Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

by Daniel H. Pink

Adam Grant, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, discovered in a study of call center representatives. Grant obtained permission to talk to people making calls for a university fundraising operation, and divided his participants into three groups. One group, each night before they made calls, read brief stories from previous employees about the personal benefits of working in this job—earning money, developing communication skills, and so on. The second group also read stories before hitting the phones, but theirs were from people who had received scholarships from the funds raised and who described how the money had improved their lives. The third group was the control group; they worked as they usually did, reading no stories before dialing for dollars. Participants were also told not to discuss what they’d read with the recipients of their calls. What happened? The people in the group reminded of the personal benefit of working in a call center were no more successful in raising money than those in the control group. But the people in the second group, who read about what their work accomplished, raised more than twice as much money, through twice as many pledges, as the other groups. A brief reminder of the purpose of their work doubled their performance.

Say you take people who are motivated to behave nicely, then give them a fairly weak set of ethical standards to meet. Now, instead of asking them to “do it because it’s the right thing to do,” you’ve essentially given them an alternate set of standards—do this so you can check off all these boxes. Imagine an organization, for example, that believes in affirmative action—one that wants to make the world a better place by creating a more diverse workforce. By reducing ethics to a checklist, suddenly affirmative action is just a bunch of requirements that the organization must meet to show that it isn’t discriminating. Now the organization isn’t focused on affirmatively pursuing diversity but rather on making sure that all the boxes are checked off to show that what it did is OK (and so it won’t get sued). Before, its workers had an intrinsic motivation to do the right thing, but now they have an extrinsic motivation to make sure that the company doesn’t get sued or fined.10

Two intriguing examples demonstrate what I mean. First, many psychologists and economists have found that the correlation between money and happiness is weak—that past a certain (and quite modest) level, a larger pile of cash doesn’t bring people a higher level of satisfaction. But a few social scientists have begun adding a bit more nuance to this observation. 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 a bauble 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 “pro-social” spending into corporate policy. According to The Boston Globe, they believe that “companies can improve their employees’ emotional well-being by shifting some of their budget for charitable giving so that individual employees are given sums to donate, leaving them happier even as the charities of their choice benefit.”12 In other words, handing individual employees control over how the organization gives back to the community might do more to improve their overall satisfaction than one more “if-then” financial incentive.

Failing to understand this conundrum—that satisfaction depends not merely on having goals, but on having the right goals—can lead sensible people down self-destructive paths. If people chase profit goals, reach those goals, and still don’t feel any better about their lives, one response is to increase the size and scope of the goals—to seek more money or greater outside validation. And that can “drive them down a road of further unhappiness thinking it’s the road to happiness,” Ryan said. “One of the reasons for anxiety and depression in the high attainers is that they’re not having good relationships. They’re busy making money and attending to themselves and that means that there’s less room in their lives for love and attention and caring and empathy and the things that truly count,” Ryan added.

You can use Csikszentmihalyi’s methodological innovation in your own quest for mastery by giving yourself a “flow test.” Set a reminder on your computer or mobile phone to go off at forty random times in a week. Each time your device beeps, write down what you’re doing, how you’re feeling, and whether you’re in “flow.” Record your observations, look at the patterns, and consider the following questions: • Which moments produced feelings of “flow”? Where were you? What were you working on? Who were you with? • Are certain times of day more flow-friendly than others? How could you restructure your day based on your findings? • How might you increase the number of optimal experiences and reduce the moments when you felt disengaged or distracted?

FIRST, ASK A BIG QUESTION . . .

So before you go to sleep each night, ask yourself the small question: Was I a little better today than yesterday?

JUST SAY NO—WITH A LIST Most of us have a to-do list. But legendary management guru Tom Peters also has what he calls “to don’t” list—an inventory of behaviors and practices that sap his energy, divert his focus, and ought be avoided. Follow his lead and each week craft your own agenda of avoidance. Staying motivated—directing your own life, making progress, and pursuing purpose—isn’t easy. So get rid of the unnecessary obligations, time-wasting distractions, and useless burdens that stand in your way. And the first step in bulldozing these obstacles is to enumerate them. As Peters puts it, “What you decide not to do is probably more important than what you decide to do.”

Type I for Organizations: Thirteen Ways to Improve Your Company, Office, or Group

CONDUCT AN AUTONOMY AUDIT

IRRIGATE THE FEEDBACK DESERT: DIY PERFORMANCE REVIEWS

TAKE THREE STEPS TOWARD GIVING UP CONTROL

Hold office hours. Sometimes you need to summon people into your office. But sometimes it’s wise to let them come to you. Take a cue from college professors and set aside one or two hours a week when your schedule is clear and any employee can come in and talk to you about anything that’s on her mind. Your colleagues might benefit and you might learn something.

Make your group a “no competition” zone. Pitting coworkers against one another in the hope that competition will spark them to perform better rarely works—and almost always undermines intrinsic motivation. If you’re going to use a c-word, go with “collaboration” or “cooperation.”

Imagine you’re a product manager and your pay depends largely on reaching a particular sales goal for the next quarter. If you’re smart, or if you’ve got a family to feed, you’re going to try mightily to hit that number. You probably won’t concern yourself much with the quarter after that or the health of the company or whether the firm is investing enough in research and development. And if you’re nervous, you might cut corners to reach your quarterly goal. Now imagine you’re a product manager and your pay is determined by these factors: your sales for the next quarter; your sales in the current year; the company’s revenue and profit in the next two years; levels of satisfaction among your customers; ideas for new products; and evaluations of your coworkers. If you’re smart, you’ll probably try to sell your product, serve your customers, help your teammates, and, well, do good work. When metrics are varied, they’re harder to finagle.

Okay,” you might be saying, “I understand the three compensation principles you just set out. But surely they don’t apply to salespeople. Aren’t they different from you and me?” My answer: Talk to Neil Davidson. In 1999, Davidson and Simon Galbraith founded Red Gate Software, a firm based in Cambridge, England, that makes development tools for programmers. Like almost all companies, Red Gate has a sales force. But unlike most companies, Red Gate has committed an act of managerial heresy: it has eliminated commissions for its salespeople. If salespeople are indeed different from you and me—if they are, as many claim, “coin-operated”—this is an act of commercial self-sabotage. Commissions are the fuel of sales. Without them, motivation stalls. Or does it? In the early days of the company, Davidson created a fairly straightforward commission scheme. But, of course, salespeople figured out a way to game it—by pushing sales into the time period most advantageous for them, by underselling one month to show a bigger gain the following month, and so on. This wasn’t because they were unethical; it was because they were rational humans responding logically to a particular incentive structure.

Motivation 2.0’s grip on education and parenting. Unfortunately, as with business, there’s a mismatch between what science knows and what schools do. Science knows (and you do, too, if you read Chapter 2) that if you promise a preschooler a fancy certificate for drawing a picture, that child will likely draw a picture for you—and then lose further interest in drawing. Yet in the face of this evidence—and as the world economy demands more nonroutine, creative, conceptual abilities—too many schools are moving in the wrong direction. They’re redoubling their emphasis on routines, right answers, and standardization. And they’re hauling out a wagon full of “if-then” rewards—pizza for reading books, iPods for showing up to class, cash for good test scores. We’re bribing students into compliance instead of challenging them into engagement. We can do better. And we should. If we want to raise Type I kids, at school and at home, we need to help them move toward autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Here are nine ways to start the journey.

GIVE YOUR KIDS AN ALLOWANCE AND SOME CHORES—BUT DON’T COMBINE THEM

The Tinkering School.

http://www.tinkeringschool.com

Drive: The Recap This book has covered a lot of ground—and you might not be able to instantly recall everything in it. So here you’ll find three different summaries of Drive. Think of it as your talking points, refresher course, or memory jogger. TWITTER SUMMARYg Carrots & sticks are so last century. Drive says for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery & purpose. COCKTAIL PARTY SUMMARYh When it comes to motivation, there’s a gap between what science knows and what business does. Our current business operating system— which is built around external, carrot-and-stick motivators—doesn’t work and often does harm. We need an upgrade. And the science shows the way. This new approach has three essential elements: (1) Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives; (2) Mastery—the urge to make progress and get better at something that matters; and (3) Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.