A (3:56)

Well, what would that mean exactly? I mean, what would a company do if a company wanted to do what you just described?

B (4:03)

I'll give you an example. I mean, there are companies that are doing this. Here's a really interesting example from an Australian company called Atlassian. It's a software company. Atlassian is a software company. And they do something really cool once a quarter. They say to their software developers, for the next 24 hours, you can work on whatever you want. You can do it with whomever you want. You can do it the way that you want. You just have to show the results to the company, the rest of the company, in this fun meeting at the end of those 24 hours. They call these things FedEx days because you have to deliver something overnight. Well, it turns out that that one day of undiluted autonomy has produced a whole array of ideas for new products, upgrades to existing products, fixes for some flaws in current products that would never have emerged except for that FedEx day. Now, this is not a carrot and stick motivator. This is not saying to them, if you are innovative, I will give you 500 bucks. It's saying, you probably want to be innovative. So let me just get out of your way and let you be innovative. That's a very different approach to motivation.

A (5:06)

But I would think that some people are motivated by some things and others by other things. So when you try to motivate a group of people with one motivation, well, it might work on some, but it might not work on others because they don't find it particularly motivating.

B (5:22)

I think that's true at one Level. But I also think that human beings. Listen. Human beings are complex. We're motivated. We have biological motivations, okay? We drink when we're thirsty and we eat when we're hungry. That's a motivation. Human beings also have a reward and punishment motivation. So if you say to me, dan, I'm going to go pay you 100 bucks to go stand out on the street corner and tap your head, I'm going out the door right now. We respond well to rewards and punishments. But human beings also have other motivations. The drive to do things because they're interesting. The drive to do things because they matter. The drive to do things because we get better at them. The drive to do things because they contribute to the world. And what the science shows is that you gotta pay people enough. You gotta pay people enough. If you don't pay people enough, you're not going to have any realistic motivation. But once you pay people enough, external rewards like that, contingent rewards, if. Then rewards don't play that big of a role in high performance. What really plays a role in high performance once you pay people enough is giving them freedom, allowing them to get better at something that matters, and infusing the workplace with a sense of purpose, a sense that they're doing something larger than themselves that is far more potent and far more enduring than this elaborate regime of carrots and sticks that we've been using for 150 years.

A (6:41)

But does it not depend on the type of work you're doing?

B (6:46)

Yes and no. I'll give you an example. Let's take something like call centers. Call centers are very difficult jobs. They're not particularly interesting. People are often monitored. The call center employees are monitored. Their calls are timed. When they get a call in, they essentially just have to read a script. It's low on the autonomy scale. It's not particularly interesting, and it's not a job that most of us would covet. Well, you have a company like Zappos who comes in and deals with its call center in a fundamentally different way. They say to their call center employees, solve the customer's problem. Solve the customer's problem. Do it however you want for as long as you want. We're not going to monitor you. We're not going to time you. Solve the customer's problem. And lo and behold, Zappos comes out of nowhere to be one of the top rated customer service firms in America. So here's a job that isn't being a graphic designer or software writer, where if you offer up some amount of autonomy, people Perform at a higher level and the company benefits.

A (7:47)

What if you're working for a company, though, that is less enlightened than Zappos, and you're losing your motivation because you work in a company that's very top down, very strict like you just described. Can this work the other way? Can this change come from the bottom up?

B (8:05)

To some extent. And what you're describing is in some ways the landscape of American work right now. I mean, job satisfaction numbers have been plummeting. It's a combination that people are nervous and uninspired. Very dangerous combination. You have levels of workforce engagement dropping, it seems, more each year. There are some things that individuals can do to take it back a little bit. And one of my favorites is this idea of a do it yourself performance review. Now, most people hate performance reviews, whether they're giving them or receiving them. And we sort of lost sight of what the purpose is of a performance review. The purpose of a performance review is to help people get better, to help them move toward mastery. But the way doing that twice a year in this kabuki theater style settings where everyone's playing a rehearse role isn't particularly effective. So one thing people can do that I encourage people to do is a do it yourself performance review, where at the beginning of a month you set out your goals and then at the end of the month you call yourself into the office and ask yourself how you're faring. Are you making progress? Are you falling behind? Do you need other information? Some people are doing these kind of peer to peer performance reviews where I set out my goals and what I want to accomplish in the month you set out yours. Fred sets out his, Maria sets out hers. And then at the end of the month, we get together, have coffee for an hour, talk about our performance, hold each other accountable. I think that's one way for individuals to take motivation back and not rely on companies to do it. One of the people I write about, a scholar named Edward Deasy, says that we got to get past this notion that motivation is something somebody does to you. It's something that you do for yourself.

A (9:48)

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B (12:43)

Yeah, I think that most companies can actually do the FedEx day, the 24 hours. But you can also do things in a more modest version. I mean, you could say, you know, this month, one afternoon a week, you can work on whatever you want and who among us has not squandered one afternoon at work? And you know, I think people could surprise you. The other thing about this is that, you know, the dark cloud of the recession might have a silver lining on motivation for couple of reasons. Number one is that recessions are often inflection points for people where their life has gone a direction they didn't expect and they have to think about where it's going to go next. So what you see in recessions is coming out of it is some amount of reinvention, some amount of entrepreneurship. A lot of those kinds of activities are often very, very self motivated. The other thing from a company's perspective is in these kind of tough times, you're pretty much out of carrots. You don't really have many bribes left. And that might force some companies, not all, might force some companies to think a little bit more creatively, a little bit more deeply about motivation.

A (13:47)

So it sounds like you're saying there's really two kinds of motivations. There's the traditional carrot and stick, which is just reward or punishment motivation, which is kind of the old school way of doing it. And then there's these other kinds of motivations that you're talking about that are more creative and interesting and motivating. But aren't those just carrots and sticks in different language? I mean, ultimately, aren't they also rewards or punishments in order to get people to do what you want them to do?

B (14:20)

Not necessarily because it comes from within. A carrot and a stick come from without. I mean, what you're doing is you're giving people freedom. I mean, I don't think that freedom is a carrot. Freedom is a, is, I think qualitatively different. It allows people to be, be self motivated. They're not chasing after something that you're dangling in front of them. What you're doing is that you're in some ways giving up control. And there are a lot of managers out there who think that their job is to control people. And I think for, you know, in the industrial age or even in the information age, when people are doing simple work, when they're turning the same screw the same way, or they're answering calls at a call center, or they are adding up columns of figures that, you know, maybe control makes some sense. But when fewer people are doing that and they're inevitably forced into doing things that require more innovation and creativity, giving up control is actually a better strategy. The problem with that is that managers giving up control face a little bit of a crisis. Because if they're not controlling people, then what the heck are they doing there? You know, I think, I mean, I think that's a question all of us should be asking ourselves in any kind of job is, okay, what the heck are you doing here? And if you went away, would anybody care? And would it have any effect on the world? And if the answer is no, then my hunch is that you're not going to be around that much longer and what you're doing isn't all that satisfying. And if you move into something as difficult as it is that is a little bit more satisfying and actually answers the question that, you know, people would care if you went away, then I think you're going to have greater satisfaction and greater job security.

A (15:48)

So what about those people in those jobs where they turn the screw the same way every time or they flip burgers the same way every time? Are we to say that this doesn't apply to them?

B (16:00)

No, but I actually think they do. I mean, the call center thing we talked about is a way to, you know, you can, I think that any kind of job has room for autonomy. And we see this over again, over and over again. You saw it with the Zappos call center example. You see it with an interesting study that I write about of hospital janitors. Okay, not a job that most of us would covet. There were some hospital janitors who saw the job essentially in that one way where they said, okay, my job is to come in at a certain time, sweep the floors and get out in other environments where managers, people leading these hospitals, maybe encourage janitors to think of their jobs a little bit differently. So, you know, if you're going in and cleaning a room, feel free to talk to the patients, see how they're doing, you know, talk to the nurses and say, hey, you know, these janitors are, you know, pretty clued in about what's going on. If you have a question or need something done, you know, don't hesitate to ask them. Well, suddenly these janitors who were able to sculpt their jobs a little bit, lo and behold, they report higher job satisfaction, there's less turnover, they're more likely to move up the ranks. So even in a job that most of us wouldn't covet, you know, cleaning floors in a hospital, there's room for tapping people's intrinsic motivation. And again, it's not this kind of nicey nice thing. It's not, you know, kumbaya, touchy feely management that says we're going to sacrifice the bottom line. It's actually in its own way, a remarkably hard headed, sophisticated, savvy and strategic approach to business.

A (17:32)

Do you think though, and maybe one of the reasons managers are reluctant to embrace this is, okay, if you have people working and you tell them, all right, you can now have as a motivation, we're going to give you 10% of your time to do whatever it is you want to do because that's gonna motivate you to work better. But initially it might not. Initially we would see a drop in productivity, a drop in results, however you measure them. And who wants a drop in results?

B (18:02)

Yeah, I don't know. I think it could. I mean one of the things, let's take 20% time. One of the things about, you know, companies where, like Google and some others where people can spend 20% of their time working on anything that they want, you know, chief financial officers go into cardiac arrest when that's proposed because you're saying, okay, let's take 1/5 of our wages and redeploy them into something we don't know if it's going to work. And so I think there might be cases where they do that. I mean, I think people, the workplace for many of us, not all of us, but for many of us is so controlling that if you release those controls initially it can be somewhat disorienting, but I think over time it can be far more powerful. I'll give you an interesting study out of Cornell that looked at small businesses and they categorized these small businesses based on whether they were top down, kind of carrot and stick management and bottom up, more autonomous management. And it turned out that the bottom up, more autonomous management companies had four times, four times the growth rate of those other, more command and control traditional companies.

A (19:07)

When you do things like this though, when you say, okay, you can take 20% of your time and do whatever you want, what should a company expect to get in return for that? I mean, is the idea that if you tell everybody to take all this time and do whatever they want, one person will come back with something spectacular? Or should you expect great things from everybody because they now have this new freedom? I mean, what's the expectation?

B (19:37)

You don't know? I mean, I think that people want to do great things. I don't think that everybody who has that kind of autonomy tomorrow will do a great thing. I think a heck of a lot more will do a great thing than people expect. But you know, there is an element of risk there, there's an element of uncertainty there. But I think that the genuine uncertainty of something that could lead to an innovation is far better than the false certainty that these outdated regimes of carrots and sticks will work. I think that's in some ways delusional.

A (20:06)

Well, thanks, Daniel. You always bring fresh insight into whatever topic you're talking about or writing about. I always appreciate that. I've been talking with Daniel Pink. The name of the book is the Surprising Truth about what Motivates Us, and there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. And this conversation has kicked off our new bonus feature, Sysk trending, where we surface past Sysk conversations that connect directly to what people are dealing with right now. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening to something you should know.