The biggest misconception about Motivation
One of the biggest misconceptions about motivation is that it’s possible to motivate people. It is not. Managers can’t motivate their people, teachers can’t motivate their students, and parents can’t motivate their children. You can’t motivate anyone. Or rather, not in the way you might think. We can guide people, inspire them, teach them; we can even give them a boost, in the short-term, but not motivate them. There is only one person that we can motivate: ourselves. The good news is that we are very good at it! We do it automatically whenever the right conditions are created. To understand this concept, there is a very practical example that we can explore.
Have you ever helped a seed grow into a plant?
If so, what did you do directly to the seed? You probably didn’t do anything to the seed, you simply put it in the ground, and then you influenced its environment. You made sure that the soil was the right one, that the amount of light and water was enough, and that the temperature was adequate. Consequently, the seed became a plant. The plant will always grow, as this is a natural consequence of a seed placed in a well-designed environment. This is the same for motivation: motivation is the natural consequence of a person placed in a well-designed environment. Unfortunately, people are not as simple as plants, and the design rules of this environment are not water, light, and soil porosity. The good news is that today, the rules we need are known, validated, and accepted in many areas of the scientific community. However, the business world is still very far from adopting and implementing them correctly.
We need a better definition of motivation to understand the most critical points of it well. To understand motivation, we can analyze the definitions of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is the motivational drive that pushes us to perform an activity which, in itself, is not particularly pleasant or appreciated (it can even be unpleasant in some cases), but from which we expect a consequence of high value for us, or we expect to avoid a particularly unpleasant result. This definition is not in itself positive or negative, many important activities are incentivized by extrinsic motivation. These extrinsic motivators are usually what we call perks in companies.
On the other hand, we talk about intrinsic motivation whenever we undertake an activity for the pure pleasure of the action itself, regardless of purpose, results, or rewards. An example of this is gaming. We play because the act of playing itself is enjoyable and fun. If we win it’s so much better, but it’s the quality of time that we dedicate to the activity that motivates us. There is no right or wrong kind of motivation in itself. However, the behavior and the type of experience we have is strongly influenced by the kind of motivation that drives us.
Every time you think about your talent management strategy ask yourself this question: What kind of motivation will get the behavior you want from your employees in this situation?
Article by Christian Zoli, VP of Product and Co-Founder of Beaconforce. He is a behavioral science expert who specializes in its application in change management, organizational behavior, culture, and generational gap. His research focuses on human behavior and decision processes ranging from positive psychology to cognitive sciences, communication, and behavioral economics.
