A few years ago, I was talking to the teenage son of a friend of mine about the upcoming season of his high school swimming team. Ever since he was a young boy, I had known “Chad” (as I’ll call him) to be inseparable from any body of water in his vicinity. Pool, pond, lake - you name it, he was in it. It only made sense for his parents to get him involved in organized competition at the earliest opportunity.
So when I asked him about his team’s prospects, I was shocked when he said, “I don’t think I’m going out for swimming this year.”
“You’re not? Why not?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it just isn’t fun anymore.”
Now I suppose this is the point where a well-meaning adult could respond with something like “It isn’t all supposed to be fun. Anything worth having is worth working for.” But, as he described his situation some more, I got a sense that his real issue wasn’t so much with the work involved. It was that the whole effort had become more about winning trophies, shooting for scholarships, and pleasing adults than about the joy of swimming that had led him into the water in the first place.
I think that Chad’s experience was another good example of the downsides of relying too heavily on external incentives to motivate people. Not only do incentives have their limitations as a means to spur performance but also – as Daniel Pink demonstrates in his book Drive - they can actually serve as a demotivator.
Pink surveys a variety of behavioral studies that demonstrate the discouraging effects of loading external inducements on top of tasks that people are inherently motivated to perform. In one study, researchers tracked a group of art students over the course of several years. The researchers found that the students who pursued their painting primarily for the pleasure of the activity itself ultimately produced art that was socially recognized as superior to the art produced by students who were more interested in monetary rewards. In another study, a group who had expressed an interest in donating blood and then were offered a monetary payment as an added inducement were less likely to go through with their donation than a similar group who were offered nothing. The reason, Pink notes, was that adding the monetary incentive “tainted an altruistic act and ‘crowded out’ the intrinsic desire to do something good.”
I think this sense of “crowding out” intrinsic desire can also explain what happened to Chad. As his participation in swimming became more about attaining external recognition and less about experiencing the sheer pleasure of cutting through the water, his intrinsic desire was gradually doused.
Pink cautions against drawing the conclusion that there is something inherently “evil” about extrinsic incentives. The real point, says Pink, is that “mixing rewards with inherently interesting, creative, or noble tasks is a very dangerous game.” You may not get the results you anticipate – in fact, you may get precisely what you don’t want.
REFLECTIONS FOR THE YES! LEADER
So can you motivate your people by enriching them? Yes – by “enriching” the job itself! As Daniel Pink’s examples show, leveraging people’s internal motivators can result in long-term commitment to their work, as opposed to the short bursts of effort induced (or not) by external motivators. What you need to do is align the job with a person’s natural inclination to create, perform, and succeed.
In her book Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em, Beverly Kaye includes an entire chapter on what she calls the “Enrich” strategy for engaging people. As she writes, “Job enrichment means change in what your employees do (content) or how they do it (process). Enrichment structures ways for employees to find the growth, challenge, and renewal they seek without leaving their current jobs or employers.”
Kaye suggests six questions to pose to people to help probe for possibilities of enrichment. What would happen if you asked your people these questions – and then found ways to take action on the answers?
· Do you know how your job is important to the company?
· What skills do you use on the job? What talents do you have that you don’t use?
· What about your job do you find challenging? Rewarding?
· In what areas would you like increased responsibility for your current tasks?
· What would you like to be doing in the next three to five years?
· In what ways would you like your job changed?
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