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.