Transcript of Bonus: SYSK TRENDING - Finding Your Motivation

So today on Something You Should Know, we're launching a new bonus feature called S Y SK Trending. See, all the time I see topics trending, and I think, Oh, we actually did a great conversation about that years ago. And with nearly a decade of episodes, there are a lot of interviews I've done that speak directly to what people are dealing with right now. Today's S Y SK Trending topic is motivation. And let me ask you, what really What motivates you? Is it money, deadlines, someone looking over your shoulder? Most of us assume that's how motivation works, but it turns out we've been getting it wrong for a long time. And since motivation is something a lot of people are struggling with right now, this conversation with Daniel Pink explains what actually works and what doesn't. And we'll get to it right after this.

What motivates you? I know that's a hard question to answer because it depends on a lot of factors. But Now, think about it. For everything you do and everything you've ever done, something has motivated you to do those things. And those motivations come either from within or from outside. It's important to know about motivation, not only to understand what motivates you, but also what works to motivate others, because throughout your life, you have been and will be required to motivate people to do things. Daniel Pink knows a lot about this. Daniel has been a guest here before, and one of the books that he's written that we haven't talked about is called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Hey, Daniel. Welcome back. So motivation seems like the perfect Daniel Pink topic to tackle. How did you approach this?

I went into the... Looked at the science of motivation, looked at some research on human motivation, which turned out to be a treasure trove. There's a treasure trove of research over the last 50 years in human motivation. It said some things that really, really surprise me.

Things like what?

Things like carrots and sticks, the classic motivator that we use in business, work, but in only a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances, and that for a lot of things, They either don't work or backfire colossally. And that there's actually a better approach to motivation that is not rooted in carets and sticks, but has to do with autonomy and mastery and purpose. And that in the In the first century, when more and more of us are doing creative, conceptual, somewhat interesting work, companies that treat people like horses, as if they're motivated only by carrots or the threat of a stick, are actually going to fall behind. And companies that actually treat people like people Offer autonomy, help them move toward mastery, infuse the workplace with a sense of purpose, those are the companies that actually are flourishing and will continue to flourish.

Well, what would that mean exactly? What would a company do if a company wanted to do what you just I'll give you an example.

There are companies that are doing this. Here's a really interesting example from an Australian company called Atlassian. It's a software company. Atlassian is a software company, and they do something really cool. Once a quarter, they say to their software developers, For the next 24 hours, you can work on whatever you want. You can do it with whomever you want. You can do it the way that you want. You just have to show the results to the company, the rest of the company, in this fun meeting at the end of those 24 hours. They call these things FedEx days because you have to deliver something overnight. It turns out that that one day of undiluted autonomy has produced a whole array of ideas for new products, upgrades to existing products, fixes for some flaws in current products, that would never have emerged except for that FedEx day. Now, this is not a carrot and stick motivator. This is not saying to them, If you are innovative, I will give you 500 bucks. It's saying, You probably want to be innovative, so let me just get out of your way let you be innovative. It's a very different approach to motivation.

But I would think that some people are motivated by some things and others by other things. When you try to motivate a group of people with one motivation, well, it might work on some, but it might not work on others because they don't find it particularly motivating.

I think that's true at one level, but I also think that human beings... Listen, human beings are complex. We're motivated. We have biological motivations, okay? We drink when we're thirsty and we eat when we're hungry. That's a motivation. Human beings also have a reward and punishment motivation. If you say to me, Dan, I'm going to go pay you 100 bucks to go stand out in the street corner and tap your head, I'm going out the door right now. We respond well to rewards and punishments. But human beings also have other motivations. The drive to do things because they're interesting, the drive to do things because they matter, the drive to do things because we get better at them, the drive to do things because they contribute to the world. What the What the plan shows is that you got to pay people enough. You got to pay people enough. If you don't pay people enough, you're not going to have any realistic motivation. But once you pay people enough, external rewards like that, contingent rewards, if then rewards, don't play that big of a role in high performance. What really plays a role in high performance, once you pay people enough, is giving them freedom, allowing them to get better at something that matters, and infusing the workplace with a sense of purpose, a sense that they're doing something larger than That is far more potent and far more enduring than this elaborate regime of carrots and sticks that we've been using for 150 years.

But does it not depend on the type of work you're doing?

Yes and no. I'll give Let me give you an example. Let's take something like call centers. Call centers are very difficult jobs. They're not particularly interesting. People are often monitored. The call center employees are monitored. Their calls are timed. When they get a call in, they essentially just have to read a script. It's low on the autonomy scale. It's not particularly interesting, and it's not a job that most of us would cover. Well, you have a company like Zappos who comes in and deals with its call center in a fundamentally different way. They say to their call for employees. Solve the customer's problem. Solve the customer's problem. Do it however you want for as long as you want. We're not going to monitor you. We're not going to time you. Solve the customer's problem. And well, lo and behold, Zappos comes out of nowhere to be one of the operated customer service firms in America. So here's a job that isn't being a graphic designer or a software writer, where if you offer up some amount of autonomy, people perform at a higher level and the company benefits.

What if you're working for a company, though, that is less enlightened than Zappos and you're losing your motivation because you work in a company that's very top-down, very strict, like you just described, can this work the other way? Can this change come from the bottom up?

To some extent, and what you're describing is in some ways the landscape of American work right now. I mean, job satisfaction numbers have been plummeting. It's a combination that people are nervous and uninspired. Very dangerous combination. You have levels of workforce engagement dropping, it seems, more each year. There are some things that individuals can do to take it back a little bit. One of my favorites is this idea of a do it yourself performance review. Now, most people hate performance reviews, whether they're giving them or receiving them. We lost sight of what the purpose is of a performance review. The purpose of a performance review is to help people get better, to help them move toward mastery. But the way doing that twice a year in this kabuki theater style settings where everyone's playing a rehearsed role isn't particularly effective. So one thing people can do that I encourage people to do is a Do It Yourself Performance Review, where at the beginning of a month, you set out your goals, and at the end of the month, you call yourself into the office and ask yourself how you're faring. Are you making progress? Are you falling behind?

Do you need other information? Some people are doing these peer-to-peer performance reviews where I set out my goals and what I want to accomplish in the month. You set out yours. Fred sets out his, Maria sets out hers. And then at the end of the month, we get together, have coffee for an hour, talk about our performance, hold each other accountable. I think that's a one way for individuals to take motivation back and not rely on companies to do it. One of the people I write about, a scholar named Edward Deesey, says that we got to get past this notion that motivation is something somebody does to you. It's something that you do for yourself.

I'm talking today with Daniel Pink, and we're talking about what's in his book Drive, the surprising truth about what motivates us.

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So Daniel, I can imagine, though, managers at companies He's thinking, Well, this all sounds great. Fedex days, go take time off, do whatever you want. Sounds great. But we're much more nuts and bolts here. We need to be in the office from 9: 00 to 5: 00. You need to do your job, and we don't have time for that.

I think that most companies can actually do the FedEx day, the 24 hours. But you can also do things in a more modest version. You could say, this month, one afternoon a week, you can work on whatever you want. Who among us has not squandered one afternoon at work. I think people could surprise you. The other thing about this is that the dark cloud of the recession might have a silver lining on motivation for a couple of reasons. Number one is that recessions are often inflection points for people where their life has gone in a direction they didn't expect, and they have to think about where it's going to go next. What you see in recessions is, coming out of it is some amount of reinvention, some amount of entrepreneurship. A lot of Those kinds of activities are often very, very self-motivated. The other thing from a company's perspective is, in these tough times, you're pretty much out of carrots. You don't really have many bribes left. That might force some companies, not all, might force some companies to think a little bit more creatively, a little bit more deeply about motivation.

It sounds like you're saying there's really two kinds of motivations. There's the traditional carrot and stick, which is just reward or punishment motivation, which is the old-school way of doing it. Then there's these other kinds of motivations that you're talking about that are more creative and interesting and motivating. But aren't those just carrots and sticks in different language? I mean, ultimately, Aren't they also rewards or punishments in order to get people to do what you want them to do?

Not necessarily because it comes from within. A carrot and a stick come from without. I mean, what you're doing is you're giving people freedom. I don't think that freedom Freedom is a carrot. Freedom is, I think, qualitatively different. It allows people to be self-motivated. They're not chasing after something that you're dangling in front of them. What you're doing is that you're in some ways giving up control. There are a lot of managers out there who think that their job is to control people. I think in the industrial age or even in the information age, when people are doing simple work, when they're turning the same screw the same way, or they're answering calls at a call center, or they are adding up columns of figures that may be control makes some sense. But when fewer people are doing that and they're inevitably forced into doing things that require more innovation and creativity, giving up control is actually a better strategy. The problem with that is that managers giving up control face a little bit of a crisis because if they're not controlling people, then what the heck are they doing there? I think that the question all of us should be asking yourself in any job is, Okay, what the heck are you doing here?

If you went away, would anybody care? Would it have any effect on the world? If the answer is no, then my hunch is that you're not going to be around that much longer, and what you're doing isn't all that satisfying. If you move into something as difficult as it is, that is a little bit more satisfying and actually answers the question that people would care if you went away, then I think you're going to have greater satisfaction and greater job security.

What about those people in those jobs where they turn the screw the same way every time, or they flip burgers the same way every time? Are we to say that this doesn't apply to them?

No, but I actually think they do. I think the call center thing we talked about is a way to… I think that any job has room for autonomy. We see this over and over again. You saw with the Zappos call center example, you see it with an interesting study that I write about a hospital janitors, not a job that most of us would cover. There were some hospital janitors who saw the job essentially in that one way where they said, Okay, my job is to come in a certain time, sweep the floors, and get out. In other environments where managers, people leading these hospitals, maybe encourage janitors to think of their jobs a little bit differently. Say, If you're going in a cleaning room, feel free to talk to the patient, see how they're doing. Talk to the nurses and say, Hey, these janitors are pretty clued in about what's going on. If you have a question or need something done, don't hesitate to ask them. Well, suddenly, these janitors who were able to sculpt their jobs a little bit, lo and behold, They report higher job satisfaction. There's less turnover. They're more likely to move up the rank.

Even in a job that most of us wouldn't cover, cleaning floors in a hospital, there's room for tapping people's intrinsic motivation. Again, it's not this nicey-nice thing. It's not Kumbaya touchy-feely management that says we're going to sacrifice the bottom line. It's actually, in its own way, a remarkable relatively hard-headed, sophisticated, savvy, and strategic approach to business.

Do you think, though, and maybe one of the reasons managers are reluctant to embrace this is, okay, if you have people working and you tell them, all right, you can now have as a motivation, we're going to give you 10% of your time to do whatever it is you want to do because that's going to motivate you to work better. But initially, it might not. That initially, we would see a drop in productivity, a drop in results, however you measure them. Who wants a drop in results?

I don't know. I think it could. I mean, one of the things, let's take 20% time. One of the things about companies like Google and some others where people can spend 20% of their time working on anything that they want, chief financial officers go into cardiac arrest when that's proposed. Because you're saying, Okay, let's take one-fifth of our wages and we redeploy them into something we don't know if it's going to work. I think there might be cases where they do I think people, the workplace, for many of us, not all of us, but for many of us, is so controlling that if you release those controls, initially it can be somewhat disorienting. But I think over time, it can be far more powerful. I'll give you an interesting study out of Cornell that looked at small businesses, and they categorized these small businesses based on whether they were top-down carrot and stick management and bottom-up more autonomous management. It turned out that the bottom-up more autonomous management companies had four times, four times the growth rate of those other more command and control traditional companies.

When you do things like this, though, when you say, Okay, you can take 20% of your time and do whatever you want, what should a company expect to get in return for that? I mean, is the idea that if you tell everybody to take all this time and do whatever they want, one person will come back with something spectacular spectacular? Or should you expect great things from everybody because they now have this new freedom? I mean, what's the expectation?

You don't know. I mean, I think that people want to do great things. I don't think that everybody who has that autonomy tomorrow will do a great thing. I think a heck of a lot more will do a great thing than people expect. But there is an element of risk there. There's an element of uncertainty there. But I think that the genuine uncertainty of something that could lead to innovation is far better than the false certainty that these outdated regimes of carrot and sticks will work. I think that's in some ways delusional.

Well, thanks, Daniel. You always bring fresh insight into whatever topic you're talking about or writing about. I always appreciate that. I've been talking with Daniel Pink. The name of the book is Drive the Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. There's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. This conversation has kicked off our new bonus feature, SYSK Trending, where we surface past SYSK conversations that connect directly to what people are dealing with right now. I'm Michael Brothers. Thanks for listening to something you should know.