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January 28 - May 17, 2023
The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table.
Meanwhile, instead of restraining negative behavior, rewards and punishments can often set it loose—and give rise to cheating, addiction, and dangerously myopic thinking.
The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road.
“Goals may cause systematic problems for organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behavior, increased risk taking, decreased cooperation, and decreased intrinsic motivation. Use care when applying goals in your organization.” If
As Suvorov explains, “Rewards are addictive in that once offered, a contingent reward makes an agent expect it whenever a similar task is faced, which in turn compels the principal to use rewards over and over again.” And before long, the existing reward may no longer suffice. It will quickly feel less like a bonus and more like the status quo—which then forces the principal to offer larger rewards to achieve the same effect.20
The starting point, of course, is to ensure that the baseline rewards—wages, salaries, benefits, and so on—are adequate and fair. Without a healthy baseline, motivation of any sort is difficult and often impossible.
As Edward Deci, Richard Ryan, and Richard Koestner explain, “Rewards do not undermine people’s intrinsic motivation for dull tasks because there is little or no intrinsic motivation to be undermined.”
they found that when the task called for “even rudimentary cognitive skill,” a larger reward “led to poorer performance.”
But “as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance.”
What’s more, for some people, much of what they do all day consists of these routine, not terribly captivating, tasks. In these situations, it’s best to try to unleash the positive side of the Sawyer Effect by attempting to turn work into play—to increase the task’s variety, to make it more like a game, or to use it to help master other skills.
Offer a rationale for why the task is necessary. A job that’s not inherently interesting can become more meaningful, and therefore more engaging, if it’s part of a larger purpose.
Acknowledge that the task is boring. This is an act of empathy, of course.
Allow people to complete the task their own way. Think autonomy, not control. State the outcome you need. But instead of specifying precisely the way to reach it—how each poster must be rolled and how each mailing label must be affixed—give them freedom over how they do the job.
The baseline rewards must be sufficient. That is, the team’s basic compensation must be adequate and fair—particularly compared with people doing similar work for similar organizations.
The essential requirement: Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete.
Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.
But one reason fair and adequate pay is so essential is that it takes people’s focus off money, which allows them to concentrate on the work itself.
Type I’s like being recognized for their accomplishments—because recognition is a form of feedback. But for them, unlike for Type X’s, recognition is not a goal in itself.
Ultimately, Type I behavior depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Type I behavior is self-directed. It is devoted to becoming better and better at something that matters. And it connects that quest for excellence to a larger purpose.
“Management isn’t about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices,” he told me. It’s about creating conditions for people to do their best work.
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.
Perhaps management isn’t responding to our supposedly natural state of passive inertia. Perhaps management is one of the forces that’s switching our default setting and producing that state.
Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T’s: their task, their time, their technique, and their team.
Autonomy over task is one of the essential aspects of the Motivation 3.0 approach to work.
“Nothing is more important to my success than controlling my schedule. I’m most creative from five to nine A.M. If I had a boss or co-workers, they would ruin my best hours one way or another.”
But the billable hour has little place in Motivation 3.0. For nonroutine tasks, including law, the link between how much time somebody spends and what that somebody produces is irregular and unpredictable.
50 hour week
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.
Nobody—not managers or employees themselves—tracks vacation days. The company explains its vacation non-policy like this: “We should focus on what people get done, not how many hours or days worked.”
Tony Hsieh, founder of the online shoe retailer Zappos.com (now part of Amazon.com), thought there was a better way to recruit, prepare, and challenge such employees. So new hires at Zappos go through a week of training. Then, at the end of those seven days, Hsieh makes them an offer. If they feel Zappos isn’t for them and want to leave, he’ll pay them $2,000—no hard feelings.
For example, at the organic grocery chain Whole Foods, the people who are nominally in charge of each department don’t do the hiring. That task falls to a department’s employees. After a job candidate has worked a thirty-day trial period on a team, the prospective teammates vote on whether to hire that person full-time.
But you know what? It’s ludicrous for you, too. Whether you’re fixing sinks, ringing up groceries, selling cars, or writing a lesson plan, you and I need autonomy just as deeply as a great painter.
It presumes that people want to be accountable—and that making sure they have control over their task, their time, their technique, and their team is the most effective pathway to that destination.
Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.
And instead of meeting with their charges for once-a-year performance reviews, managers sat down with employees one-on-one six times a year, often for as long as ninety minutes, to discuss their level of engagement and path toward mastery.
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
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So if you’re feeling the urge to control, here are three ways to begin letting go—for your own benefit and your team’s:
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.
