Aligning Company Culture and Employee Motivation

Last week we wrote about how a team’s shared understanding — that vital ingredient for productive collaboration — goes beyond the work itself and extends to the very fabric of the team and company.

The ability to connect the dots of your work to your company’s goals and, further, to a larger purpose, is one of the three key ingredients for motivation.

Dan Pink explained why in his seminal book Drive, where he pointed out how business attitudes about motivating people had completely diverged from what science was telling us. Scientists have proven that carrot-and-stick motivators come up short. They kill creativity, actually diminish performance, and can lead to bad behavior.

As Dan Pink put it, creative people function best when they have a sense of mastery, autonomy, and purpose.

Mastery: you aspire to achieve mastery over the kind of work you do, which means a culture of perpetual learning and improvement regardless of level or experience. But mastery in modern work cannot be done in isolation. It must be done through shared challenge and shared knowledge.

Autonomy: You want to feel the autonomy to make good decisions rather than be ordered about. Autonomy does not mean isolation nor lack of accountability. Modern work is done in teams, and it is ideally focused on outcomes over output. Autonomy means empowering people to make choices. It means allowing the most suitable person on the team to make a particular decision. It means giving everyone a voice.

Purpose: you need to understand and buy into the mission you are part of, and connect the dots from your work to that bigger goal. You need to feel how you fit into that mission, and how you fit with the people on the journey with you. You also want to understand the progress, or lack thereof, of your company towards achieving that mission.

In a healthy culture, managers have a big role to play in fostering mastery, autonomy, and purpose, but it is actually everyone’s job. Within a team, we can choose to allow elements of autonomy to win out over ego or seniority. We can push each other to greater mastery. We can come together to forge and align and evolve purpose with optimism rather than cynicism.

It takes action, communication, transparency and humility on everyone’s part, but it is how work should be done.

This post originally appeared on the Jotto blog.