Since I had amazing responses and discussions about my last blog post I’d like to add some further thoughts to that.
“There’s a mismatch about what science knows and what business does!”
(Dan Pink)
One of our employees sent me the following link which I find very interesting: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation#t-11718
Dan Pink talks about how todays incentive-driven structures don’t fit the tasks that are to be done in our working environment, especially in the western countries. He states that incentives are working very well for tasks that have a clearly determined result which you can measure. If you can follow a clear process and can measure the success by the number of items created (example) you can define various ranges for payments. If the task results are more ‘open’ and unclear monetary incentives even do have a negative impact on the results. Scientific research showed that in different studies.
You can find the same content in a great way of telling here:
Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose
The talk also states that when you pay people enough to don’t think about the money (so that they can live a good life without fear of being bankrupt but still need to work to live) you have to make sure that their most important value factors for a better performance & personal satisfaction are matched: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose!
Autonomy
Autonomy means that people want to be self-directed. In the case of an intrapreneur / innovation manager this means that the person needs to have the freedom to make their own decisions. You cannot create borders in which they have to move. You cannot tell them that their new product needs to fit the current portfolio. Openness and freedom are the most important things you as a manager / CEO need to give those people.
Mastery
“Mastery is our urge to get better at stuff”. Awesome phenomenon, examples in the video. I think mastery is really something you find a lot in entrepreneurs. When you think about it, the dogma of lean (fast learning) also meets the parameters of mastery. By learning fast and by pivoting a lot you get better and better, your business model and your product get better and better. You accept mistakes and failures but continue to work on your idea in order to get better and to improve your chances of winning.
Purpose
That’s the missing masterpiece I think. When monetary things are in the center of your actions this offen results in worse results. Worse products, worse service, worse everything. The purpose, the will of realizing a vision is the thing that drives real success. When your employees are motivated by purpose and when they follow a vision you will get better results. You cannot do that by giving them rewards for achieved predefined goals.
Adoption to intrapreneurs
Why is this so hard to do? Well, it’s because actually nearly no organization on the planet works like that right now. Even though there are a lot of smart people in corporates, they fight against a crazy amount of people that are used to this monetary incentives. And without wanting to hurt somebody, people fixed on bonuses most likely aren’t the ones that really push your company to the next level. Having that in mind we should think about parallel organizations in which we behave differently.
This topic somehow got me in the last time. I’ll post everything I find about that… Stay tuned 😉
Categories: basics, motivation
the lean consultant | mantro.net 