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February 15 - March 25, 2021
Type I behavior is made, not born. These behavioral patterns aren’t fixed traits. They are proclivities that emerge from circumstance, experience, and context.
Type I’s almost always outperform Type X’s in the long run. Intrinsically motivated people usually achieve more than their reward-seeking counterparts.
Type I behavior does not disdain money or recognition. Both Type X’s and Type I’s care about money. If an employee’s compensation doesn’t hit the baseline that I described in Chapter 2—if her organization doesn’t pay her an adequate amount, or if her pay isn’t equitable compared to others doing similar work—that person’s motivation will crater, regardless of whether she leans toward X or toward I.
But one reason fair and adequate pay is so essential is that it takes the issue of money off the table so they can focus on the work itself.
Type I behavior, which is built around intrinsic motivation, draws on resources that are easily replenished and inflict little damage. It is the motivational equivalent of clean energy: inexpensive, safe to use, and endlessly renewable.
Ultimately, Type I behavior depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
That’s why, a little past noon on a rainy Friday in Charlottesville, only a third of CEO Jeff Gunther’s employees have shown up for work. But Gunther—entrepreneur, manager, capitalist—is neither worried nor annoyed. In fact, he’s as calm and focused as a monk. Maybe that’s because he didn’t roll into the office himself until about an hour ago. Or maybe that’s because he knows his crew isn’t shirking. They’re working—just on their own terms.
In a ROWE workplace, people don’t have schedules. They show up when they want. They don’t have to be in the office at a certain time—or any time, for that matter. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, and where they do it is up to them.
Indeed, Gunther thinks that in a ROWE environment, employees are far less likely to jump to another job for a $10,000 or even $20,000 increase in salary. The freedom they have to do great work is more valuable, and harder to match, than a pay raise—and employees’ spouses, partners, and families are among ROWE’s staunchest advocates.
Have you ever seen a six-month-old or a one-year-old who’s not curious and self-directed? I haven’t. That’s how we are out of the box. If, at age fourteen or forty-three, we’re passive and inert, that’s not because it’s our nature. It’s because something flipped our default setting. That something could well be management—not merely how bosses treat us at work, but also how the broader ethos has leeched into schools, families, and many other aspects of our lives.
But today economic accomplishment, not to mention personal fulfillment, more often swings on a different hinge. It depends not on keeping our nature submerged but on allowing it to surface. It requires resisting the temptation to control people—and instead doing everything we can to reawaken their deep-seated sense of autonomy. This innate capacity for self-direction is at the heart of Motivation 3.0 and Type I behavior.
Autonomy, as they see it, is different from independence. It’s not the rugged, go-it-alone, rely-on-nobody individualism of the American cowboy. It means acting with choice—which means we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others.
“We’ve always taken the position that money is only something you can lose on,” Cannon-Brookes told me. “If you don’t pay enough, you can lose people. But beyond that, money is not a motivator. What matters are these other features.”
autonomy over four aspects of work: what people do, when they do it, how they do it, and whom they do it with.
The freedom to pick my boundaries.” SETH GODIN,
3M’s technical staff could spend up to 15 percent of their time on projects of their choosing.
Ever wonder why lawyers, as a group, are so miserable? Some social scientists have—and they’ve offered three explanations. One involves pessimism.
“There is one glaring exception: pessimists do better at law.” In other words, an attitude that makes someone less happy as a human being actually makes her more effective as a lawyer.11
A second reason: Most other enterprises are positive-sum. If I sell you something you want and enjoy, we’re both better off. Law, by contrast, is often (though not always) a zero-sum game: Because somebody wins, somebody else must lose.
But the third reason might offer the best explanation of all—and help us understand why so few attorneys exemplify Type I behavior. Lawyers often face intense demands b...
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Alas, at the heart of private legal practice is perhaps the most autonomy-crushing mechanism imaginable: the billable hour. Most lawyers—and nearly all lawyers in large, prestigious firms—must keep scrupulous track, often in six-minute increments, of their time. If they fail to bill enough hours, their jobs are in jeopardy. As a result, their focus inevitably veers from the output of their work (solving a client’s problem) to its input (piling up as many hours as possible). If the rewards come from time, then time is what firms will get.
If we begin from an alternative, and more accurate, presumption—that people want to do good work—then we ought to let them focus on the work itself rather than the time it takes them to do it.
Zappos doesn’t monitor its customer service employees’ call times or require them to use scripts. The reps handle calls the way they want. Their job is to serve the customer well; how they do it is up to them.
However, encouraging autonomy doesn’t mean discouraging accountability. Whatever operating system is in place, people must be accountable for their work.
As Zappos CEO Hsieh told me by e- mail, “Studies have shown that perceived control is an important component of one’s happiness. However, what people feel like they want control over really varies, so I don’t think there’s one aspect of autonomy that’s universally the most important. Different individuals have different desires, so the best strategy for an employer would be to figure out what’s important to each individual employee.”
Gallup’s extensive research on the subject shows that in the United States, more than 50 percent of employees are not engaged at work—and nearly 20 percent are actively disengaged.
According to the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., in some countries as little as 2 to 3 percent of the workforce is highly engaged in their work.
“Throughout my athletics career, the overall goal was always to be a better athlete than I was at that moment— whether next week, next month or next year. The improvement was the goal. The medal was simply the ultimate reward for achieving that goal.” SEBASTIAN COE
Most important, in flow, the relationship between what a person had to do and what he could do was perfect. The challenge wasn’t too easy. Nor was it too difficult. It was a notch or two beyond his current abilities, which stretched the body and mind in a way that made the effort itself the most delicious reward.
When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what they must do falls short of their capabilities, the result is boredom.
Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton, two business school professors, have studied this phenomenon among hospital cleaners, nurses, and hairdressers. They found, for instance, that some members of the cleaning staff at hospitals, instead of doing the minimum the job required, took on new tasks—from chatting with patients to helping make nurses’ jobs go more smoothly. Adding these more absorbing challenges increased these cleaners’ satisfaction and boosted their own views of their skills. By reframing aspects of their duties, they helped make work more playful and more fully their own. “Even in
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Our beliefs about ourselves and the nature of our abilities—what she calls our “self-theories”—determine how we interpret our experiences and can set the boundaries on what we accomplish.
“Figure out for yourself what you want to be really good at, know that you’ll never really satisfy yourself that you’ve made it, and accept that that’s okay.” ROBERT B. REICH
Those who subscribe to an “incremental theory” take a different view. They believe that while intelligence may vary slightly from person to person, it is ultimately something that, with effort, we can increase.
The best predictor of success, the researchers found, was the prospective cadets’ ratings on a noncognitive, nonphysical trait known as “grit”—defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”10 The experience of these army officers-in-training confirms the second law of mastery: Mastery is a pain.
“Whereas the importance of working harder is easily apprehended, the importance of working longer without switching objectives may be less perceptible … in every field, grit may be as essential as talent to high accomplishment.”14
“Being a professional,” Julius Erving once said, “is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.”16
Mastery is impossible to realize fully. Tiger Woods, perhaps the greatest golfer of all time, has said flatly that he can—that he must—become better. He said it when he was an amateur. He’ll say it after his best outing or at the end of his finest season. He’s pursuing mastery. That’s well-known. What’s less well-known is that he understands that he’ll never get it. It will always hover beyond his grasp.
“There is no reason to believe any longer that only irrelevant ‘play’ can be enjoyed, while the serious business of life must be borne as a burdensome cross. Once we realize that the boundaries between work and play are artificial, we can take matters in hand and begin the difficult task of making life more livable.”19
Then—at some point in their lives—they don’t. What happens? “You start to get ashamed that what you’re doing is childish,” Csikszentmihalyi explained.
Autonomous people working toward mastery perform at very high levels. But those who do so in the service of some greater objective can achieve even more.
According to Lara Aknin and Elizabeth Dunn, sociologists at the University of British Columbia, and Michael Norton, a psychologist at the Harvard Business School, how people spend their money may be at least as important as how much money they earn. In particular, spending money on other people (buying flowers for your spouse rather than an MP3 player for yourself) or on a cause (donating to a religious institution rather than going for an expensive haircut) can actually increase our subjective well-being.11 In fact, Dunn and Norton propose turning their findings on what they call
“One cannot lead a life that is truly excellent without feeling that one belongs to something greater and more permanent than oneself.” MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI
What’s your sentence?
Reminding yourself that you don’t need to be a master by day 3 is the best way of ensuring you will be one by day 3,000. So before you go to sleep each night, ask yourself the small question: Was I better today than yesterday?
Maybe, as Douglas McGregor and others have suggested, we should give ourselves our own performance reviews.
how. Figure out your goals—mostly learning goals, but also a few performance goals—and then every month, call yourself to your office and give yourself an appraisal.
One key to mastery is what Florida State University psychology professor Anders Ericsson calls “deliberate practice”—a “lifelong period of … effort to improve performance in a specific domain.”
Remember that deliberate practice has one objective: to improve performance.
Repeat, repeat, repeat.
