Motivation
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When it comes to motivation, there’s a gap between what science knows and what business does. Our current business operating system–which is built around external, carrot-and-stick motivators–doesn’t work and often does harm. We need an upgrade. And the science shows the way. This new approach has three essential elements: 1. Autonomy – the desire to direct our own lives. 2. Mastery — the urge to get better and better at something that matters. 3. Purpose — the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.
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- Dan Pink: Drive
So, of course, we can consider this as the ingredients for helping to grow and retain motivation, which in turn results in greater performance. If any one of these is missing from an employees work-life...that is to say if their autonomy is restricted such that they can't perform their job as well as they otherwise could; or if the job itself doesn't contain tasks that enable them to learn and grow their skills; or if they do not feel a clear and obvious link to their contributions and a meaningful purpose, then performance will be non-optimal.
Back in 2014, Forrester published this:
You can see clear parallels between the road to flow containing alignment, enablement, ability, consulted and important, with autonomy, mastery and purpose. And the road to burnout being effectively the inverse. We see more evidence that organisations recognise the cost of stress and burnout to their business, but don’t recognise the activities that are driving people towards that burnout.
There’s a common misconception that a major part of burnout is the quantity of work that people are expected to do. In fact, it’s got a lot more to do with low motivation resulting from inadequate autonomy, mastery and purpose.
As a manager, what can you do?
Here are some tips for your 121s
Research in worker productivity reveals that the top 1% of performers in high-complexity knowledge work, such as engineers, systems analysts, and project managers, are 127% more productive than average performers and up to 47 times more productive than the bottom 1% of performers. We believe that firms that favor strict, centralized policies and control of technology resources will fall farther behind their competitors in employee motivation, customer service, and employee retention. Firms that instead favor investments in autonomy and improving information access on the go will have the advantage by increasing employee motivation and performance.
These numbers are huge but if you've had the opportunity to see, or to be part of a really high performing team, it's not hard to believe these figures.