Daniel Pink is the author of “Drive,” a new book about motivation. He brought his core message to the Catalyst crowd.
Money is a motivator, he admits, but it is limited. (You can’t pay someone unfairly. But once you pay people enough, you don’t get additional satisfaction or motivation. The application: Pay them enough to take the issue of fairness off the table.) You need to provide three other motivations to bring out the best efforts in people.
1. Autonomy. “Management is a technology” (Gary Hamel) – organizing for productivity. Managemeht leads to compliance. But we don’t want compliance anymore. We want ENGAGEMENT. And management doesn’t lead to what we want them to do.
People perform better when they know they have some freedom of their time, technique, team, and task.
2. Mastery. Desire to get better at stuff. An inherent desire. Single most motivating thing is “making progress.” The only way to measure that is feedback. How am I doing? That’s not neediness, that’s seeking immediate feedback. DIY feedback (do it yourself). Effective teams do this themselves. What’s going well; what’s not.
3. Purpose. Profit motive is insufficient. When profit motive is unhitched from purpose motive, bad things happen. Marry the two, good things happen.
“Carrots and sticks are so last century. For 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery, and purpose.”
