Motivation
We differentiate between motivation and hygiene factors:
Motivation is enthusiasm or willingness to doing something.
Hygiene factors are the things that when are there, do not contribute to higher motivation, but when absent, they reduce motivation, a.k.a demotivate.
When employees can not only focus on work, but are also enthusiast about it, results and retention increase.
Hygiene factors
While you cannot satisfy every whim of your direct report even if you wanted to, there are some common hygiene factors that are beneficial to address:
- Compensation — pay enough to remove the topic “off the table”
- Tools and equipment — allow to effectively and efficiently do the job
- Exhibit personal care to the direct report, their family, career, work, etc.
- Set psychological safety — it encourages knowledge sharing, creativity, productivity, learning as well as higher performance, as people focus on work, not cover mistakes or gaps
- Don’t shoot the messenger
- Don’t shoot down ideas or questions
- Speak last - Trust, vulnerability, Reliability — take actions which are “deposits” to the “trust wallet”
- Admit mistakes
- Ask for help when need
- Don’t do other work during meetings — be present, especially in 1:1s
- Follow up on questions and action items
- Do what you say and say what you do
Motivation
You cannot really motivate someone to do something. You can set the environment and incentives for motivation to flourish:
- Purpose — start with “why”, explain the vision, meaningfulness and value
- Autonomy — depending on the task and situation, directs can choose the “what”, “how”, and “when” (without you abandoning them)
- Mastery — proudly practice their skills and grow them — most tasks are not too boring and not too challenging
Motivations can be intrinsic, that is, gratifying or intriguing (e.g. self actualization, do-good, have fun, learn) or extrinsic, i.e. an outside reward (e.g. recognition, status, title, salary, influence, reputation, not getting yelled at). Use 1:1s to probe the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of your directs.
Intrinsic motivation is much more important to attend to, because extrinsic motivation has one huge setback: it wears off quickly, somewhere between one and three months. For example you get a raise or a title you wanted for a long time, and you get used to the new status after two months. You probably remember this happening after purchasing a gadget you wanted and forgot about after a few weeks.
Management 3.0 created Moving Motivators, where you can ask your directs to sort their individual motivation elements, so you and others understand them better:
If you are curious, there is a simple technique to identify whether motivation is intrinsic or extrinsic — ask one simple question: “If no one ever knows about this, will you still do it?”
E.g. pursing PhD while your parents, partner and colleagues would ever know about it.
The “magic button” technique helps to identify true will. Sometimes we confuse what we really want with difficulties around it. The way to know what we really want is to remove them.
For example, let’s say you don’t know whether you want to take on a leadership role — imagine you have a magic button and when you press it, the difficulties vanish and you’re successful, e.g. your manager supports you, you get a coach to guide you and the team members trust you.
What would you choose?
Bonus
Bonus is a great incentive to get others to act and reach goals. Or is it?
Researches conducted on several age groups, countries and professions (including salespeople), show that bonus can create big problems:
- Destruction of creativity
- Destruction of the joy of work and value
- Encouragement of bare minimum
- Promotion of competition (over cooperation) and comparison with others
- Stress due to unclarity whether it will be paid
- Incentive to achieve goals even while knowing that it damages other areas
- Inflexibility, promotion of working on the bonus goals even when knowing it’s wrong
- Promotion of near-future thinking and avoiding taking risks
- Lower performance in knowledge and creative jobs when bonus is high
Summary
Instead of the outdated “carrot and stick”, remove hygiene factors and rely on purpose, autonomy, mastery, as well as the specific motivations of each member.
Recommended read
Drive by Daniel Pink
Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appelo
