The old command-and-control model doesn’t work any more, says management guru Dan Pink
It’s easy to blame the relentless economic gloom and the constant tide of corporate scandals for the crisis of trust and engagement in Britain’s businesses, but the truth is employees’ confidence in their employers was in decline long before the banking sector brought the economy to its knees. That’s because we are relying on outdated management techniques and rewarding people for short-term thinking, says Dan Pink, best-selling author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. As he teams up with the CIPD to deliver a range of workshops (see below), People Management asked him about the right balance of carrot and stick.
Why are businesses having so much trouble engaging their staff?
We tend to think that management has always been here, but it is just something some guy invented in the 1850s. It’s a brilliant technology but it is designed to get compliance. What we have is a set of motivational mechanisms that were good for 19th century work and not bad for 20th century work. But they have outlived their usefulness for most 21st century work. If you ask people when they were most engaged at work, they don’t say: “I was so engaged when my boss told me exactly what to do.” So the challenge – and it’s one that the CIPD is grappling with – is to prepare people for the workforce of now rather than the workforce of yesterday.
How could we improve motivation?
There’s a certain kind of reward we use in organisations, I call it an “if-then” reward – if you do this, then you get that. Social science tells us that if‑then rewards are effective for simple, short‑term technical work but are less effective for jobs that require more creativity. If-then rewards narrow people’s vision and time horizons. You can’t see the fundamental systemic changes if your focus is narrow and short-term. Kodak was so focused on objectives that it met all its targets – and made a brilliant job of being in the wrong business [making camera film]. The world changed underneath it. Dell hit all its numbers until people stopped buying PCs and bought tablets instead. This is what happens if you don’t have a wider vision.
Does that mean we should ditch performance-related pay and stop giving people bonuses?
There isn’t an easy answer to that. Money narrows your vision but the problem with if-then rewards isn’t the money, the problem is the if-then part. That is a form of control and people don’t do their best in complicated tasks under conditions of control. Money matters a heck of a lot, yet people can think about the work more if they are not thinking about the money.
If we can’t rely on financial carrots, how can we motivate people?
What we do now is to use if-then rewards where the science tells us they work and go to another mechanism where they don’t work. That mechanism is typically built around three key ideas – autonomy, mastery and purpose.
The first is the principle of self-direction – the way that human beings get engaged is by getting there under their own steam. The second one is mastery – one of the most powerful human motivators out there is getting better at something. People do this all the time in non-work realms such as sport. The final one is purpose. Purpose with a capital “P” is “let’s change the world”; purpose with a small “p” is more important – it’s “does what I do matter?” I think a lot of people have doubts about that and in that case they disengage.
What will happen if we don’t change the way we motivate and reward people?
Ultimately, the system is unsustainable. You can run an old operating system on a new computer but it is going to crash. I still think it’s amazing that if I want to know the population of, say, Liverpool, I can find it on my phone in seconds, but my kids’ attitude is “that’s just how it is”. So you have this whole new generation of people who have lived their lives with rich, robust, meaningful feedback. Then we stick them in organisations and even the enlightened ones give feedback only twice a year.
Do you think businesses are up to the challenge?
I don’t think there is much of a choice. What’s interesting now, as we crawl slowly out of this recession, is that it offers us an opportunity to do some serious rethinking. The way we do that isn’t necessarily to wave a magic wand: we just need to run our businesses a little better. Everybody has the capacity to be more innovative and creative. When we look at somebody who is passive and inert in the workplace, we tend to think that’s how they are but I’m convinced that is learned behaviour. You are not going to take someone who is sluggish and inert and suddenly get them inventing the next iPad Mini – but you can help that person become a bit more autonomous.
A lot of young companies are embedding autonomy, mastery and purpose from the beginning. You also see initiatives such as “ShipIt Days” taking hold in some bigger companies – one day of intense, undiluted autonomy, where people can work on whatever they want for a day, provided they show what they’ve created to their colleagues 24 hours later. No rewards, no punishments, no million-dollar bonuses for coming up with a good idea. What this does is to give people an island of autonomy in an otherwise somewhat controlling environment. Over and over again, people do creative conceptual work when they have a certain measure of autonomy and freedom.
What’s HR’s role in this?
The most important thing any individual HR professional can do is to challenge orthodoxy. Are if-then rewards the best way to motivate? Are yearly performance reviews the best way to provide feedback? Some of those orthodoxies are going to hold up, yet in many cases they are not. Rejecting all the orthodoxies is in some ways foolhardy, but the idea that just simply continuing to do something because that’s how we’ve always done it is very dangerous. We also need to change the lens through which we look at the workforce. There is a lot of inertia behind certain kinds of work practices. The CIPD can be that outside force that explains to business why we need to point in a different direction.
THINK PINK
Autonomy
• Look for opportunities for staff to set their own schedule
• Focus on whether work is getting done, not how
Mastery
• Work with your team to identify steps each member can take to improve
• Ask people to identify how they will know they are making progress
Purpose
• When giving instructions for a task, share the why as well as the how
• Think about how people can experience the organisation’s purpose directly
CHANGE AGENT
Peter Cheese, CIPD CEO, on working with Dan Pink
The world is changing faster than many organisations and leaders are, and our own profession must also catch up. The scale of challenge is greater than ever before, and we need equivalent scales of response.
Everyone is now talking about failures in leadership, behaviours and organisational culture. These are easy to point at but hard to fix. Organisations struggle to truly engage their employees behind a clear, shared purpose, and to motivate them to deliver innovation, competitive advantage and superior performance. We need “game changers”, to challenge established orthodoxies.
Dan Pink challenges those orthodoxies. His assessment of the flawed ways in which we try to manage and incentivise people, by design or by default, is incisive. His perspective is built on a deep understanding of psychology and the drivers of engagement, and his solutions are driven by compelling back-to-basics thinking, making them capable of being readily translated into practice by HR and line managers.
This is why the CIPD is working with thought leaders like Dan. As a profession, we need to be consistently challenging approaches to management and motivation, to re-evaluate prevailing practice, particularly given the challenging context we are in. Our collaboration with Dan Pink means we can exclusively offer his workshops to individuals and to organisations in the UK. “Drive: The Surprising Truth about Workplace Motivation” is a workshop that will enable HR and line managers to unlock the human desire for autonomy, mastery and purpose: the route to delivering truly engaged staff. For more information about the Drive workshops, visit cipd.co.uk/drive/pm
✶ The CIPD is running free ‘Drive’ taster sessions on 29 May. You can find full details at cipd.co.uk/drive/taster