You work so hard, for some it is easier no doubt, to become knowledgeable. You learn to speak, to emulate you parents beliefs - religious, political, cultural, to understand relativity, quadratic equation, the system of government and how it was designed to work and then how it actually works. You become successful and you are sure the success is deserved and repeatable. In fact if you are not sure at first, you will be when the University asks you to speak to a batch of new students or when the industry publication has your picture on the cover. You so desperately cling to the idea of order and predictability that when in your heart you can attribute much of your success to randomness. It is not that your not smart or that you did not work hard to be successful but you know, had you not sat next to that person on the first day of school you would likely never been business partners, Chief of Staff at the White House, hired for that job only to become CEO. How often is it said that those you meet the first day of school become your closest friend. Random, luck, fate, you call it. (more to follow)
All leaders bring unique characteristics and histories with them on the rise to the top. Like you and me, they're human. Sometimes, though they want to forget or hide parts of their past, of themselves--the parts they find embarrassing or unbefitting their current position. The more they try to hide or forget, the more potential there is for damage--to themselves and, perhaps, others. The more they bottle up, the farther the cork flies and liquid spills.
Rather than having an "I am who I am, and I'm never going to change!" explosion, I let the crazy out just a little bit at a time. It honors the shadow side of myself, yet prevents my aberrant behaviors from showing up at the wrong times.
We're all capable of change and growth. Still, by keeping some of that craziness with you throughout the change, the beautifully unique you will remain.
Is Your Leadership Encouraging Screen or Face Time?
Is your obsession with order driving your company to input more data and generate more reports? Is it distracting your employees from delighting your customer?
Yesterday, a hundred megabyte drive was sufficient storage; today it's in the terabytes. The drastic reduction of costs associated with data storage is allowing companies to save, compile, and sort to discover incremental performance of their people. This incessant need to measure, control, and create predictability within the business may be having a counter-intuitive effect on the company and its staff's abilities to serve the customer, however.
In order to successfully use all this data, it needs to be converted into actionable information. Which means someone is entering the data, another is determining the relevancy, and your managers are reading it to take actions. What used to be a single document is now a dashboard full of meters, indicators, and controls. And it's eating up lots of your organization's energy and time. While you're all assessing the data piles, who is serving the customer?
It might be helpful to think of this as Screen Time (data collection, information assessment, and dash board controls) verses Face Time (human-to-human interactions). What is your Screen Time to Face Time ratio? What is it for your front-line employees and their managers? If you're like many companies, your supervisors are becoming less capable of managing people (Face Time) and more capable of managing information (Screen Time). Here's the problem: As you try to move all this information to action, your people can no longer effectively engage customers. They have stopped building their people strengths by spending too much time on Screen Time.
Dan Pink - Interview on Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Gary B. Cohen: Dan, thank you for your willingness to share your thoughts with the readers of the Just Ask Leadership Blog. Your new book, Drive: The Surpising Truth About What Motivates Us, is a terrific read. I will be doing a full review of the book later this month for our next CO2 Leadership Newsletter. In your book, you introduce the concepts of Motivation 2.0 and Motivation 3.0. How would you describe the difference between them?
Dan Pink: Motivation 2.0 is built around our reward-and-punishment drive. It presumes the way that people perform at the highest level is by offering them carrots for the behavior you seek and sticks for the behavior you want to deter. That approach -- that motivational operating system, if you will -- can be effective for certain kinds of tasks. But for complex, creative, and conceptual tasks, it's usually a bad idea. The better approach there is Motivation 3.0, which is built around another of our drives -- our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
Gary B. Cohen: What do autonomy, mastery, and purpose have to do with motivation?
Dan Pink: These three elements are at the heart of this newer, more effective approach to motivation. If we really want high performance -- especially on complex, creative, and conceptual work -- people have to have freedom to do work their own way. They must be able to make progress, to get better at something that matters. And they're more likely to really excel if what they do is in the service of something larger than themselves.
Gary B. Cohen:My book, Just Ask Leadership, examines how leaders can increase alignment, engagement, and accountability by asking more and better questions. How might this approach align with Motivation 3.0?
Dan Pink: It aligns extremely well. One of the simplest pieces of leadership and management advice I give is this: "Listen more, talk less." Asking questions is a way to hone your listening and hear other voices rather than just your own.
Gary B. Cohen: It is not unusual for the science of a subject, in this case motivation, to appear far in advance of implementation. Is there anything particular to our culture that will affect this lag time, specifically as it relates to how we practice motivating others?
Dan Pink: Interesting question. I'm not sure, actually. But cycle times for everything are accelerating. So there's a chance, I guess, that once the science is exposed and revealed a little more clearly, organizations may move somewhat more quickly than in the past.
Gary B. Cohen: What is the danger for those of us who continue to only use the carrot-and-stick approach or move to only intrinsic motivation?
Dan Pink: The danger of using only carrots and sticks is that they're ineffective for many types of work. What's more, they can bring a cascade of other negative consequences -- locking people in to short-term thinking, tamping down creativity, and even enticing some people to cheat. The danger of using only intrinsic motivators is overlooking that money is a motivator. If you don't pay people enough -- if they're not being compensated adequately or if they can't support their family -- you're not going to get any motivation at all. The idea that intrinsic motivators can somehow substitute for fair pay is a colossal mistake.
Gary B. Cohen: What five tips do you have for organizations wanting to switch to Motivation 3.0?
Understand the limits of carrots and sticks -- and use them only where they're effective.
Do whatever you can to provide employees with more autonomy over their time, their team, their task and their technique.
Encourage people to supplement traditional performance reviews by doing their own performance reviews -- setting out their monthly goals, for instance, and self-evaluating at the end.
Take a day when people can work on any idea they want -- then show the results to the rest of the company the following day. These one-day sessions of intense autonomy -- known as FedEx Days, because people have to deliver something overnight -- have proven incredibly productive.
Infuse the workplace with a purpose larger than simply making the numbers or increasing earnings per share by two cents this quarter. Supplement the profit motive with the purpose motive.
If you want a well writen book that brings a fresh perspective on what drives you and your teams based on our current understanding of motivation, pick up Dan Pink's Book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.
