I respect Dan Pink a ton. He writes original, provocative business books. He speaks well. He’s intellectually curious. And, full disclosure, he’s also been helpful to us with The Start-up of You and The Alliance. He did a Q&A with Reid, Chris, and me on the Amazon page for The Alliance.
I’ve been meaning to read his book Drive for awhile. You see it everywhere — airports, bookstores, office shelves. It met my high expectations. It’s an engaging tour of what drives people to be the way they are. My highlights from the book below. (I had one nice small surprise reading it. Pink was telling a story that seemed so familiar that I looked up the endnote and he cited my old AEI piece on side projects.)
Bottom Line: Drive is a good read for any manager thinking about how to get the most of his or her people.
[Organizations] still operate from assumptions about human potential and individual performance that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. They continue to pursue practices such as short-term incentive plans and pay-for-performance schemes in the face of mounting evidence that such measures usually don’t work and often do harm. Worse, these practices have infiltrated our schools, where we ply our future workforce with iPods, cash, and pizza coupons to “incentivize” them to learn. Something has gone wrong.
Try to encourage a kid to learn math by paying her for each workbook page she completes—and she’ll almost certainly become more diligent in the short term and lose interest in math in the long term.
[Paying people to donate blood] It tainted an altruistic act and “crowded out” the intrinsic desire to do something good. Doing good is what blood donation is all about. It provides what the American Red Cross brochures say is “a feeling that money can’t buy.” That’s why voluntary blood donations invariably increase during natural disasters and other calamities. But if governments were to pay people to help their neighbors during these crises, donations might decline.
Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy.
Contrast that approach with behavior sparked by intrinsic motivation. When the reward is the activity itself—deepening learning, delighting customers, doing one’s best—there are no shortcuts. The only route to the destination is the high road. In some sense, it’s impossible to act unethically because the person who’s disadvantaged isn’t a competitor but yourself.
[Fining parents who pick up kids late] The theory underlying the fine, said Gneezy and Rustichini, was straightforward: “When negative consequences are imposed on a behavior, they will produce a reduction of that particular response.” In other words, thwack the parents with a fine, and they’ll stop showing up late. But that’s not what happened. “After the introduction of the fine we observed a steady increase in the number of parents coming late,” the economists wrote. “The rate finally settled, at a level that was higher, and almost twice as large as the initial one.” And in language reminiscent of Harry Harlow’s head scratching, they write that the existing literature didn’t account for such a result. Indeed, the “possibility of an increase in the behavior being punished was not even considered.” Up pops another bug in Motivation 2.0. One reason most parents showed up on time is that they had a relationship with the teachers—who, after all, were caring for their precious sons and daughters—and wanted to treat them fairly. Parents had an intrinsic desire to be scrupulous about punctuality. But the threat of a fine—like the promise of the kronor in the blood experiment—edged aside that third drive.
In other words, where “if-then” rewards are a mistake, shift to “now that” rewards—as in “Now that you’ve finished the poster and it turned out so well, I’d like to celebrate by taking you out to lunch.” As Deci and his colleagues explain, “If tangible rewards are given unexpectedly to people after they have finished a task, the rewards are less likely to be experienced as the reason for doing the task and are thus less likely to be detrimental to intrinsic motivation.”
But take a step back and think again. Management didn’t emanate from nature. It wasn’t handed to us from God. It’s something that somebody invented. It is, as the strategy guru Gary Hamel has observed, a technology—and an 1850s technology at that. Now look around your office or home. How many nineteenth-century technologies are you still using? Sure, some companies have oiled management’s gears, and others have sanded off its rough edges. But at its core this technology hasn’t changed much in more than a hundred years. Its paramount goal remains compliance, its central ethic remains control, and its chief tools remain extrinsic motivators.
Autonomy, as they see it, 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. And while the idea of independence has national and political reverberations, autonomy appears to be a human concept rather than a western one.
But the billable hour has little place in Motivation 3.0. For nonroutine tasks, including law, the link between how much time somebody spends and what that somebody produces is irregular and unpredictable.
The opposite of autonomy is control. And since they sit at different poles of the behavioral compass, they point us toward different destinations. Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.
According to the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., in some countries as little as 2 to 3 percent of the workforce is highly engaged in their work.
Goldilocks tasks offer us the powerful experience of inhabiting the zone, of living on the knife’s edge between order and disorder, of—as painter Fritz Scholder once described it—“walking the tightrope between accident and discipline.”
So the shrewdest enterprises afford employees the freedom to sculpt their jobs in ways that bring a little bit of flow to otherwise mundane duties. Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton, two business school professors, have studied this phenomenon among hospital cleaners, nurses, and hairdressers. They found, for instance, that some members of the cleaning staff at hospitals, instead of doing the minimum the job required, took on new tasks—from chatting with patients to helping make nurses’ jobs go more smoothly. Adding these more absorbing challenges increased these cleaners’ satisfaction and boosted their own views of their skills. By reframing aspects of their duties, they helped make work more playful and more fully their own.
“Purpose provides activation energy for living,” psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi told me in an interview. “I think that evolution has had a hand in selecting people who had a sense of doing something beyond themselves.”
That’s the thinking behind the simple and effective way Robert B. Reich, former U.S. labor secretary, gauges the health of an organization. He calls it the “pronoun test.” When he visits a workplace, he’ll ask the people employed there some questions about the company. He listens to the substance of their response, of course. But most of all, he listens for the pronouns they use. Do the workers refer to the company as “they”? Or do they describe it in terms of “we”? “They” companies and “we” companies, he says, are very different places.
According to The Boston Globe, they believe that “companies can improve their employees’ emotional well-being by shifting some of their budget for charitable giving so that individual employees are given sums to donate, leaving them happier even as the charities of their choice benefit.” In other words, handing individual employees control over how the organization gives back to the community might do more to improve their overall satisfaction than one more “if-then” financial incentive.
