The Yin and Yang of Motivation.
What we’re all misunderstanding about when people thrive at work.
In April this year, Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge won his 13th marathon with the second fastest time ever. Second to himself. He set the world’s fastest time in 50 years a few years earlier. On his arm, Kipchonge wears a band that states: “No human is limited.” Yet he’s the only one on the cusp of breaking the two-hour marathon, something we’ve never considered possible.
What makes him different?
At Brave, we’re on a mission to uncover the nature of potential at work. After studying countless theories about high altitude training and diet to explain Kipchoge’s exceptionalism, one thing he said hinted at a lesson for the rest of us:
“If you have that belief — pure belief in your heart — that you want to be successful then you can talk to your mind and your mind will control you to be successful.”
In organizational psychology, “talk to your mind” and “mind [that] will control you” can be summed up by one word; motivation. Despite being studied for decades, creating and maintaining motivation remains elusive.
The most common measure of motivation in the workplace is engagement. A 155 country survey conducted by Gallup in 2017 showed that only 15% of workers are engaged at work. In other words,
“85% of adults worldwide, roughly 4 billion workers are not engaged or are actively disengaged at work.”
This huge portion of our species are both unhappy and unproductive at work. Engaged employees are 17% more productive and 21% more profitable than actively disengaged folks. If this doesn’t morally vex you, consider the fact that right now, the vast majority of our society consists of underutilized and unrealized potential. With payroll representing, on average, 30% of operating business costs, these numbers describe a significant drain on the global economy as a whole. Our productivity is a fraction of what it might be.
Clearly, we should pay far more attention to engagement. Companies that do, spend countless hours measuring and managing the question: How can we make our employees more motivated so they can be more productive? However, given these numbers, most of what we’re doing isn’t working that well. Our take: Several myths about how motivation works have sent us in the wrong direction.
Here’s one we hear very often…
Myth: Happy employees are motivated ones.
The logic for creating happiness at work varies, but it mostly revolves around flooding people’s bloodstream with hormones. A trendy way to put this into practice is installing foosball tables and providing free lunches. In other words, raising the level of misery and drudgery of your work. We should make work fun, right?
On closer inspection, this approach appears to be a band-aid solution rather than a long-term one.
The problem is two-fold. First, the word happiness is used to describe momentary pleasures as well as a long-term state of mind. But these two experiences are not the same.
Here’s how cognitive scientist Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas and psychologist Dacher Keltner define a person in a long-term state of happiness. They are living a life “rich in a variety of emotions, even including episodes of anger, sadness, and stress.” Professionally, they are, “feeling an overall sense of enjoyment at work; being able to gracefully handle setbacks; connecting amicably with colleagues, co-workers, clients, and customers; and knowing that your work matters to yourself, your organization, and beyond.”
Behavioral economist, Dan Ariely, agrees. We usually pursue momentary happiness rather than long-term happiness. We avoid the things that are complex and challenging, even if they would eventually lead to a deeper lasting sense of happiness.
Which points to the second problem: motivation and happiness are conflated. As those with deep happiness in their lives are described above, work will not, and perhaps should not, bring you joy every single moment of every day. In addition, experiencing rich emotions is not, in itself, motivation to create value. Most good evaluations of motivation focus on measuring people’s productivity, not their mood.
As far as a company is concerned: employee motivation is about the desire to be creative and invest effort to overcome challenges that progress professional goals as well as the company’s goals.
And that’s not always going to inspire smiley emojis.
In fact, sometimes the best work can be downright painful. Take, for example, getting up at 4 am, jumping into freezing cold water, and swimming for three to five hours, every day of the week. It doesn’t sound like fun at all, but it’s what Michael Phelps had to do to win 23 Olympic Gold Medals.
Why companies fail at cracking motivation.
Studies on work motivation first began in the late 1800s with Frederick Taylor. His theory of Scientific Management, published in 1911, analyzed and synthesized workflows to improve economic efficiency and labor productivity by decomposing and standardizing manufacturing processes. It also helped employers rethink the relationship between wages and performance. For example, Taylor found that because workers were paid hourly, they were inadvertently punished for working faster. Taylor used this insight to reward talent based on output and productivity rather than time worked. Today this performance or merit-based pay and other extrinsic incentives are common.
Just two years earlier, in 1909, Frank Parsons revitalized the Abrahamic tradition of vocation with his posthumously published work: Choosing a Vocation. His concept was that every person should choose their work by considering their own “aptitudes, abilities, ambitions, resources, and limitations”. According to Parson, selecting a career this way would result in “enthusiasm, love of work, and high economic values, — superior product, efficient service, and good pay”.
Sound familiar?
Social psychologists in the vocation camp have gone down a road paved with factors affecting intrinsic motivation such as autonomy, mastery, and purpose to make jobs more rewarding.
Yet, even with 100 years of progress in both Scientific Management (extrinsic motivators) and Vocation (intrinsic motivators), we continue to make the same error when applying both.
It turns out that intrinsic and extrinsic motivations only work well when done together.
Debating which is more useful, intrinsic or extrinsic (classic binary thinking), actually diminishes the value of both. The key driver of productivity is actually in the relationship between the two. Each motivational system positively — and negatively — reinforces the other. And like Yin and Yang, both are required for success.
First, let’s just admit it; almost all people work for money. We should stop looking at money as the villain. Even Dan Pink, who gave a well watched TED Talk on intrinsic motivations, emphasized the value of autonomy and self-direction after removing the issue of money from the table “and paying people adequately and fairly”.
Also, never underestimate the power of other extrinsic factors like praise or the boss-employee relationship. Global studies revealed that 79% of people who quit their jobs cite “lack of appreciation” as their reason for leaving. Another Gallup study of 7,272 U.S. adults showed that one in two left their job to get away from their manager and improve their quality of life.
You might get the idea that we’re saying you need to create extrinsic motivation first to get to the intrinsic.
Not quite…
In 2000, Richard Thaler and Sendhil Mullainathan published an essay titled Behavioural Economics to address this very issue. They argue that seeking better opportunities, competitive advantage, or growth by themselves do not explain people’s choices.
Why?
Because we aren’t infinitely rational, self-controlled, or selfish. Our choices are equally shaped by moral and emotional factors when we consider whether a task or a job is worthwhile. Let’s take the value of fairness. Thaler and Mullainathan point out that janitors in a high wage industry are paid more than janitors in a lower wage industry. Because the pay a person is offered or accepts is as much about fairness as it is about the value of a clean office.
Don’t try to create intrinsic motivation. Just try to avoid destroying it.
Think of the different sources of intrinsic motivation; a sense of autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
To state the obvious, by definition experiencing intrinsic motivation doesn’t come from the company, it comes from the person. As an employer, you can’t create intrinsic motivation in a person, but you can destroy it.
Let’s start by not doing that.
For example, autonomy — an intrinsic motivator — tends to occur naturally in knowledge and managerial jobs where people are rewarded for having original ideas and selecting their own priorities. But as you move down the hierarchy, autonomy, and quite predictably intrinsic motivation, diminishes rapidly.
To fight this decline in motivation, the former SVP of People Ops at Google, Laszlo Bock, describes how the company pulls authority away from managers on major decisions such as hiring, promotion, incorporating code into the software code base, among others.
They cited a study on performance where University of Sheffield’s Dr. Kamal Birdi and six other researchers studied the productivity of 308 companies across twenty-two years. The study concluded that,
“Performance improved only when companies implemented programs to empower employees (for example, by taking decision-making authority away from managers and giving it to individuals or teams).”
Perhaps you’re thinking, that’s all well and good for Google who can attract (and afford) the best talent on earth. The rest of us need standard processes, assembly line specialization, and merit-based pay to ensure new and junior employees actually deliver, right? Paradoxically, these command-control management practices limit the very outcome they aim to improve — workforce productivity.
Create conditions for people to find their own sources of motivation.
This isn’t the first time the dilemma of management and motivation has been discussed, and it won’t be the last. Luckily, there are new approaches available for managers to enable the interplay of motivations at all levels of work.
Job Crafting
Perhaps the most recently popular approach is also the simplest. Job crafting is when workers and their managers spend time discussing and recasting their job descriptions in terms of the positive end benefits of getting the work done, and not the tasks it comprises. The key is emphasizing the end benefits of work that interest the worker.
The woman who coined the term, job crafting, Yale professor Amy Wrzesniewski, studied hospital custodial workers and found a pattern distinguishing those who were productive and those who were not. The less productive group thought of their work as the tasks described in the job description. The more productive group described their work as creating a safe, comfortable, and welcoming environment for patients.
To dwell on janitors for a moment, Disney takes the exact same approach for its amusement park cleaning crew. Every employee crafts their work around a shared common purpose (aka. end benefit) to create happiness for everyone with magical moments.
Try it: Job Crafting Exercise
Tours of Duty
Mission alignment or defining professional goals that align with a person’s values as well as the organization’s goals is something we’ve talked about before. The insight here is linking typical extrinsic motivations — promotion and performance bonuses — very explicitly with intrinsic ones — curiosity, mastery, and accomplishment.
LinkedIn’s CEO, Reid Hoffman, wrote a whole book about how to do this well.
Impact Feedback Loops
Even if everyone has a mission and personally crafted job, the outcome of their work won’t always be as straightforward and tangible as smiling children on amusement rides.
Some companies run town halls to highlight company purpose, performance, and how each department is contributing. Starbucks got a lot of attention, and a boost in loyalty, from their 2008 conference and 2012, $35 million, Leadership Lab to help 9,600 store managers connect the company’s purpose to the day-to-day work happening in each store.
However, they also back up these gatherings by giving people a stake in their future contribution to the purpose. Since 1991, Starbucks has granted all employees’ stock in the company. The company maintains the highest engagement and lowest attrition in the industry.
Socially Intelligent Bosses
We already mentioned the trend of poor management driving about half of all departures. However, remember the concept here, it’s not about how nice your boss is, it’s about creating the conditions for intrinsic motivation to flourish and not diminishing people. Liz Wiseman’s book, Multipliers, is a wonderful guide on management to maximize instead of diminishing.
In the talent industry, we call the outcome of good team management, psychological safety. After comparing their highest performing teams to the rest, Google uncovered that psychological safety explained the difference. To spread this performance, Google used the work of professor Amy Edmondson to make a manager’s guide including 30 tactics around 5 principles for building psychological safety in every team:
- Demonstrate engagement.
- Show understanding.
- Be inclusive in interpersonal settings.
- Be inclusive in decision-making.
- Show confidence and conviction without appearing inflexible.
There’s no universal formula. There are many small ones.
Companies who manage to create and sustain motivation in their teams achieve far more productivity than those who don’t.
People have an innate drive to make progress and accomplish great things, so as a company it’s our job to inspire that.
As much as our work at Brave uses AI to spot potential high performers, at the end of the day, we need to remember that when it comes to employee engagement and retention, the center is on people not on machines, and people are complex.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for motivation. Leaders need to understand and embrace the idea that a different cocktail of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation will work for each employee. And like a good cocktail, we all have our favorite…this month. Keep listening. People change.
Authors
Ibanga Umanah is a Cofounder and the Head of Strategy for Brave Venture Labs. Brave is a tool for spotting and ranking talent for companies building product teams in emerging markets.
Amina Islam has a Ph.D. in engineering and is currently putting her skills and academic background into doing evidence-based research on the impact of informal learning programs.
Get in touch to hire, get hired, or join our team: brave.careers
