Keep 'Em Playing on Your Street

"Who trains your people?" Robert Spector - author of The Nordstrom Way - once asked a member of the Nordstrom Board of Directors. The board member replied, "Their parents."

That's where motivation comes from? It has its beginning deep inside the employees themselves. They were born with some and their early upbringing hopefully added some more...and life experiences likely contributed along the way as well.

I know what you're thinking: "But what about incentives and reward programs? They're important too, right?" They ARE a helpful component to focus employee attention on what's most important to the organization, but they can easily backfire. Incentives tend to get employees to chase bonuses and short-term targets, skewing motivation toward "what's in it for me?" rather than doing the job well. The recent payout of bonuses at AIG is a perfect example of this.

If people are inspired and engaged and find meaning and pleasure in their work, they're motivated. Add bonuses and that's icing on the cake. But it ain't the cake. Create a workplace where employees feel like they belong, where they can contribute in a meaningful way, and they have fun...you'll touch them deeply and elicit a powerful response. It's called motivation.

The story is told of Charles Handy, a prolific and profound writer, suffering from writer's block one day. A bunch of kids came by and were playing outside his window. The sounds of their laughter and frolicking made his creative juices flow and the words tumbled onto the page. He went out and told them how delighted he was that they chose that spot to play, how it helped him write, and then he asked them to come back and play the next day.

They did. The same thing happened. He wrote fluently and asked them to return. They did. And at the end of the third day, he was so excited about how much work he'd gotten done with them playing outside his window that he ran out and cried, "Come back tomorrow and I'll give you a pound!" (the equivalent of about two bucks in U.S. dollars).

Next day: no kids. Handy goes looking for them and finds them playing one street over. "Why didn't you come back," he asked?

"For a pound it wasn't worth it," they replied with disdain.

Unwittingly, Handy had put a price on what the kids had innately enjoying doing...and they found the price lacking. They took their motivation one street over.

How do you use inspiration to light the fire of motivation that's already burning inside the people you work with? Are they playing on your street or have they moved one street over?

Comments

[Todd Razor]

Interesting post on motives. I've been thinking a lot lately about where my motivation comes from. Thank you for you insight.

[Dan Topf]

I suggest that motivation is often not an issue of the individual, but an issue in the work environment. See the link above to research by Richard Clark at USC. It is vital that work environments His research shows that everyone is motivated in some way, but that performance suffers in the workplace due to universal de-motivators, and it's the de-motivators that we ought to concern ourselves with:Dishonesty, Vague or Unrealistic Goals, Unnecessary Work Rules, Constant Competition with Everyone, and Prejudicial Feedback. I would offer that for business, it's more important to focus on the work environment than the individuals in it.

[Dan Topf]

http://www.cogtech.usc.edu/publications/clark_fostering.pdf

I see that my link didn't post. Here it is again.