Motivation & Performance
I attended a Slack Frontiers conference today on the Future of Work, and heard a talk that I needed to share. The fantastic talk was given by Lindsay McGregor, and it was all about professional performance. Having studied a bit of HR and leadership in business school (and work), I thought this would be another boring talk regurgitating the same topics. It wasn’t. It was so profound I had to rewrite the ideas with the slides I took pictures of. The conclusions are mine, so I’ll use my words to explain what I took away, but the hard work is hers and the talk has much better stories/much more engaging.
In our workplaces, there is a need for harmony between tactical performance and adaptive performance. Tactical performance is doing the things that you need to do — basically stuff you are told to do. While adaptive performance is being given the freedom to be creative and focus on a wider set of metrics.
An example is of a call centre. We have all called customer support where we knew someone on the other end was reading a script. Heck, I did that for Ivey when I was calling for alumni donations. The script was a tactical tool, and sticking to it was excelling at tactical performance. We’ve also seen the opposite, which was calling a call centre where 3 different people each had 3 different solutions to our problems. In this case, each person was presenting an adaptive solution, that was not totally inline with company protocol. A combination of both of these things would help the company succeed, and provide the right value to the customer.
If we know we need a combination of these two things, how do we get that out of our employees? We have to start with motivation. What are the things that motivate us? And can we put them in a spectrum from most motivating to least? Ofcourse we can.
Firstly, lets outline the three distinct areas of where motivation comes from. It comes from the work itself, the identity and values we uphold, and the external forces that drive us. Now within these three buckets, there resides 6 triggers of motivation.
- Play: This is how fun we deem work to be. An example is solving a complex coding challenge, or identifying how to pitch a new feature. Outside tech, it could be helping a patient feel better, teaching a student something new, designing the next great residential project etc.
- Purpose: This is what drives us to work at certain companies over others. This is why some of us would never work for an alcohol or guns company, while others would never work at Facebook. Its the purpose or the problem the overall company is trying to solve and how it relates to what we think we are doing on Earth.
- Potential: This has to do with a combination of where we see our abilities, and what we think we can learn from our workplaces. Its what the outcome of our efforts will be in our professional lives.
Each of the three above things is our direct motives. These are core reasons for us doing something. Next we have indirect motives.
- Emotional pressure: Guilt trips, fomo, etc are all part of emotional pressure. We are highly emotional beings and whether we like it or not, our decisions are always based on feelings. If we feel we may miss out on the next rocket ship company, or New York is the best place to work, we may make a professional decision thinking its a direct motive when it isn’t.
- Economic pressure: Doing something for the money or the benefits. This is probably why so many people go into finance. It’s not wrong, but its clear there is some sort of extrinsic motivation.
- Inertia: This is is doing things because you’ve been doing it. This is working in fintech because you’ve always worked in fintech. Or sticking at a company because you’re scared of finding something better. When you ask yourself on a Wednesday afternoon, why you are still at company X doing job Y….inertia.
Now if we were to plot these on to a graph, here is what it would look like:
Notice the top three, direct motives, are all to do with your values and the work, and the bottom three are all to do with mostly external forces? Inertia however goes across the board because it ranges from your personality, to the type of job you have, all the way to what else is happening in your life that forces inertia to occur.
Now a high degree of direct motives will lead to higher total motivation (or tomo), where higher indirect motives will lead to substantially lower tomo. It’s obvious that high tomo leads to better performance, both tactically and adaptively. However, there are levels to low tomo, and that is what most organisations face. Lets break this down before moving on to the next slide.
- High tomo: At this level, tactical and adaptive performance is high and maladaptive performance is low. We know why we are at work, and it feels great being there.
- Decreasing tomo — Distraction effect: There might be less play or less potential at work, but a rise in some indirect motives to stick around. This causes high tactical performance as we are still able to do the job we are told. We can still check all the boxes, but we keep getting distracted. We read the news, we take longer coffees, etc. This is where adaptive performance — our ability to be creative, goes down to medium.
- Decreasing tomo — Cancellation effect: Indirect motives have taken over, and we are unfortunately just checking the boxes. At this stage we are doing the minimum, if any adaptive performance related tasks at work. Remember when you go grocery shopping and you ask for help from a clerk and they can’t be bothered? The clerk has checked out.
- Decreased tomo — Cobra effect: This is where you still do the work that is required of you, but you do such a bad job that it actually hurts the company. Usually this is a product of bad company culture, or poor evaluation metrics. In this case, the adaptive performance is so low, its in fact maladaptive. The reason its called the cobra effect, was because rumour has it, in Delhi the Brits set up a bounty for anyone who killed a cobra. Indians, being as smart as they are, set up cobra farms to claim more bounty. Upon the Brits hearing this, they shut down the bounty program…so the Indian snake farmers released the snakes into the city. While the tactical performance worked, it ended up hurting the city more than helping it.
One conclusion here is that if we are purely motivated by indirect motives, we will likely complete the tactical work, but perform purely on adaptive tasks. We won’t be creative, and we’ll just check off all the boxes where possible. You could argue this is what happens in most massive company scandals, where good, hard working employees, lose their real motivations and end up working with external pressures. This creates poor performances that hurt customers and companies in the long run.
All of this ties back to culture and management. As employees, I learned that we are all good at doing the job we are told, but if you want the best out of us..if you want true adaptive performance, our motivations need to be inline. The minute work stops being play, the minute we switch our purpose, or lose sight of the potential, something is wrong and we as employees are starting to hurt the company and ourselves. The reality of life ofcourse, is that when that happens, we can’t just quit our jobs. But we can change our frame of mind and focus on the learnings behind our work.
As managers, we should understand the motivations of our employees. While play (or flow state) is hard to achieve, there are ways to encourage that. Part of it is creating more autonomy or ownership for work. Few managers I work for ask about my purpose and my values, and we can definitely ask this question more often of our colleagues. Lastly, potential or mastery is a focus on improving and getting better. No one wants to do the same thing forever, so creating small career plans or providing mentorship can go a long way to build a strong company culture.
We all want motivated employees, and we all know what we are like when we are in a state of total motivation. Lets evaluate and re-evaluate until we get there, and hopefully the above helps you do that.
Further reading:
