Here’s one thing I think we can all agree on:  no one likes annual Performance Reviews.  We don’t like preparing for them.  We don’t like receiving them.  We don’t like giving them.  And this concept of providing direct feedback—or just direct communication—extends far beyond the workplace.  For some reason, most of us have difficulty sharing our honest thoughts with people.  Sometimes that’s a good thing.  Most of the time, it just creates problems.  The question is:  Why is it so hard?  That’s what we are going to unpack today.

I’m writing about this topic because I experienced a communication miscue when I went home for Thanksgiving.  I’m guessing many of you will have experienced something similar.  When people who don’t spend a lot of time together suddenly find themselves in a room fishing for topics while the string bean casserole bakes, things can happen.  I won’t detail the story here.  Suffice it to say that an opinion was asked for and enthusiastically given; the actual truth came out the next day thanks to a text from another family member.  It wasn’t a big deal.  It just surprised me.  And it got me thinking about communication.

Lack of direct communication is a core competence in many families and social groups, including the workplace.  I believe that at the heart of this issue are two truths:  giving AND receiving direct communication are both learned skills; and, many people believe they are being kind by not telling their truth.  The corollary, of course, is that HOW you communicate makes a big difference in the impact of your statements.  However, I still believe that people hide behind examples of bad “how’s” to avoid speaking honestly. 

Let’s go back to the dreaded Performance Review to discuss how both giving and receiving communication are learned skills.  Most large corporations provide training in this area, but the emphasis is almost always on the “giving” part.  The directions are to: 1)make sure you gather well-rounded feedback on the individual in question, not just information from one or two people; 2)provide specific and/or quantifiable examples of behaviors and actions; and, 3)engage in “constructive feedback” as part of a “compliment sandwich”—provide an example of something positive, give the constructive feedback, provide another example of something positive.  The reasons for the first two are obvious.  The third suggestion is meant to reinforce an important concept—no one is perfect.  We all have things we do well and things we could do better.  That’s what “growth” entails.  But we usually don’t want to hear about the things we could do better, at least not from someone else.  We say we want to hear the truth, but we want “the truth” to be “you are perfect”.

What we don’t talk about often enough is that RECEIVING feedback is also a learned skill, exactly because we don’t like hearing it.  In my field, I worked with a ton of insecure perfectionists (yours truly included).  Many of us, upon receiving feedback from our boss on areas we could improve upon, immediately go down the rabbit hole to “I’m worthless and am going to get fired.”  I had an extreme example of this at one point in my career.  I was preparing to give a performance review to an exceptionally talented individual who was crippled by this insecure perfectionism.  She had a lot of outstanding accomplishments to trumpet.  That part was easy.  She also had a few areas she could have improved upon, although none of them were of high concern.  I simply believe that all performance reviews should provide areas of improvement.  We all can get better at something or learn something new.  Knowing I had a mountain to climb, we first spent a full half hour a few days before the review discussing the skills around giving and receiving feedback and how a good performance review should work.  Since our focus was on mechanics, the discussion was relaxed and productive.  When it was time for the actual review, I reminded her of those mechanics.  She was ready, she said!  I began the compliment sandwich, reviewing all of her many accomplishments.  I then leaned into just two areas I wanted her to focus on for improvement and growth.  You would have thought I’d run over her dog with a truck.  Her face dropped and she totally shut down.  I never even got to the second string of compliments.

At the root of that behavior is one of the big “why’s” of why direct communication is so hard!  It is that to be open to speaking or hearing a real truth, you must first fight that internal battle of authenticity:  knowing your authentic self, learning to like that authentic self, and being able to be vulnerable enough to share that authentic self with others.  To paraphrase another of my favorite Brené Brown mantras:  Work on your own shit so you’re not constantly taking it out on others.  The authenticity part is hard enough.  To be able to be vulnerable enough to others requires mutual trust and respect and, wow, we all know how difficult and scary that can be.  That is why being authentic and vulnerable are two of the most difficult and courageous things a person can do.  I am most assuredly still working on that.  Those of you who know me and have known me at different points on my journey know that I am absolutely not the poster child for direct communication.  But I have gotten a lot better.  Part of the reason is the experience that comes with age—seeing how much better things work out when you find the right way to be direct and listen without judging.  A big part has been finding the right partner.  (This is my contractual obligation to compliment Trish so she continues to edit my essays.)  Seriously, though, our ability to communicate directly and compassionately has not just led to a strong relationship.  It’s given me the confidence to be direct and compassionate with others.

Which brings us to the final point I want to make.  I said above that people often feel that avoiding direct communication is compassionate.  It’s usually not.  And it is often used as an excuse when you are fearful of a negative reaction.  What it often leads to is passive/aggressive behavior in an attempt to hint at true thoughts, sometimes using another person, and that just leads to worse feelings.  Most of us do want to hear the truth or at least honesty.  What is required to do this well is good old empathy.  Ask yourself if there a power imbalance in the relationship.  Is this person new to the group or new to you?  What might make them uncomfortable to hear what you are saying or hesitant to say what they need to say?  What can you do to make them more at ease?  It’s important at this point to say that you can only control your own behavior.  If you make the effort to smooth the way and they still choose to resist or, worse, employ passive/aggressive behavior, so be it.  Their discomfort might explain their behavior but it doesn’t excuse it—nor would it excuse your behavior if you chose to take that route.

Direct communication is a constant challenge for me—both giving and receiving.  While not the perfect empath, I have found myself paralyzed by trying to consider the impact of my actions on others.  But I’m trying to get better every day, every chance I get.  If we all keep doing that, then little by little, direct communication won’t be so hard.

It’s 7:18 am.  I’ve been awake since 3-ish, on and off, and up since 5:30.  Why?  In part, because today (Friday) is the day that I knew I needed to get up and put electronic pen to paper for this essay, which is due to post on Sunday.  Crunch time is upon us and my most effective intrinsic motivator (my self-imposed deadline) has finally gotten me on this computer.  Beau has given up trying to jump up on my lap for morning snuggles.  Mommy is focused.

As we discussed last time in the first essay around motivation, even though I love to write and get enormous satisfaction from it, I still require a bit of motivation to actually do it.  I’ve been writing this essay in my head over the two weeks—I’ve even jotted down notes to remind me of points I want to make—but sitting down and actually drafting and editing rarely seems to happen until the deadline is upon me.  That’s the motivator I’ve discovered I need.

We talked about motivation in general last time, intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, and more deeply about personal motivation through the examples of my own struggles.  This time, I want to talk more about motivating others, as well as how lessons on motivating others can give you some insights into motivating yourself.

There is a huge body of work on motivating others, particularly in the workplace.  I’m sure most of you reading this have been to at least one training class on this topic.  Not surprisingly, there is no consensus on what actually works.  This is because we are talking about motivating people, not, say, carbon atoms.  I’m a chemist so you know you’ll get science analogies!  If I want to “motivate” a carbon atom to bond with, say, an oxygen atom, I know how to do that.  A carbon atom is a carbon atom is a carbon atom.  And the reaction is well studied and will work every time since I can control the conditions to my liking.  Unlike carbon atoms, all people are different and even if I COULD control conditions to my liking, each person will respond to different sources of motivation.  Frustratingly, even the same person will respond differently depending on the context.  For example, fear can be a powerful motivator but circumstance is critical.  If you fear for your life, you will be motivated to do extraordinary things.  You may even be highly motivated if you fear for your job.  But if a manager chooses to regularly motivate his staff through fear and intimidation coupled with the threat of firing them, he will get the bare minimum effort he requires and even that only for a short period of time.  I am fond of saying that the difference between a good organization and a great organization is the discretionary effort put in by people.  Few choose to put in consistent, excellent extra effort out of fear.  Shame is another poor choice of motivation.  It might get you one action out of a particularly reluctant colleague (and make you feel better for an instant), but likely the trust in that relationship will be gone.  If you choose to use shame, it had better be worth it.  If you consistently use shame, don’t expect to be a manager for long.

There is a lot of controversy over the use of incentives for motivation, be it in the workplace or with, say, kids.  I was subjected to a segment on financial incentives during a leadership training program in which the takeaway was “financial incentives never work so don’t bother proposing them to us.”  My belief is that well crafted financial incentives do indeed work, but only in the right context.  If the work environment is toxic, if no one believes in the mission of the business (or has no idea what it is), and if the reward is really small compared to the effort, then I agree that financial incentives won’t work.  Nor will dangling days off, or a big celebration event, or any other “reward” that requires the recipient to actually appreciate the workplace and their co-workers.  Get your culture right, first.

Peter Diamandis, of X-Prize fame, is one of the most annoyingly optimistic people I’ve ever met and he has some good thoughts on getting that culture right.  I subscribe to his blog, geared towards entrepreneurs who want to do really big things.  I am not one of those people, but I appreciate his perspectives and how his thinking challenges me out of my relentless incrementalism.  In a recent blog, he talked about employee motivation.  For workers to be motivated to do great things, he says, they need three things from you and the culture you create in your company: 1) Autonomy—the freedom to work within a framework that is not overly restrictive; 2) Mastery—the opportunity and support to get better and better at what they do; and, 3) Purpose—self-explanatory, but which I will dig into more below.  If you create an environment in which your employees have these three things, he says (and I agree), they will do Great Things.  The devil, of course, is in the details.  Creating this kind of culture and maintaining it clearly fight against the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  It takes a lot of work and a lot of nurturing, which is why it doesn’t happen that often.

So, let’s talk about one particular aspect of that environment: purpose.  In my leadership life, I tried to always be clear with the organization about what our high level business goals were (sales, profitability, scientific excellence and differentiation, etc.).  Once they were stated, I’d work with individuals to connect their particular goals and responsibilities to those business goals.  This “line of sight” in goal setting helps to instill that sense of purpose.  If you understand how your efforts contribute to the larger goals, that is a piece of the motivation puzzle.  Of course, you have to believe in the mission of the business and the worthiness (and achievability) of the goals, as well.  Plus, you need feel trust in and from your workmates to believe that you are not toiling in vain.  This is when financial incentives tied to workplace achievement work.  They work because those extrinsic motivators provided by leadership inspire you to access your intrinsic motivators—pride in your work and your own sense of accomplishment.  That is what gets the job done.

And this brings us full circle, back to motivating yourself in your personal life.  Thanks to a great comment by a reader in response to Part I of this essay, I was reminded of the connection between how I have motivated others in the workplace and how I might better motivate myself—this connection to higher level goals.  It’s easier in the workplace, because those higher levels goals are discreet and measurable and time bound.  And you expect to achieve them!  In your personal life, those higher level goals are aspirational.  You don’t really expect to fully achieve them; your goal is to continually move toward them or at least take actions that are consistent with that aspiration.  I am talking about goals like “I want to be able to grow old maintaining my physical and mental health well into old age” and “I want to treat everyone with whom I cross paths with kindness and compassion” and, for my fellow Jewish tribesmen out there, “I want to embrace my responsibility toward tikkum olam—healing the world”.  Those are big, hairy aspirations.  How do I tie organizing recipes and shelf contents to THAT? 

There’s a clue to that in something I wrote earlier, in Living the Second Quadrant, about living with intention.  This means choosing to do things that are important to me, not just reacting to what others wanted from me or mindlessly doing less important things because they were in front of me and/or easy.  The “how” I do that, this motivational piece, must then be tied to what I consider those high level aspirational goals.  Sounds like a lot of work and that’s the rub.  There’s that Second Law of Thermodynamics, again—nature tends towards increasing chaos and we have to put work into reversing that inclination.  I’m ok with that, as long as I believe in what I’m working towards.  I’m starting to articulate that better.  I’ve got work to do.

I started thinking about motivation during spin class last week. It was at that point in the class when I was no longer in a state of flow and was just trying to get through the last 15 minutes. The instructor began an 8 minute journey of pain that involved 40 second sprints followed by a 20 second “rest” period during which you increased your gear so that the next 40 second sprint would be tougher. I was thinking to myself, as I turned up the gear for the fourth time in as many minutes, that I really need an instructor. I could never motivate myself to do this on my own. My memory went back to the time that I was working out twice weekly with a trainer. I was always amazed that I would just do whatever he told me to do. There was one time he was late to our session.  I had done my warm up and thought, “Well, Sean often starts me off with burpees so why don’t I do a set a burpees?” But I hate burpees. So, I didn’t do them. Just as I was trying to decide on some exercise less unpalatable to do while I waited, Sean came in the door and said, “Burpees.  Go!”  And I immediately started doing burpees.

Motivation is a tricky thing. It’s wrapped up in priorities, which we have discussed at length before, but is a separate beast. When I asked Siri to define motivation, she returned this from Dictionary.com: “The reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way.  The general desire or willingness of someone to do something.”  Reasons, desire, willingness.  Alright, that resonates. So, when you really want to do something (priorities) or HAVE to do something (responsibilities), how do you summon that desire and willingness? And if you are trying to motivate someone else, how do you find those triggers that summon desire and willingness in them?

First, let’s talk a bit about types, or sources, of motivation.  Sources of motivation are either intrinsic or extrinsic.  “Intrinsic” means the source comes from within you.  “Extrinsic” means the source is external to you.  Ideally, extrinsic motivation awakens some source of intrinsic motivation.  Afterall, you still need to make the choice to act.  No one can MAKE you do anything you don’t want to do.  They can, however, provide a stimulus that causes you to CHOOSE to do something that, without that stimulus, you would not choose to do.  Based on that external stimulus, you run a quick cost/benefit analysis and decide that the consequences of not responding to that extrinsic motivator are not worth it (negative consequences) or that the benefits of responding are indeed worth it (positive consequences).  Regardless, you are making a choice to act or not act.  Own that.  (See:  Hot Button of Personal Accountability/Not Playing the Victim.)

Back to exercise as an example.  We have established that I am basically a lazy person.  When it comes to exercise, I need extrinsic motivation.  There are some things I will do on my own, like long walks listening to podcasts or moderate treadmills stints watching videos or reading eBooks.  However, these are rarely very strenuous workouts.  If I want to work out hard (spin, lifting) or go through a routine (stretching, yoga) I need an instructor or at the very least a workout partner.  I just do.  It is not a failing that I am not one of those people who motivate myself to workout hard.  It is an understanding of what type of motivation I need to do strenuous workouts.  Afterall, I can motivate myself to put myself in front of that instructor.  I just prefer to have them make the decisions of what exercise I do next, or the accountability of keeping up with a workout partner.  It’s taken me years to figure this out about myself.  Yet, while I have figured out the exercise thing, I’m still figuring out what kind of motivation I need to do other things that I want to do—or at least things that I want to have completed.

Even writing, something that I really enjoy, requires some type of motivation.  What works for me is a deadline.  This is why I will never write a book, unless I can motivate myself to break down that enormous task into a zillion little deadlines (or find an editor who will do that for me).  I write to a deadline, whether it’s my self-imposed every-two-week blog post deadlines or publishing deadlines for the articles I write for Lab Manager Magazine.  I rarely sit down to actually type until a few days before said deadline, which is why my writing is usually limited to 1200-1500 words.  Oh, I’ll compose in my head for days or weeks, but the actual task of writing doesn’t happen until that date-driven motivation pops up.

What I have a really hard time with is motivation around small personal or household tasks.  This drives Trish absolutely nuts.  Take a guess at how long I’ve been “promising” to organize the stacks of recipes I’ve been collecting?  Or organizing the shelves lining the wall beside our basement steps.  Or any number of little tasks around the house.  It’s not like I don’t have the time.  It’s not like I haven’t made a zillion lists (and I do love a list).  It’s not like I don’t get enormous satisfaction when I complete one of those tasks—when I take Trish on a tour through some little task I’ve completed, I’m like a child showing off an “A” on a class assignment.  I haven’t found the right intrinsic motivator yet for those things and I don’t think it would be good for our marriage if I asked Trish to be the source of extrinsic motivation.  I know that my activation barrier is around my paralyzing perfectionism.  I know that when I DO actually start something that I finish it to reasonable satisfaction.  But I just.  Can’t.  Get.  Myself.  To start.  It’s important to note, here, that Trish does not have this issue.  In fact, one could say she has the opposite problem.  When she gets a task into her head, she cannot sit still until it is done.  She will drive herself to exhaustion.  And there is usually an injury involved, a bandage or two, and some blood.  That is not my goal, either.  There must be some happy medium.

This had been an issue throughout my working life as well.  I’m sure my former co-workers who are reading this are rolling their eyes.  They could probably comment on the techniques they developed to motivate me to do things they needed me to do, be it a capital expenditure justification document or a conversation with someone or a phone call.  I probably should not let Trish know this, but I think what worked best was putting me in a position of personal and/or public embarrassment if I didn’t complete the task.

What’s super frustrating is that I know all the tricks.  I know that if there is something you are dreading that you should do that FIRST.  Get it out of the way.  I know that I do my best work of any kind in the morning hours—I’m writing now at 9:30 am.  I know that allowing myself some time to do something fun and/or mindless will absolutely keep me from ever tackling whatever it is that I want to motivate myself to do.  And I know that sometimes I just need to give myself a little grace and try again tomorrow.  No epiphanies, here.  No fancy wrap-up sentences that describe how I’ve tackled this issue.  Like most personal growth, it’s just going to be a forever journey, a daily battle.  What I can commit to is to keep trying to get better.  Writing about it like this will help me for a little bit.  I now, at least, feel a bit of public accountability over those recipes and those shelves.  I will NOT share with you what else is on that list!

I’m not sure which is tougher:  motivating yourself or motivating action in others.  I will tell you that I’ve found it a lot easier to motivate others within the structure and hierarchy of the work environment than in my personal life.  Incentives help sometimes.  Simply applying what works on you usually does not.  We’ll tackle that next time.