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Highlights
- Discover some truths around what motivates you and learn how to capitalise on it
- An exercise to help you find what drives you
- Tips for helping team members and colleagues find fulfillment in their role
- A 15 minute read
To excel in your career there is no denying that you must be able to motivate yourself to achieve. What does it take to get you passionate about a task, about a job or just about a subject? Have you examined that about yourself, or are you just going to work to pay your bills? Are you tired of the 8 to 5? Is that any way to live?
I have recently been through a period of self-examination on this exact subject, and I’d like to share my thoughts with you. In the latter half of my career, I have spent a huge amount of time and effort looking at how to be a motivational leader, learning how to inspire greatness in others, and how to help other people achieve. I have read a lot of books on the subject and tried hard to apply those learnings to my career.
Until recently though, I had never looked at myself. I had never examined why I get out of bed in the morning or importantly, why some mornings I didn’t want to. Until now.
How it has always been
Historically, humans have been motivated to complete tasks so that they may survive. Provide food and water for themselves and their families and reproduce. These basic drives to deliver on tasks have not changed for centuries.
Then later, the rewards and punishments system of motivation became the mainstay of our society, especially when the industrial revolution happened. If you do this, then you’ll receive that. Either rewards or punishments, wages, beatings or whatever was the order of the day.
Through much of my career I found motivation in the rewards and punishments theory of motivation. I had a mortgage and aspired to be comfortable and healthy. Having a baby boomer father as my role model, I always understood that if you keep your head down, and do as your told, for at least 8 hours a day, you’d have enough to get by. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t – simple. But, I’m tired of the 8 to 5, are you?
There must be more than that though, mustn’t there?
Recently many people are realising that there is a better way. There have been people whose careers, and occupations seem to excite and enthral them to stay late and start early. There have been people who seem to, dare I say it… enjoy their work!?!?
No one really knows who said it, but you will have heard the old maxim, ‘if you find something you love doing, you’ll never work a day in your life..’ – well, I’m here to tell you that it is true, and more importantly, it’s possible for you to achieve. But how?
In 1949 a behavioural scientist called Harry F. Harlow conducted simple puzzle experiments with primates, and realised that, as with primates, we don’t just do things to satisfy our survival drives. He identified something that we can all feel inside ourselves and puts a name to it – our third drive. The drive we all have inside us, our intrinsic motivation, that which comes from within us, rather than from extrinsic motivators, like the carrot and stick approach. The joy of completing a task for the sheer enjoyment of doing the task itself, not for any reward or punishment. Sadly though, no one took any notice, no one realised just how important this discovery was.
Do we really just do things to get a reward?
Denying that people are driven by external motivators is pointless. The if you do this – then you get that approach seems to be hardwired into us. Only it’s not. In 1977 psychologists Richard Ryan, and Edward Deci, developed the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) of motivation, which overthrew the belief that the best way to get humans to perform tasks is to reinforce their behaviour with rewards.
Human behavioural scientists have shown that children start out as being driven entirely by the search for meaning and intrinsic motivators. Simply wanting to discover why something is the way it is, or how something works, to complete a task just for the pleasure of completing it are our base settings.
It is our parents, our teachers and our employers who, through following traditional methods of teaching and putting into practice what they themselves were taught, instil the extrinsic motivation model into us.
Extrinsic motivators harm our intrinsic drive
Daniel H Pink explains in his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us that, the carrot and stick approach to motivating ourselves and others destroys the intrinsic drive we all have within us.
Once you add a financial incentive to a task, you destroy the innate motivation we all have to do something for the fun of doing it in the first place. It’s for this reason that if we want to stop exchanging our lives for money, and instead be engaged with what we spend our time doing, making a living along the way, we need to abandon the old motivation model and embrace intrinsic motivators…
Autonomy for the people
A key to finding that innate drive within us is the concept of autonomy. This is a lesson I applied to how I encouraged motivation in others but failed to recognise I needed it in my own life. Looking at my career I realise that the times when I really excelled was when I had the most autonomy over my work life.
Traditional management theory says when a task needs to be completed, the boss works out what needs doing, when the task needs to be done (8:00 – 5:00, 5 days a week), who needs to work on it and how it needs to be done.
You or I arrive at work, at the time we are told to and do as we are told, no matter how ludicrous the prescribed method is and are told to work with people chosen for us, no matter how useless. When we arrived and what breaks we take are monitored and how much ‘chat’ we engaged in are all monitored… sound familiar?
In their 1985 book, Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behaviour, Ryan and Deci concluded autonomy is how you tap into that intrinsic motivation. Giving people autonomy over the task (what is done), time (when its done), team (who they do it with) and technique (how they do it) has proven to be a phenomenal discovery. Through giving control, companies have left those still employing the old system in the dust.
How can you use this information? – autonomy
So, ask yourself, during those times that you have felt driven to achieve, without the promise of a reward, which elements of autonomy were present? What can you change about your work which will maximise the potential for autonomy, hint… it doesn’t always have to mean being self-employed. If you’re a manager, how can you give your colleagues more autonomy?
An example of something that I personally have had great results with when leading other people is similar to Google’s 20%-time initiative. I came to be a team leader of a small team who were really fed up and unhappy. I knew I had to try some pretty radical things with these guys to get some results, for them and for me. I had recently read Pink’s book (Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us) and learned about how people at Google were able to work on anything they liked, one day a week, as long as they presented a result at the end of it. (Pink also cites these as FedEx days… “you must deliver”).
I asked each team member to come up with a mini project which they felt passionate about and present the idea at our next 1:1. The ideas that came back, blew my mind! They were great. They were then given autonomy to run their mini projects for one day a week over the next 6 months in any way they saw fit. One team member completely changed the way school canteens were run in over a hundred government run schools, using just one additional team member for support! A fantastic result!
But, just as importantly, that team member sent me a huge Christmas card that year explaining how she had been depressed and hated her job until I had taken over leading the team. She went on to completely change her career, develop a new passion for life and she attributes all that to being given the opportunity to achieve in her own way.
Flow rider
You know when you are doing something you really enjoy, time flies by doesn’t it? Have you ever asked yourself why?
You don’t clock watch. You don’t notice that you are uncomfortable. You don’t think about anything else at all… just exactly what you are doing at that moment, right?
What you are experiencing has been studied in some detail and was described in depth by Hungarian Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
In his famous book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, he discusses that people feel most content with an activity when they are in a state of ‘flow’. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. It is a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. The flow state is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation – doing something for the sheer joy of doing it and forgetting everything else while you are doing it.
Csikszentmihalyi identifies the key ingredients necessary to achieve that state of ‘flow’ so that total immersion in a task follows and extrinsic motivators become entirely irrelevant. The first is matching the task to our abilities perfectly.
Not too hard and not too easy…
When I have introduced ‘stretch’ targets to teams in the past I often encountered resistance. Sometimes people think that as a leader, I am just trying to squeeze another 10% out of people, but that misses the point entirely. To achieve that flow state, the first crucial ingredient is that the task has to be in that sweet spot, where its just stretching enough to be at the very outer limit of current capacity, so we need to focus and concentrate entirely to reach it. Although, it mustn’t be so far out of range that we lose hope!
This brings in the second ingredient for flow. When you are trying to do something for the pleasure of being good at it, you are seeking ‘mastery’ of that skill or task. When someone learns to play the piano, through deliberate practice, for many hours they are edging closer and closer to mastery of the piano. Why are they doing this? Most often, not for extrinsic reward, but for the sheer pleasure of attempting to ‘master’ the piano.
The key here when attempting to master anything, as Daniel Pink explains, is mindset. Seeing your abilities as fixed and finite will ensure you neve reach flow or travel towards mastery on any task. People who feel they cannot do something are seeing their ability as finite. No one’s ability is finite.
Instead, acknowledging that you can’t do something yet, but can work slowly but surely toward that skill, is crucial to starting the journey towards mastery and therefore achieving the flow state in a task.
How can you use this information? – flow and mastery
Can you think of a time recently when you experienced the state of flow? Can you describe it? What were you doing and who were you doing it with? Was it something you found particularly challenging, and was it something you are striving to improve at?
Csikszentmihalyi developed a way of identifying what gives you flow in your life too. He suggests picking 40 random times over the course of a week to stop what you are doing and write down what you are doing, and how you are feeling. At the end of the week review: What moments over the week gave you the feeling of flow? Where were you and what were you working on? Who were you with? Are certain times of the day more likely to enable your flow state than others?
Finally here, if you are having doubts about how rewarding your job is, are there ways of maximising the conditions that created flow within your work, or, did this exercise tell you more about where your true source of intrinsic motivation comes from?
If you are a leader of others, this may be an opportunity to take a look at how you assign and delegate tasks to your team. Could you work with your team members to identify what gives them flow, and what their intrinsic drivers are? Perhaps, through looking at the career structure in your organisation, you could identify ways of challenging more junior staff to harness the power of mastery and work towards more senior role skill sets.
What will it take?
It is a cold hard truth that most of us need to earn a living wage in order to survive. No matter how many inspirational quotes we read, we still need rooves over our heads and food on the table. But… how much food? How large a TV? How luxury a car?
Giving over any more of your waking hours to do something that you don’t enjoy to earn anything more than what is necessary could be considered crazy! If you are tired of the 8 to 5, and realise that the same old tiresome extrinsic motivators are no longer compensation enough for you, perhaps examining what drives you, what gives you a state of flow and how you could redesign your life to have more of that in it is long overdue.
Over to you!
Daniel H Pinks, Richard Ryan, Edward Deci and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi have discovered remarkable things that can help us all have more fulfilling lives. What science knows and what business does in terms of work culture and motivation strategies are incredibly disconnected.
Have you experienced burn out? Have you found ways to help the people who report to you have fufilling roles? I would love to hear your experiences. Learn the details about how you can find motivation and satisfaction in your worklife from the experts:
These inspirational titles are available on Amazon.com
See you for the next article!
Greg Bennett is a Public Health Professional and
Leadership Coach
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