The Right Way to Motivate Your Team: Understanding the Power of Intrinsic Rewards
/Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers…and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.1
Many management systems overlook the key component of any successful organization – the people. Systems and procedures are designed to meet various financial objectives, but rarely do they prioritize the human factor. But if you design systems to maximize the intrinsic motivations and fulfillment of your team, you’ll have a better chance of meeting your objectives than if you just focus on the objectives themselves.
The organizational approach to motivation, rewards, and incentives is still stuck in the past. There is still the belief that if you want to motivate your people, you just need to increase the rewards or increase the punishment.
This was the standard approach in the industrial age, where maximizing raw labor and physical production was critical. Today is different. Knowledge work isn’t like working on a factory line. What motivates people today is not the same as it was 100 years ago. But many leaders treat their people as if they’re still on the factory floor.
Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization, explains why most management practices embed mediocrity in organizations:
I believe that, the prevailing system of management is, at its core, dedicated to mediocrity. It forces people to work harder and harder to compensate for failing to tap the spirit and collective intelligence that characterizes working together at their best.2
How should leaders adjust their approach to get the most out of employees? The first step is understanding the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic rewards.
Frederick Herzberg was a psychologist and one of the foremost experts on business management and employee relations.3 Herzberg was an early pioneer in understanding what really motivated workers. Herzberg illustrated the critical difference between extrinsic factors (hygiene) and intrinsic factors (motivators).
Many leaders overestimate the ability of extrinsic rewards (more compensation, fancier titles, more recognition, bigger offices, prime parking spots) to drive behavior. These are external factors are essential, but only to a degree. These are “hygiene factors,” as noted by Herzberg. Yes, hygiene factors are important. Yes, they are absolutely necessary. But no, they are not sufficient. If you really want to let your people thrive, deeper needs must be met.
Leaders prioritize hygiene factors because it’s been the standard for a long time. It’s easy to increase someone’s compensation, give them a new title, or upgrade their office. Many leaders are convinced that because something of value has clearly been given, the employee should be sufficiently motivated.
But most people want more than just stuff. They want purpose and fulfillment in what they do. And that probably scares most managers, because it takes a lot more effort and time to figure out how to support people’s intrinsic motivations: purpose, meaning, and fulfillment.
People are the most valuable assets of organizations, but many work environments destroy any chance of enabling their team.
If you are a leader and want to survive in an increasingly competitive world, you can’t manage with early 20th century practices. That means less rules and regulations and more empowerment and flexibility.
Many leaders would be surprised how few rules and punishments are necessary when you give people “ownership” of their job. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy – if you treat people as untrustworthy, they will gradually meet those expectations, reinforcing the need for rules and strict supervision. But if you give people autonomy and real responsibility, you’ll enable self-sufficiency and self-motivation, which requires less oversight and micro-management.
Why External Motivation is Not the Solution
An extreme form of external motivation was popularized by Frederick Taylor, whose “scientific management” strategy in the early 1900’s heavily emphasized external rewards:
Taylorism is the ultimate in external motivation. People come to work to make money — end of story. You motivate workers by giving them clear standards, teaching them the most efficient way to reach the standard, and then giving them bonuses when they exceed the standard. The standards are for quantity, not quality.5
Peter Diamandis, best-selling author, entrepreneur, and founder of Singularity University, further describes why extrinsic rewards were so dominant in the past:
To understand this boost requires dipping back into the science of motivation. For most of the last century, that science focused on extrinsic rewards—that is, external motivators, “if-then” conditions of the “do this to get that” variety. With extrinsic rewards, we incentivize the behavior we want more of and punish the behavior we dislike. In business, for example, when we want to drive performance, we offer classic extrinsic rewards: bonuses (money) and promotions (money and prestige).6
Many managers prefer extrinsic rewards, primarily because it’s the way it’s always been done. And it seems to make logical sense – people value money and status, so why not give them more?
Diamandis elaborates on how extrinsic motivators can end up hurting productivity and performance:
Unfortunately, an ever-growing pile of research shows that extrinsic rewards do not work like most suppose. Take money. When it comes to increasing motivation, cash is king only under very specific conditions. For very basic tasks that don’t require any cognitive skill, money can effectively influence behavior. If I’m nailing together boards for five dollars an hour, offering me ten will increase the rate at which I nail. But once tasks become slightly more complex—such as shaping those nailed boards into a house—once they require even the slightest bit of conceptual ability, money actually has the exact opposite effect: It lowers motivation, hinders creativity, and decreases performance.7
Daniel Pink, multiple NY Times best-selling author on motivation and worker engagement, reiterates these points in his book Drive:
The science shows that . . . typical twentieth-century carrot-and-stick motivators—things we consider somehow a “natural” part of human enterprise—can sometimes work. But they’re effective in only a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. The science shows that “if-then” rewards . . . are not only ineffective in many situations, but can also crush the high-level, creative, conceptual abilities that are central to current and future economic and social progress. The science shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive (our survival needs) or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to fill our life with purpose.8
Why Intrinsic Motivation Works
So if external motivators have limited effectiveness, what are the internal motivators that actually drive engagement?
Daniel Pink has been a proponent of the big three: Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.
Pink uses fifty years of research in behavioral science to argue that external rewards like money are not the best motivator of high performance; instead, the best motivators are what he calls “intrinsic motivators”—motivation we find within ourselves. The three elements of true motivation are:
• Autonomy: The urge to direct our own lives
• Mastery: The desire to get better and better at something that matters
• Purpose: The yearning to do what we do in service of something larger than ourselves9
Here’s how Peter Diamandis describe these factors:
• Autonomy: the desire to steer our own ship.
• Mastery: the desire to steer it well.
• Purpose: the need for the journey to mean something.10
Autonomy
Autonomy, also sometimes referred to as authenticity, is about acting in harmony with your innermost being. It means you’re connecting what you do with who you are. Your work should reflect your core values and beliefs; you should express some part of your innermost self in your activity.11
Autonomy is having the authority and autonomy to solve problems and find ideas under your own direction, rather than being imposed by an organization or manager. It doesn’t mean operating with no supervision or rules. It does mean however, that you have the flexibility to find different solutions to get your job done. Leaders set the organizational mission, but the team has the authority to figure out the details to accomplish it.
Autonomy 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.12
To build autonomy, workers and bosses need to work together. It’s not something that is just given and then everything is set. Kelly Palmer and David Blake, author of The Expertise Economy, describe the relationship that needs to exist if autonomy is successful:
Autonomy and flexibility only work if managers frequently connect with their employees to discuss tasks, set goals, set expectations, and provide feedback. If a remote-working situation isn’t working out, surely the manager should take accountability for the employee’s failure to deliver.13
Palmer and Blake describe how even giving employees a choice on when to work from home vs. the office enables autonomy:
For example…the team agrees to come into the physical office Tuesdays and Thursdays, but doing so is not mandatory. Why is it not mandatory? Because giving people an option provides them with a sense of autonomy, a sense of choice. It drives motivation, but also, interestingly, it instills a sense of accountability to their coworkers.14
Mastery/Competency
Competency is about having a sense of control over the outcome of your efforts and the ability to make progress over time. If you don’t believe that your efforts will be rewarded with improvement, why put forth any effort to begin with? If you don’t feel like you’re progressing in an activity — be it better performance, more enjoyment, or some other measure of “success” — then why continue?15
People have an intrinsic desire to get better at what they do. It’s not just at high-level, strategic roles. Even the most junior person will derive satisfaction from becoming very good at what they do. The best way to envision the concept of mastery is to approach work as “craftsmanship.” Craftsmanship typically applies to physical trades – woodworking, blacksmithing, etc. But the concept applies equally to knowledge work. It can apply to any job.
The craftsmen they cite don’t have rarified jobs. Throughout most of human history, to be a blacksmith or a wheelwright wasn’t glamorous. But this doesn’t matter, as the specifics of the work are irrelevant. The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not the outcomes of their work. Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but it’s shaping can be. The same applies to knowledge work. You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.16
It’s critical to enable your workers to approach their roles as craftsmen, not automatons going through the motions.
The truth, of course, is that creativity is a by - product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice. It seems to be built up through submission (think a musician practicing scales, or Einstein learning tensor algebra). Identifying creativity with freedom harmonizes quite well with the culture of the new capitalism, in which the imperative of flexibility precludes dwelling in any task long enough to develop real competence.17
How many of your team members are truly engaged in what they do? It’s pretty easy to tell – just look at someone’s attitude and mannerisms. It’s a hard thing to fake.
And I think it’s true that we are happiest when we are engaged. When we are at one with what we’re doing, not thinking about past or future but wholly present. I’m always seeking that feeling of losing myself in time. The irony is that when I’m in it, I don’t realize it. It’s only when it’s over and the spell is broken that I recognize where I had been. Being so focused that I look up and all of a sudden it’s four o’clock. That’s my perfect day.18
Purpose
People want to know that their work matters. It may not be saving lives or creating life-changing technology, but all work serves some purpose. Most often, workers don’t have any idea who ultimately benefits from their effort.
People need to believe in two purposes. One, the purpose of the organization they work for. Two, the purpose of the actual work they do. Both are necessary to be fulfilled. If your organization has a worthy purpose, but the daily work doesn’t satisfy a personal sense of purpose, workers will still feel underwhelmed and frustrated.
This insight also suggests the best way to find motivation at work is to find our own higher purpose. If we know what we value most and what is most meaningful to us, then we know what we can work on that serves our higher purpose. When that happens, our work can become a source of sustainable happiness for us. We can then become very good at our work because we are happy doing it, which in turn allows us to enjoy the happiness of flow with increasing frequency.21
Purpose is connected to relatedness. We want to know we are part of something bigger, trying to make a small, but lasting change in the world.
Relatedness: The final component of self-determination theory is one that binds us to others: the need to feel connected to and/or like you are a part of something larger. Humans are social animals. Our ability to work together in highly integrated groups and to display empathy toward one another helped our species thrive and grow over multiple millennia.22
What’s the ultimate benefit of driving autonomy, mastery, and purpose among your team? It’s all about turning followers into leaders. Especially those not in a true leadership role. They need to behave like leaders, even if it’s only within their own role.
The military is one example of an organization that traditionally tries to control people through orders. But some military leaders, including David Marquet of the U.S. Navy, describe the drawbacks of traditional military leadership methods:
In other words, leadership in the Navy, and in most organizations, is about controlling people. It divides the world into two groups of people: leaders and followers. Most of what we study, learn, and practice in terms of leadership today follows this leader-follower structure...it is exactly because the leader-follower way of doing business has been so successful that it is both so appealing and so hard to give up.
But this model developed during a period when mankind’s primary work was physical. Consequently, it’s optimized for extracting physical work from humans.
In our modern world, the most important work we do is cognitive; so, it’s not surprising that a structure developed for physical work isn’t optimal for intellectual work.23
Leading with intrinsic rewards creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Greater autonomy, mastery, and purpose enable people to do their jobs better, find creative solutions, and work with a sense of ownership. This builds greater trust with leaders and frees up the leader to do other tasks besides micromanaging and supervising daily activity.
People who are treated as followers have the expectations of followers and act like followers. As followers, they have limited decision-making authority and little incentive to give the utmost of their intellect, energy, and passion.24
Kelly Palmer and David Blake reiterate the importance of abandoning the control environment:
Why foster an environment of control at all? How about, instead, transforming these controlling cultures into ones that empower creative, innovative, smart people who are given the freedom and autonomy to work in a way that makes them most productive and allows them to learn and develop along the way?25
Shifting the focus from extrinsic to intrinsic rewards won’t happen overnight. But even a small shift will be noticed by your team.
Sources:
1. Peter Senge. The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
2. Peter Senge. The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Herzberg
4. Jeffrey Liker. The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles From the World's Greatest Manufacturer
5. Jeffrey Liker. The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles From the World's Greatest Manufacturer
6. Peter Diamandis. Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
7. Peter Diamandis. Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
8. Peter Diamandis. Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
9. Chade-Meng Tan. Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)
10. Peter Diamandis. Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
11. Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. The Passion Paradox: A Guide to Going All In, Finding Success, and Discovering the Benefits of an Unbalanced Life
12. Kelly Palmer and David Blake. The Expertise Economy: How the Smartest Companies Use Learning to Engage, Compete, and Succeed
13. Kelly Palmer and David Blake. The Expertise Economy: How the Smartest Companies Use Learning to Engage, Compete, and Succeed
14. Kelly Palmer and David Blake. The Expertise Economy: How the Smartest Companies Use Learning to Engage, Compete, and Succeed
15. Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. The Passion Paradox: A Guide to Going All In, Finding Success, and Discovering the Benefits of an Unbalanced Life
16. Cal Newport. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
17. Matthew Crawford. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
18. Eric Gorges and Jon Sternfeld. A Craftsman’s Legacy: Why Working with Our Hands Gives Us Meaning.
19. Matthew Crawford. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
20. Peter Senge. The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
21. Chade-Meng Tan. Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)
22. Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness. The Passion Paradox: A Guide to Going All In, Finding Success, and Discovering the Benefits of an Unbalanced Life
23. L. David Marquet and Stephen R. Covey. Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders
24. L. David Marquet and Stephen R. Covey. Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders
25. Kelly Palmer and David Blake. The Expertise Economy: How the Smartest Companies Use Learning to Engage, Compete, and Succeed