sometimes you need to summon people into your office. But sometimes it’s wise to let them come to you. Take a cue from college professors and set aside one or two hours a week when your schedule is clear and any employee can come in and talk to you about anything that’s on her mind. Your colleagues might benefit and you might learn something.

  PLAY “WHOSE PURPOSE IS IT ANYWAY?”

  This is another exercise designed to close the gap between perception and reality. Gather your team, your department, or, if you can, all the employees in your outfit. Hand everyone a blank three-by-five-inch card. Then ask each person to write down his or her one-sentence answer to the following question: “What is our company’s (or organization’s) purpose?” Collect the cards and read them aloud. What do they tell you? Are the answers similar, everyone aligned along a common purpose? Or are they all over the place—some people believing one thing, others something completely different, and still others without even a guess? For all the talk about culture, alignment, and mission, most organizations do a pretty shabby job of assessing this aspect of their business. This simple inquiry can offer a glimpse into the soul of your enterprise. If people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, how can you expect them to be motivated to do it?

  USE REICH’S PRONOUN TEST

  Former U.S. labor secretary Robert B. Reich has devised a smart, simple, (and free) diagnostic tool for measuring the health of an organization. When he talks to employees, he listens carefully for the pronouns they use. Do employees refer to their company as “they” or as “we”? “They” suggests at least some amount of disengagement, and perhaps even alienation. “We” suggests the opposite—that employees feel they’re part of something significant and meaningful. If you’re a boss, spend a few days listening to the people around you, not only in formal settings like meetings, but in the hallways and at lunch as well. Are you a “we” organization or a “they” organization? The difference matters. Everybody wants autonomy, mastery, and purpose. The thing is, “we” can get it—but “they” can’t.

  DESIGN FOR INTRINSIC MOTIVATION

  Internet guru and author Clay Shirky (www.shirky.com) says that the most successful websites and electronic forums have a certain Type I approach in their DNA. They’re designed—often explicitly—to tap intrinsic motivation. You can do the same with your online presence if you listen to Shirky and:• Create an environment that makes people feel good about participating.

  • Give users autonomy.

  • Keep the system as open as possible.

  And what matters in cyberspace matters equally in physical space. Ask yourself: How does the built environment of your workplace promote or inhibit autonomy, mastery, and purpose?

  PROMOTE GOLDILOCKS FOR GROUPS

  Almost everyone has experienced the satisfaction of a Goldilocks task—the kind that’s neither too easy nor too hard, that delivers a delicious sense of flow. But sometimes it’s difficult to replicate that experience when you’re working in a team. People often end up doing the jobs they always do because they’ve proven they can do them well, and an unfortunate few get saddled with the flow-free tasks nobody else wants. Here are a few ways to bring a little Goldilocks to your group:• Begin with a diverse team. As Harvard’s Teresa Amabile advises, “Set up work groups so that people will stimulate each other and learn from each other, so that they’re not homogeneous in terms of their backgrounds and training. You want people who can really cross-fertilize each other’s ideas.”

  • Make your group a “no competition” zone. Pitting coworkers against one another in the hope that competition will spark them to perform better rarely works—and almost always undermines intrinsic motivation. If you’re going to use a c-word, go with “collaboration” or “cooperation.”

  • Try a little task-shifting. If someone is bored with his current assignment, see if he can train someone else in the skills he’s already mastered. Then see if he can take on some aspect of a more experienced team member’s work.

  • Animate with purpose, don’t motivate with rewards. Nothing bonds a team like a shared mission. The more that people share a common cause—whether it’s creating something insanely great, outperforming an outside competitor, or even changing the world—the more your group will do deeply satisfying and outstanding work.

  TURN YOUR NEXT OFF-SITE INTO A FEDEX DAY

  Behold the company off-site, a few spirit-sapping days of forced fun and manufactured morale—featuring awkward pep talks, wretched dancing, and a few “trust falls.” To be fair, some off-sites reengage employees, recharge people’s batteries, and restart conversations on big issues. But if your organization’s off-sites are falling short, why not try replacing the next one with a FedEx Day? Set aside an entire day where employees can work on anything they choose, however they want, with whomever they’d like. Make sure they have the tools and resources they need. And impose just one rule: People must deliver something—a new idea, a prototype of a product, a better internal process—the following day. Type I organizations know what their Type X counterparts rarely comprehend: Real challenges are far more invigorating than controlled leisure.

  The Zen of Compensation: Paying People the Type I Way

  Everybody wants to be paid well. I sure do. I bet you’re the same. The Type I approach to motivation doesn’t require bargain basement wages or an all-volunteer workforce, but it does demand a new approach to pay.

  Think of this new approach as the Zen of compensation: In Motivation 3.0, the best use of money is to take the issue of money off the table.

  The more prominent salary, perks, and benefits are in someone’s work life, the more they can inhibit creativity and unravel performance. As Edward Deci explained in Chapter 3, when organizations use rewards like money to motivate staff, “that’s when they’re most demotivating.” The better strategy is to get compensation right—and then get it out of sight. Effective organizations compensate people in amounts and in ways that allow individuals to mostly forget about compensation and instead focus on the work itself.

  Here are three key techniques.

  1. ENSURE INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL FAIRNESS

  The most important aspect of any compensation package is fairness. And here, fairness comes in two varieties—internal and external. Internal fairness means paying people commensurate with their colleagues. External fairness means paying people in line with others doing similar work in similar organizations.

  Let’s look at each type of fairness. Suppose you and Fred have adjoining cubicles. And suppose you’ve got pretty much equivalent responsibility and experience. If Fred makes scads more money than you, you’ll be miffed. Because of this violation of internal fairness, your motivation will plummet. Now suppose instead that you and Fred are both auditors with ten years’ experience working in a Fortune 200 company. If you discover that similarly experienced auditors at other Fortune 200 firms are making double your salaries, both you and Fred will experience a largely irreversible motivation dip. The company has violated the ethic of external fairness. (One important addendum: Paying people the Type I way doesn’t mean paying everyone the same amount. If Fred has a harder job or contributes more to the organization than you, he deserves a richer deal. And, as it turns out, several studies have shown that most people don’t have a beef with that. Why? It’s fair.)

  Getting the internal and external equity right isn’t itself a motivator. But it is a way to avoid putting the issue of money back on the table and making it a de-motivator.


  2. PAY MORE THAN AVERAGE

  If you have provided adequate baseline rewards and established internal and external fairness, consider borrowing a strategy first surfaced by a Nobel laureate. In the mid-1980s, George Akerlof, who later won the Nobel Prize in economics, and his wife, Janet Yellen, who’s also an economist, discovered that some companies seemed to be overpaying their workers. Instead of paying employees the wages that supply and demand would have predicted, they gave their workers a little more. It wasn’t because the companies were selfless and it wasn’t because they were stupid. It was because they were savvy. Paying great people a little more than the market demands, Akerlof and Yellen found, could attract better talent, reduce turnover, and boost productivity and morale.

  Higher wages could actually reduce a company’s costs.

  The pay-more-than-average approach can offer an elegant way to bypass “if-then” rewards, eliminate concerns about unfairness, and help take the issue of money off the table. It’s another way to allow people to focus on the work itself. Indeed, other economists have shown that providing an employee a high level of base pay does more to boost performance and organizational commitment than an attractive bonus structure.