Continuing Education for Technical Professionals
You Can't Motivate Employees!
(Part 1 of a 3 part series)
by Susan de la Vergne
No one can persuade me to get excited about something I’m not naturally excited about. No form of incentive, no sums of money, no amount of community reinforcement can make me genuinely rev up about something I don’t especially care about or believe in.
Business leaders who think money, incentives, or even threats are “motivating” their employees are kidding themselves. “Finish this project ahead of schedule and there’s a bonus in it for you!” is tying a reward to a specific outcome. While it may result in short-term behavior changes (longer hours, more focus on the task), that’s hardly the same as motivating people.
Motivated, committed, engaged employees care about what they do and why they do it. They get up and come to work every day because they care about it. It’s not a short-term energy surge; it’s a way of life.
So the truth is you can’t motivate people because people motivate themselves.
What, then, can you as a business leader do to help them get there?
You can create the best conditions under which people motivate themselves.
If you’re asking yourself, “Good grief, what conditions are those?” here’s the answer:
Sense of Purpose: What is it about your job that gets you out of bed in the morning? What contribution to the betterment of anything are you, personally, making every day?
Leadership: Competent, trustworthy, genuine, conscientious innovators who are glad to be on the job every day! (Well, okay, most days.)
Organizational Character: The integrity and consistency of choices and decisions the organization makes. More than “how we do things around here,” but the principles that guide why we do them that way.
Sense of Purpose
Most people want there to be some meaning in the work they do, something more than hours of labor that result in a bi-weekly paycheck. The paycheck is necessary, of course, but at the end of the day, we want to think we’ve done something more than that.
A little over 30 years ago, an extraordinary book came out that remains the definitive examination of people in jobs – Working, by world class journalist Studs Terkel. He met and listened to workers around the nation, capturing their thoughts and feelings about the jobs they were doing, the on-the-job experiences they’d had. A recurring theme in this narrative is that employees want to feel they’re doing something that matters.
“You throw yourself into things because you feel that important questions – self-discipline, goals, a meaning of your life – are carried out in your work,” says one of the more than 100 workers whose voices Terkel captured.
Keeping an eye on why our companies are in the business they’re in sounds easy enough, but it isn’t often enough what employees are reminded of. For one thing, it’s difficult to measure purpose. There aren’t generally accepted accounting practices that quantify how much of a company’s operations are fulfilling that purpose.
Perhaps that’s why it goes in and out of focus for so many employees. They’re more often aware of the stock price, the latest cost-cutting measures, and the current steps being taken to meet that all-important end-of-quarter earnings report.
“You cannot inspire employees by urging them to help management get the company’s stock price up,” says Bill George in his book Authentic Leadership. “Employees today are seeking meaning in their work.”
In his Harvard Business Review article (December 2002), “What’s a Business For?” Charles Handy recognizes the same thing: “The contribution ethic has always been a strong motivating force. To survive, even to prosper, is not enough.… We need to associate with a cause in order to give purpose to our lives.”
Purpose: Every business has one. To deliver electricity that sustains lives and livelihood. To conduct research that leads to life-improving discoveries. To build bridges across cultures. To renovate civic infrastructure. To promote learning, restore rivers, capture history, heal the sick, enable new businesses.
It could be anything, but it needs to be front and center in the hearts, minds and conscious attention of the people who do the jobs and the people who lead them.
Motivated, engaged, even enthusiastic employees believe in what they do. Business leadership must also and must remind people “why we do what we do” so that employees can align themselves and their individual jobs with the contribution.
Next issue: You Can’t Motivate People – Part 2 – Leadership
© 2006 Susan de la Vergne. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.