I’ve Looked at Motivation From Both Sides Now – The Path To Understanding

I've taken a lot of chiding lately about my obsession with Dan Pink and his new book “Drive” (review here.)  I have an innate dislike for any theory, point of view or idea that is so singularly adopted by the masses.  It always seems to me that when something gets that much airplay, there is something missing in the conversation. 

Black and white opinions are the arena of young minds.  

If time and experience teaches us anything it is that nothing is black and white.  Grey is the color of the world of thought and to truly understand and apply any principle one must take a look at both sides of an argument and develop your position based on both points of view.

When confronted with such “fan-boy” dedication to an idea I have to ask “why?”  Why is that opinion resonating so strongly with the group?  In other words, before I seek to tell them they are wrong, I ask myself why I might be wrong.  It’s not always easy to challenge yourself.  I have been wrong in the past (usually I find that I’m mistaken in that as well.)  

So I sat this weekend and asked myself what I was missing.  Why didn’t I jump on the bandwagon along with others as it relates to the discussion between motivation and incentives in the book "Drive?"

I came up with two things: 

1. We are not talking about the same thing and 
2. We like any theory that gives us control

Definitions Make Difference

Dan Pink in "Drive" is talking about what motivates us.  I’m talking about how companies can influence behavior.  

BIG, BIG, BIG difference.  

If a company wants to have “motivated” employees providing autonomy, mastery and purpose (AMP) are the tools to do that.  Motivation is how I feel toward something.  Motivation is my opinion – my desire.  Motivation is the internal yardstick I use to decide if I want to keep doing something.  If I don’t feel it – I stop doing it.  If it makes me feel good – I keep doing it.  The key word in all of that is “I.”

Motivation is not the same as offering an incentive.  Incentives are external awards “offered” contingent upon an outcome.  On this Dan Pink and I agree.  I also believe incentive programs do NOT provide motivation (collective gasp from the incentive industry here.)

Incentive programs provide direction.  

Incentive programs provide employees (and channel partners/consumers) with clues to what you as the sponsor think they should be working on/toward.  To say that an incentive program increases or decreases motivation is wrong.  Incentives are simply a way to communicate to your audience that you would like them to channel their behavior in a specific direction.  The audience still has the choice to accept the guidance – or not.  The participants in a program can determine if the award is valuable enough to them to make them want to change behavior.  The incentive doesn’t change motivation – it changes behavior.

Nothing in that previous paragraph has anything to do with motivation.  The audience is still internally driven to do what they want to do.  The incentive didn’t change their motivation.  The incentive gave them an ADDITIONAL target, reason, goal, over and above their internal drive.

Incentives and Motivation are not mutually exclusive.

As an organization you can have a work environment that allows employees to focus on autonomy, mastery and purpose – AND – provide them with incentives to communicate what you think is important within that environment.  Properly designed incentives guide an employee toward personal and organizational goals without disrupting their pursuit of mastery or purpose.  

Understanding that motivation and incentives are two distinct things will help you determine how best to apply them.  I agree that the “AMP” approach will create a much more engaged workforce.  Those three elements are hard to argue with.  When given the ability to do what we do best, and get better at it and do if for a purpose greater than ourselves we are motivated, engaged, heck you might even say fanatical about the work.

But from an organizational standpoint it is impossible to run a company without guidelines, goals and objectives.  We need to provide directional clues to our employees to ensure they know what is valuable and important in the organization.  Without external influence –ie: incentives – we lose an important tool for influencing behavior (notice I didn’t say motivation.)

The problem for most companies is they choose one over the other.  Companies decide to ONLY use incentives or – eschew incentives altogether.  Neither approach is correct.  Try to guide an organization of engaged employees without incentives and you have chaos.  Try to run a program with only incentives and you have unmotivated, mercenary, disengaged, automatons.  Neither is acceptable.

We Don’t Like To Be Controlled

My second thought was this… No one wants to believe they are being controlled.  Given the option between free will and control we choose free will every time.  Any theory that tells us that we are 100% in control of our destiny is attractive.  We don’t want believe we can be controlled.  And we rebel against it.  The concepts in “Drive” speak to our innate desire to be free.  Who wouldn’t want that?

Incentives speak to control.  I think that those that have sold incentive programs from the “Antecedents, Behavior, Consequences” (ABC) point of view are the biggest problem for the word incentive.   Which is BS in my opinion – we're not rats or dogs.

But we have free will (or so we think – check with Scott Adams from Dilbert fame – he doesn’t think we do) and the idea that an incentive program takes away our desire to do what we like, are good at and enjoy – is anathema.  

Correctly applied incentive programs can work in harmony with the “AMP” approach.  It’s just not as easy as lobbing an objective at the team and a trip to Cancun upon achievement. 

It’s an Issue of Proportions

Think of your strategy in this way:

I’m going with this rule of thumb:  

If the “surface area” of your incentive applications exceed 50% of the work you’re doing to promote the “AMP” approach you’ll have problems.

Stop trying to do motivation – start using well-designed incentive programs to guide behavior within the AMP construct.  That is how you will achieve your goals.