Last night I heard Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind and the new book Drive, speak about the most powerful wellsprings of human motivation: the intrinsic motivators autonomy, mastery and purpose. If you haven’t read Drive, here is Daniel Pink’s TEDTalk on human motivation. An entertaining 18-minute summary of what behavioral scientists know about human motivation, but ignored by business and management theorists for 40 years.
Pink struck a responsive chord with his Seattle audience by contrasting today’s dysfunctional 20th century institutions, with their outmoded management and reward-punishment mechanisms, with the 21st century model: what happens when you unleash the power of engaged and motivated employees. He summarized a number of experiments that proved the failure of “contingent motivators — if-then rewards and punishments” to drive the best performance from people who do anything other than rote, mechanical tasks.
In an economy fueled by “the marketplace of ideas” and intangible services, intrinsic motivators like autonomy, mastery and purpose are far more effective than external carrot-and-stick motivators. Employee engagement flourishes, says Pink, when people have more influence over what they do, when they do it, how they do it, and the team they work with. The lack of this autonomy was a contributing factor for the past “decade of truly spectacular underachievement,” asserts Pink.
To make his case for the superior power of intrinsic motivations, Daniel Pink cites the impact of the open source movement, as well as “20% time” policies on spurring new product innovation and new business models. 3M’s biggest hits (like PostIt notes) and 50% of Google’s new products all have emerged from the unstructured 20% time when employees are allowed and encouraged to work on things they feel passionately about (versus things they are required to do as a defined part of their job).
Putting It into Practice
Today while reading Jive Software’s manifesto, “The Social Business Imperative,” I find myself asking, what if enterprises truly embraced Pink’s ideas, and were empowered to do so? What if they invested in the processes and technologies to enable these changes? What if they thought, and acted, differently about how best to inspire and motivate their people? What if they discarded their outmoded theories of what motivates people?
Could this accelerate the reinvention of the world of work within large enterprises and institutions? Could we thereby unleash the power of the human imagination, and channel people’s passions and creative energies into more worthwhile products and services? Instead of believing the mantra “more is better,” might we shift toward “better is more?”
Yes, people who live their lives online are all in a frenzy about this thing they call “social.” But human motivation is even more fundamental. What if we linked the power of intrinsic motivators to right-brained work in the context of marketplace or intra-company conversations and learning? And enabled it with one of these so-called “social platforms?”
Jive’s social business manifesto asserts:
When your best people work on your best ideas in an open, transparent, collaborative way, they create a completely new kind of asset called Social Capital…. Social capital is what your company gains when its best people with the best ideas can take the right actions, actions that speed all sorts of time-to-business outcomes — from reducing costs to driving new product innovation and increasing sales and marketing effectiveness.
If you believe Daniel Pink’s assertions about the power of autonomy, mastery and purpose to fuel employee engagement and passion, what if your best people were enabled to work (at least part of their time) on their best ideas? What if they were really engaged, spending time on things they believe could truly make a difference, and had the opportunity to bounce their ideas off the best and brightest, or most experienced people in your customer and partner community? Or with fellow employees in other regions?
What might happen then?
