Motivation is the golden key to behavioural change. If you work with motivated people you can feel the positive energy. They achieve more, are a joy for managers as they create very few issues, and as long as they stay motivated they are less likely to leave.
This blog posts looks at three key elements of motivation:
- What motivates us?
- How to measure your own level of motivation
We will touch up how you can use that knowledge to motivate your teams, then pick up on that next week with some great ways to promote self-esteem and personal growth and how to create a motivating environment
What Motivates Us
As you might imagine this is like military intelligence, there is a complex casserole of possibilities. Here are a few;
Toward versus away
This is a simple division of what drives us. If you are towards it suggests you are motivated by success, you look forward to potential reward and promotion.
If away then the same carrot that excites the ‘towards’ person may actually demotivate you because it raises the prospect of failure. Not everyone wants to be on the board. There are many who are happy with a safe simple job they know how to do easily.
Equity and fairness.
How would you feel if you discovered that one of your peers who does the same job, same level, same responsibility is actually earning more than you? Even a tiny difference would matter. We are very keen for our situation to be equitable.
Purpose, autonomy and mastery.
Daniel Pink reviewed studies on motivation which revealed that increasing bonuses did not necessarily lead to improved performance. In fact, in some cases it detracted and the productivity reduced. The finding was that the classic carrot method of motivation would only work if the task was very rudimentary and involved little or no complexity or intellectual application. Pink suggested there were three elements:
Purpose – We need to know why and what we are doing this for on both an internal, personal level and external organizational level.
Autonomy – Nobody wants micromanagement. Having a degree of control over how and even what you do is a motivator.
Mastery – Or as Pink put it getting good at doing stuff. Personal development creates an energy of its own.
Pink’s findings resonate with our next opinion leader on this subject, Hertzberg. This suggests that there are a number of hygiene factors that are necessary though not sufficient to motivate. These are:
- Money
- Company
- Culture
- Policies
- Ways of working
- Relationships
- Conditions of work
- Management
- Job security
Money not a motivator? Think of it like this, if you went to a restaurant and the waiter was polite and welcoming, the cutlery was clean and the menu clear and varied. This on its own would not be enough to recommend it to your friends. These are hygiene factors, they have to be there or it’s not a contender. Pink, put it “pay people enough to take money off the table as an issue”. So these factors are not motivators however, without them you will not motivate.
I hope this post was useful. In the next post we’ll look at the structure of how to give feedback.
David Solomon
Managing Director, Sun and Moon Training
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