The Truth About Motivation
What the business world gets wrong- and how to fix it
Hello there,
Our understanding of what motivates people at work is broken.
Bosses think dangling big rewards will make people chase their targets as aggressively as a Bajaj Finance recovery agent going after a 7-time EMI defaulter.
The truth is- it doesn’t work that way.
Humans aren’t machines with simple input-output relationships governing them.
We’re a little more complicated- anyone involved in trying to impress their girlfriend only to get into a 3-day kinetic war already understands this fact quite deeply.
If true, where did this simple carrots & sticks approach come from? Why doesn’t it lead to humans delivering high performance at work?
And if it doesn’t, what can managers do? (Apart from giving up their jobs out of exasperation and getting into Nifty options trading full-time?)
There’s a lot to cover today. The insights that follow will reveal something fascinating about us and how we ought to motivate people (if we ever get tasked with that dastardly job).
Let’s start with a story of monkeys & puzzles- and what it reveals about incentives.
Monkeys solving puzzles
In the 1950s, a scientist named Harry Harlow conducted a fascinating experiment.
He left monkeys in a cage with a simple puzzle- simple for us but not so simple for them.
What he saw next was intriguing. The monkeys experimented and very quickly developed the proficiency to solve these puzzles with ease.
The interesting thing here was that there was no real need for the monkeys to do so. It wasn’t like they were being offered a cozy time with a diva or a luscious banana in return.
They were solving these puzzles just for the heck of it (like I sometimes play Call of Duty 18 hours straight for no apparent reason)
But here’s the money shot.
Harlow wanted to see what would happen if the monkeys were given rewards for solving the puzzles. If performance was already good, an additional reward should only make it better, right? Right?
Wrong.
Offering food rewards when they solved a puzzle led to their performance worsening over time!
What the heck? It’s like the sales guy playing Minesweeper all day after getting a huge bonus and going from top performer status to getting the “We’re putting you on PIP” treatment from HR.
You may say that this is a glitch, that monkeys are just stupid animals who don’t get it. But the funny thing is that the same experiments were tried on humans many decades later- and the results were similar.
When the researcher Edward Deci tried the same experiment with humans, he found similar results. What’s the core idea behind all this?
Intrinsic Motivation
Here’s the thing. When Harlow saw monkeys solving puzzles, he realized that they were acting on a kind of drive that was different from the ones we always thought of.
There are 3 kinds of motivations we have.
Motivation 1.0 is about doing things to meet our basic needs of food and shelter.
Motivation 2.0 is about reacting to rewards & punishments- chasing things that can lead to a reward and avoiding those that can lead to punishments.
This is essentially the carrots & sticks approach to management, which seemed to work until the 20th century but started breaking down afterward.
But what Harlow saw was something called intrinsic motivation- the monkeys were inherently driven to solve those puzzles- that was the end they were seeking, and nothing else. They were doing the task purely for the sake of it.
This intrinsic motivation (IM) is what the author Daniel Pink refers to as Motivation 3.0, and that is the key to the question we’re trying to answer.
We humans are driven by these IMs- the need to play, paint, make music, sell things, build relationships, write code, build apps, fight cases- you name it. Each human is different, and has a different set of IMs- and when these align with the work they’re doing, it sets the stage up for high performance.
The reason Motivation 2.0 style rewards and punishments worked is that for most of the industrial age, work was algorithmic and rule-driven: think of doing repetitive tasks on the factory floor. Incentives can help us get through monotonous work and finish it even if it’s as boring as the new Bollywood movies hitting our dying theatres.
But in the 21st Century, where more of our work is right-brained and requires some creativity, just incentives don’t work (even though people require adequate pay, without much motivation again drop to the floor).
Rather, it ends up worsening performance because it diverts us away from the joys of doing something (because we enjoy it) and narrows our focus to the cash reward being dangled.
This narrowing of vision is harmful- thinking creatively requires broadening our horizons and evaluating multiple possibilities- which is exactly what a narrowing of vision doesn’t allow us to do.
So if the modern-day employee needs to be handled with this new view of motivation and the old-school way doesn’t work (as shown by lab experiments and real-life experiences), what can companies and managers do?
The 3 Things People Need
The 3 things that can get employees to nurture their IMs and deliver better are autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
If people at the workplace get autonomy over how to manage their time, the way they perform their tasks, and the people they work with (this is difficult), it can lead to high performance. We’re inherent freedom-seekers, and given control over the way we work brings out the best in us.
The company 3M realized this and allowed people to spend 15% of their time on projects they enjoyed. This autonomy led one of their folks to discover Post-Its! Imagine- such an important product was created because someone was given the space & autonomy to work on what they wanted to.Similarly, Atlassian allows people to work on self-initiated projects for 20% of the time. This also creates the opportunity to master a particular skill- a pursuit that can deliver a lot of joy and keep people engaged in the long term.
Doing that is fun because it allows people to enter the flow state: where everything else drowns it and they’re completely absorbed in their work, to the point where they lose track of time (drinking a bottle of Absinthe to achieve the same goal doesn’t count). Creating more opportunities for people to experience flow and chase mastery will nurture their IMs.Finally, communicating the purpose of the organization and letting people see how their work fits into the larger scheme of things helps. We’re more purpose-maximizers than profit-maximizers, which is why it’s getting more common for GenZ to tune out of workplaces that don’t have a clear sense of direction.
We have a deep-seated need to contribute something larger than us- and if a workplace can address this need it’ll attract the best people because top talent is always driven more by IM than money or fame or a 20 Lakh family insurance cover.
As AI continues to eat algorithmic tasks and leaves room only for creative ones, the need to motivate people by tapping their IMs will only rise.
That’s why knowing how human motivation works has become critical.
Companies will have to make a choice: understand what drives people or be driven out of business.
Thanks for tuning in! This article is based on the book Drive by Daniel Pink.
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