Drive: the surprising truth about motivation by Daniel H. Pink

Lean is all about people. In any Lean transformation project we need to motivate people, we need their support. I would like to share with you the summary of an insighful book about motivation.

Twitter summary 

Carrots and sticks are so last century. Drive says for 21^st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Cocktail party summary 

When it comes to motivation, there’s a gap between what science knows and what business does. This new approach has 3 essentials elements:

1. Autonomy: the desire to direct our own lives
2. Mastery: the urge to get better and better at something that matters
3. Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

Chapter-by-chapter summary 

Introduction: The puzzling puzzles of Harry Harlow and Edward Deci

Human beings have a biological drive that includes hunger, thirst, and sex. In the middle of the twentieth century, a few scientists began discovering that humans have a third drive what some call “intrinsic motivation”.

Part one: A new operating system

Chapter 1. The Rise and fall of Motivation 2.0

 The first human operating system (call it Motivation 1.0) was all about survival. Its successor, Motivation 2.0, was built around external rewards and punishments. That worked fine for routine twentieth century tasks. But in twenty-first century, Motivation 2.0 is proving incompatible with how we organize what we do, how we think about what we do, and how we do what we do. We need an upgrade.

Chapter2. Seven reasons carrots and sticks (often) don’t work

Traditional “if-then” rewards can give us less of what we want: They can extinguish intrinsic motivation, diminish performance, crush creativity, and crowd out good behavior. They can also give us more of what we don’t want: they can encourage unethical behavior, create addictions and foster short-term thinking.

Chapter 2a…and the special circumstances when they do

They can be effective for rule-based routine tasks. But for “now that” rewards (noncontingent rewards given after a task is complete) can sometimes be okay for more creative, right-brain work, especially if they provide useful information about performance.

Chapter 3. Type I and Type X

For professional success and personal fulfillment, we need to move ourselves and our colleagues from type X to Type I. The good news is that Type I’s are made, not born, and Type I behavior leads to stronger performance, greater health, and higher overall well-being.

Part two: The 3 elements

Chapter 4. Autonomy

Our “default setting” is to be autonomous and self-directed. Unfortunately, circumstances (including outdated notions of “management”) often conspire to change that default setting and turn us from Type I to Type X. People need autonomy:

• over task (what they do)
• time (when they do it)
• and technique (how they do it).

Companies that offer autonomy, sometimes in radical doses, are outperforming their competitors.

 Chapter 5. Mastery

While Motivation 2.0 required compliance, Motivation 3.0 demands engagement. Only engagement can produce mastery: becoming better at something that matters.

Mastery abides by 3 peculiar rules:

1. Mastery is a mindset: It requires the capacity to see your abilities not as finite, but as infinitely improvable
2. Mastery is a pain: It demands effort, grit, and deliberate practice.
3. Mastery is an asymptote: It’s impossible to fully realize, which makes it simultaneously frustrating and alluring.

Chapter 6. Purpose

Humans, by their nature, seek a cause greater and more enduring than themselves. This “purpose motive” is expressing itself in 3 ways:

1. In goals that use profit to reach purpose
2. In words that emphasize more than self-interest
3. And in policies that allow people to pursue on their own terms.

Type I for Organizations: Nine ways to improve your company, office, or Group

Try “20 percent time” with training wheels

You’ve read about the wonders of “20 percent time” where organizations encourage employees to spend one(fifth of their hours working on any project they want. And if you’ve ever used Gmail or read Google News, you’ve benefited from the results.

Go with a more modest version: 20 percent time…with training wheels. Start with, say, 10 percent time. That’s just one afternoon of a five-day workweek.

By creating this island of autonomy, you’ll help people act on their great ideas and convert their downtime into more productive time. And who knows? Someone in your operation just might invent the next Post-it note.

Encourage peer-to-peer “now that” rewards

Kimley-Horn and Associates, a civil engineering firm in Raleigh, North Carolina, has established a reward system that gets the Type I stamp of approval: At any point, without asking permission, anyone in the company can award a 50$ bonus to any of her colleagues. “It works because it’s real-time, and it’s not handed down, from any management”, the firm’s human resources director told Fast Company. “Any employee who does something exceptional receives recognition from their peers within minutes”. Because, they come from a colleague, not a boss, they carry a different (and perhaps deeper) meaning.

Conduct an autonomy audit

Ask everyone in your department or on your team to respond to these four questions with a numerical ranking (using a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 meaning “almost none” and 10 meaning “a huge amount”).

1. How much autonomy do you have over your tasks at work, you main responsibilities and what you do in a given day?
2. How much autonomy do you have over your time at work, for instance, when you arrive, when you leave, and how you allocate your hours each day?
3. How much autonomy do you have over your team at work that is, to what extent are you able to choose the people with whom you typically collaborate?
4. How much autonomy do you have over your technique at work, how you actually perform the main responsibilities of your job?

Make sure all responses are anonymous. Then tabulate the results. The figure will fall somewhere on a 40 point autonomy scale (with 0 being a North Korean prison and 40 being Woodstock). Compare that number to people’s perceptions. Perhaps the boss thought everyone had plenty of freedom but the audit showed an average rating of only 15. Also calculate separate results for task, time, team and technique. An overall autonomy rating of, say, 27 isn’t bad. However, if that average consists of 8 each for tasks, technique, and team, but only 3 for time, you’ve identified an autonomy weak spot in the organization.

It’s remarkable sometimes how little people running organizations know about the experiences of the people working around them. But it’s equally remarkable how often leaders are willing to do things differently if they see real data. That’s what an autonomy audit can do. And if you include a section in your audit for employees to jot down their own ideas about increasing autonomy, you might even find some great solutions.

Take 3 steps toward giving up control

1. Involve people in goal-setting
   Individuals are far more engaged when they’re pursuing goals they had a hand in creating. They could surprise you: People often have higher aims than ones you assign them.
2. Use noncontrolling language
   Next time you’re about to say “must” or “should”, try saying “think about” or “consider” instead.
3. Hold office hours
   Set aside 1 or 2 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.

Play “Whose purpose is it anyway?”

Hand everyone a blank 3-by-5 inch card. Then ask each person to write down his or her one-sentence answer to the following question: “What is our company’s (or organization’s) purpose?”

Collect the cards and read them aloud. What do they tell you? Are the answers similar, everyone aligned along a common purpose?

This simple inquiry can offer a glimpse into the soul of your enterprise. If people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, how can you expect them to be motivated to do it?

Use Reich’s pronoun test

Former US labor secretary Robert B. Reich has devised a smart, simple, (and free) diagnostic tool for measuring the health of an organization. When he talks to employees, he listens carefully for the pronouns they use. Do employees refer to their company as “they” or as “we”?

Design for intrinsic motivation

Internet guru and author Clay Shirky (www.shirky.com) says that the most successful websites and electronic forums have a certain Type I approach in their DNA. You can do the same with your online presence if you listen to Shirky and:

·         Create an environment that makes people feel good about participating.

·         Give users autonomy.

·         Keep the system as open as possible.

Promote Goldilocks for groups

• Begin with a diverse team. As Harvard’s Teresa Amabile advises, “Set up work groups so that people will stimulate each other and learn from each other, so that they’re not homogeneous in terms of their backgrounds and training. You want people who can really cross-fertilize each other’s ideas.”
• 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.
• Try a little task-shifting. If someone is bored with his current assignment, see if he can train someone else in the skills he’s already mastered. Then see if he can take on some aspect of a more experienced team member’s work.
• Animate with purpose, don’t motivate with rewards. Nothing bonds a team like a shared mission. The more that people share a common cause, the more your group will do deeply satisfying and outstanding work.

Turn your next off-site into a FedEx Day

Some off-sites reengage employees, recharge people’s batteries, and restart conversations on big issues. But if your organization’s off-sites are failing short, why not try replacing the next one with a FedEx Day? Set aside an entire day where employees can work on anything they choose, however they want, with whomever they’d like. Make sure they have the tools and ressources they need. And impose just one rule: People must deliver something (a new idea, a prototype of a product, a better internal process) the next day. Type I organizations know what their Type X counterparts rarely comprehend: Real challenges are far more invigorating than controlled leisure.

The Zen of compensation: paying people the Type I way

Effective organizations compensate people in amounts and in ways that allow individuals to mostly forget about compensation and instead focus on the work itself.

1. Ensure internal and external fairness

The most important aspect of any package is fairness. Internal fairness means paying people commensurate with their colleagues. External fairness means paying people in line with others doing similar work in similar organizations

Suppose you and Fred have adjoining cubicles. And suppose you’ve got pretty much equivalent responsibility and experience. If Fred makes scads more money than you, you’ll be miffed. Now suppose instead that you and Fred are both auditors in a Fortune 200 company. If you discover that similarly experienced auditors at other Fortune 200 firms are making double your salaries, both you and Fred will experience a largely irreversible motivation dip.

Getting the internal and external equity right isn’t itself a motivator. But it is a way to avoid putting the issue of money back on the table and making it a de-motivator.

2. Pay more than average

Consider borrowing a strategy first surfaced by a Nobel laureate. In the mid-1980s, George Akerlof, who later won the Nobel Prize in economics, and his wife, Janet Yellen, who’s also and economist, discovered that some companies seemed to be overpaying their workers. Instead of paying employees the wages that supply and demand would have predicted, they gave their workers a little more. It wasn’t because the companies were selfless and it wasn’t because they were stupid. It was because they were savvy. Paying great people a little more than the market demands, could attract better talent, reduce turnover, and boost productivity and morale.

Higher wages could actually reduce a company’s costs.

The pay-more-than-average approach can offer an elegant way to bypass “if-then” rewards, eliminate concerns about unfairness, and help take the issue of money off the table. Other economists have shown that providing an employee a high level of base pay does more to boost performance and organizational commitment than an attractive bonus structure.

3. If you use performance metrics, make them wide-ranging, relevant, and hard to game

The type I fitness plan: 4 Tips for getting (and staying) motivated to exercise

Set your own goals

Don’t accept some standardized, cookie-cutter exercise plan. People who seek to lose weight for extrinsic reasons (to slim down for a wedding or to look better at a class reunion) often reach their goals. And then they gain the weight back as soon as the target event ends.

Meanwhile, people who pursue more intrinsic goals (to get fir in order to feel good or to stay healthy for their family) make slower progress at first, but achieve significantly better results in the long term.

Ditch the treadmill

If trudging to the gym feels like a dreary obligation, find a form of fitness you enjoy that produces those intoxicating moments of flow. Gather some friends for an informal game of tennis or basketball, join an amateur league, go for walks at a local park, dance for a half-hour, or play with your kids. Use the Sawyer effect to your advantage and turn your work (out) into play.

Keep mastery in mind

Pick an activity in which you can improve over time.

Reward yourself the right way

If you’re really struggling, consider a quick experiment with Stick (www.stickk.com) , a website in which you publicly commit to a goal and must hand over money to a friend, a charity or an “anti-charity” if you fail to reach it.