Yesterday I listened to Dan Pink talk about human motivation, as part of Neustar’s Innovation Speakers series. Dan’s well known for writing “Free Agent Nation” about ten years ago and is a good speaker. I attended one of his addresses in 2008 and wrote it up for the blog here.
Dan usually takes something of a contrarian angle to things, and this time was no different. The conventional wisdom to be questioned yesterday was that more reward always equals better performance. Turns out that’s wrong – at least most of the time. The key difference seems to be jobs that require a limited perspective versus roles that require an expansive perspective.
For purely mechanical skills, rewards seem to improve performance. But as soon as you require even “rudimentary cognitive skill” in the task, greater financial rewards do NOT improve performance, and in fact often lead to a decrease in effectiveness. How can this fundamental tenet of capitalism be wrong – don’t you always get more behavior that you incentivize?
Turns out money IS very important to knowledge workers (my term, Dan didn’t use), but only to a point. Dan stressed technology workers in particular, because they are knowledge workers and because he was talking to Neustar employees. Most employees are extremely attuned to fairness — they want to be compensated according to their experiences, skills and market value. Companies need to compensate at or (even better according to Dan) slightly above the market price for acquire and motivate good talent.
But once companies do that, money can’t increase motivation much. Turns out your average technology worker is motivated strongly by three factors:
- Autonomy — how much space do you give your people to succeed? After all, “management” as we know it today is a mid 1800’s concept designed to control behavior in a workplace. It doesn’t exactly foster engagement, and how many other nineteenth century technologies do we use today?
- Mastery — this is profoundly motivating for humans — we all like to get better at things, from a personal satisfaction perspective apart from recognition or reward.
- Purpose — what’s the larger reason we do what we do each day? It has to be more than increasing the EPS four cents this quarter for most people.
Of course Dan shares studies and examples to back up these theories, some more well known than others. Google News being invented during a worker’s “15 percent” time is famous by now, and Zappos running their call centers with no clocks or scripts is getting there. One I’d never heard was an Israeli daycare center that started charging parents for late pickup of their children. The percentage of late pickups soared, because by imposing a fine the center had taken a moral issue — please don’t do this, not fair to staff, etc. — and turned it into a straight transaction.
Unfortunately Dan didn’t get to my question during the Q&A regarding how best to motivate millennials, the generation now entering the workplace. I’ve read a lot of fascinating commentary about the changing nature of childhood, how unstructured free time is scant, regimentation is in and there is a culture of unceasing praise designed to boost self-esteem.
What this has produced (if you accept the reasoning) is a new workforce generation unable to function without detailed instruction and also unaccustomed to honest criticism. Obviously, every individual is different and you have to be very careful making sweeping assumptions across an entire generation. But I have seen these traits crop up as we try to recruit the best talent for Strategic, and that sort of makes sense.
After all, the agency environment can be tough like all professional service businesses. Clients are demanding and you need to be smart, be able to think on your feet and have a problem solving mentality. You can’t always be expecting a thank you, either. Plus, Strategic demands that every account member truly understand the business vertical the client is in, and be extremely efficient with their time management.
Serving clients isn’t a process I can put on a chart for account teams. There is no “if a, then b” certainty to it — each client is different, each niche is different. Of course we have a proven delivery methodology, but there’s a big percentage of learning by doing as well. I’ve seen some take to it like ducks to water, and other, equally intelligent staff members wash out totally.
I wanted to ask Dan first if he’s seen this, and if yes how we would square the needs of the next generation with the need for autonomy. It seems the exact opposite of what they were raised to expect. So Dan, if you read this please drop a comment!
And to all other readers, check out Dan in person or read one of his books when you’re ready to think about important concepts in different ways.