Motivation: would your employees buy their own supplies?

This came from a local paper, but surely many teachers around the country behave similarly:

Like many colleagues, she said she spent about $100 on back-to-school supplies. She said she expected to spend another $400 of her own money over the rest of the school year.

Let's put it another way: suppose $500 is 1% of the teacher's annual wages, which seems like a fairly reasonable estimate.  They're spending money not for the employer, but for what you would call "clients", who should and are expected to provide for themselves. 

Now take a typical bond trader, and 1% of their salary is $5k to $10k.  (Yes, it could be a lot more.)  Would you think they would spend that much every year on client problems?  They might ask their company to pay, but if they didn't, how many do you think would dig into their own pockets?

The article goes on to say that many of these teachers have spouses that have lost their jobs due to the recession.  They spend the money anyway because they want to make sure every child has equal opportunity, and they want to provide a good environment.

How do you get an employee to care so much about their job that they take the quality of their work so personally?

Sure, it helps that teaching can be very rewarding.  Teaching can provide a meaningful purpose, which Dan Pink identifies as one of the three critical factors for employee motivation.

Another aspect is professional pride.  Teachers have a vision of how they want the lesson plan they've created to go, and every kid that doesn't have the right supplies is an obstacle to achieving that.  I know a number of software developers who pay for many pieces of software and hardware so that they can do their jobs better.  In both cases, autonomy about how to achieve their goals -- the teachers create their own lesson plans, the programmers can use their own tools -- imparts ownership of the results.  Yes, this covers both of the other primary inputs that Dan Pink discusses.

One personal aspect, though, is simply getting employees deeply involved with their customers.  Teachers see theirs everyday, and the desire to help springs forth.  (Or else, they become overwhelmed by it, shut down, and just see it as another job, the kids' problems as not part of their job description.)

Being around other people, personally sharing in their problems, unlocks a natural instinct to want to get involved.  We sometimes purposefully avoid knowing anything because we know beforehand that once we even put a toe in the water, we'll be compelled to jump all the way in.

If you're running software teams, get them in front of the users as much as possible, as much as the users allow.  That's one strong argument against separate support and development teams.  Programmers who see their users more won't need any more motivation than that to rush back and work quickly on that bug that seems so small (hey, there are workarounds!) but is in fact a major pain and awfully embarrassing.

Drive: reading list

At the end of Drive, Dan Pink offers a dozen or so books that provide more depth.  All of them intrigued, but these stood out:

Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci.
"The questions so many people ask -- namely, 'How do I motivate people to learn?  to work?  to do their chores?  or to take their medicine?' -- are the wrong questions.  They are wrong because they imply that motivation is something that gets done to people, rather than something that people do." 

Fascinating.  Those are questions I'm asking all the time, so I've got the wrong ones.

Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes by Alfie Kohn.
"Do rewards motivate people?  Absolutely.  They motivate people to get rewards."

I've been thinking about whether to given a small token at every practice for the hardest working player on the soccer team I'm coaching -- basically, a gold star.  Yes, very Management 2.0, but I figure these are 8 year-olds.  Maybe I should read this book first.  Kohn has been writing about this stuff from all sorts of angles; lots to explore.

Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler.  Pink calls Semler "the first autonomy freak."  He has 3000 workers in a manufacturing company, Semco -- the kind of company where you'd think stricter management would produce the best results -- and he lets them set their own hours, vote on major decisions.  Some set their own salaries.  Semler hesitates to call his company "organized" -- 3000 people! 

The company has done fantastically well for 20 years.

Drive: audit yourself

Drive offers a tool for measuring autonomy, one of the three tenets of Management 3.0.  Audit your workplace or your team. How much input do you or your team members have over:

• Tasks -- responsibilities and main tasks.  Can they decide what they work on, what goals they want to set, what their priorities are?

• Time -- work schedule.  Who decides when the "work day" starts and ends?  If there's rotational coverage of some kind, who determined what rotation was required and how was the coverage assigned?  Do you require people to spend time commuting?

• Team -- who they partner and interact with.  Do they get to pick their project team members or are people assigned?  Can they decide to divide the work up with others any way they choose?  How much freedom do they have to interact with customers or business partners, or senior managers for that matter?

• Tools -- how they're supposed to do it.  Tasks are what they're supposed to do; tools are the method.  For programmers, it could include architectures, IDEs, even languages: who chooses?  Are there a lot strict processes in place -- check in these things, fill out this form, then get sign-offs from these people, then schedule your release only on Fridays -- or is it totally free?

Compile the ratings given by everyone on your team or department or whatever level you desire. 

Being completely autonomous in every aspect of the job might be undesirable.  For example, jobs that require customer interaction have to consider the customers' hours and locations.  You'll have to get creative to find ways to bring more autonomy to that area of the.

Also, average scores might be fine, but a low score in one area might indicate an place to focus.

*Bounce*

Matthew Syed's Bounce tries to uncover how exceptional people got that way.  It starts out promising, but quickly fizzles out.

It offers a very tight review of current studies that demonstrate that hard work matters more than talent.  You can skip Talent Is Overrated and just read the first couple chapters of Bounce.

But the hard work argument just opens another mystery: what compels people to work so hard that they rise above everyone else, even at great cost and pain to themselves?  The book never provides a meaningful answer.  A few studies show that the right kind of coaching words can make a difference, but that just scratches the surface.  I doubt Michael Jordan was lucky enough to only have positive, supportive coaches all his youth and career.

The rest of the book talks about other high performance issues, such as "choking" and how to avoid it.  Not uninteresting, but more like appendix material to the main storyline, which remains unresolved.

*Drive*, part 1

Drive tells us about Motivation 3.0.  Version 1.0 involved kings: do it my way or die.  Motivation 2.0 introduced management: supervision and evolved forms of control.

Management still revolves largely around supervision, "if-then" rewards, and other forms of control.  That's true even of the kinder, gentler Motivation 2.1 approach that whispers sweetly about things like "empowerment" and "flexibility."

Indeed, just consider the very notion of "empowerment."  It presumes that the organization has the power and benevolently ladles some of it into the waiting bowls of grateful employees.  But that's not autonomy.  That's just a slightly more civilized form of control.  Or take management's embrace of "flex time."  Ressler and Thompson call it a "con game," and they're right.  Flexibility simply widens the fences and occasionally opens the gates.  It, too, is little more than control in sheep's clothing.  The words themselves reflect presumptions that run against both the texture of the times and the nature of the human condition.  In short, management isn't the solution; it's the problem.

If you don't have management, what's left? 

Motivation 3.0, which comes from the self.  Drive is about how organizations can foster that -- indeed, that organizations must foster that, because those that don't will themselves die in the future.