This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Organizational Psychology for Managers
When motivation is focused around rewards and punishments, it is being done to people not with them. There are several problems with this approach.
First of all, as we touched on in the previous chapter, rewards need to be used carefully in order to motivate appropriately. The classical image of using rewards and punishments, as taught in many programs, is that you should always reward behavior you like and punish behavior you don’t like. As we’ve already observed, different people have different ideas of what constitutes a reward and what constitutes a punishment. Even if we all agree that being fired is punishment, firing people does not motivate them, it only gets rid of them.
A more serious problem, as we’ve discussed, is that when people are taught to work for a reward, they do exactly that. When the reward stops, so do they. Even worse, though, is that rewards cannot remain static: the same reward will not provide the same level of motivation.
Consider a serious athlete. They compete in a tournament and, after a few years of trying, they win. They might do it again, but if they are good enough, it’s not long before that tournament becomes too easy. It’s just not worth the effort for one more identical trophy. They look for something harder, something more challenging, with greater prestige or rewards. If they are good enough, they might make it to the world stage, at which point there are no more higher level competitions to win. However, there is always the possibility of winning multiple Olympic gold medals, as swimmer Michael Phelps did, or winning multiple years in a row, as fencer Mariel Zagunis attempted in 2012. Phelps retired after the 2012 Olympics when he successfully became the most decorated Olympian of all time. Zagunis narrowly missed becoming the first woman to ever win three Olympic gold medals in fencing in a row.
Left to our own devices, we seek greater challenge. We also expect the benefits of overcoming those challenges to be ever greater. Conversely, doing the same thing becomes boring. The less interesting or inherently attractive the task is, the greater the reward required to keep us focused on it.
Another problem with the reward and punishment approach is that it works best in a metaphorically quiet environment. The famous behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner once claimed that if he could completely control all inputs a person received, he could completely shape their behavior. In fact, it’s not even clear that it would work as well as he thought even if he did have someone in a box where he had total control. It does sound good though.
The real world is a noisy place. People are receiving a constant stream of inputs and are reacting to a variety of different stimuli. Many of your messages are going to get lost or misinterpreted in the shuffle. A small, inadvertent reward can negate a great deal of punishment: a smile, a laugh, a nod taken to mean approval can be enough.
People also resist crude behavioral manipulation. The smarter and more capable a person is, the less willing they are to feel that their behavior is being manipulated: manipulation infringes on their feelings of autonomy and competence. For them, the reward becomes not responding. There’s a big difference between having a coach push you and feeling that you are being forced into a behavior. Force triggers resistance. When deprived of control, we seek to reassert that control in some way.
I attended a jujitsu seminar in which the instructor, a skinny old man, effortlessly threw us around. When we tried the same technique on each other, we ended up sweating and gasping as we tried to force our partners to the ground. The instructor didn’t even work up a sweat. There was no sense of power, no feeling of being grabbed, but we just flew through the air. When we did it, we applied force. The more force you apply, the more the other person fights back. The secret to defeating your opponent is to let them throw themselves to the ground and the instructor was a master of allowing us to do just that.
All that being said, there are situations where rewards are effective. Rewards are extremely motivating when structured as feedback that you are working towards a goal, rather than being the goal itself. Rewards are also effective, perhaps even most effective, when done in ways that build a relationship: as we’ve discussed, remembering to give employees gifts on their birthdays is powerful technique for building motivation and loyalty.
It’s important to notice when your efforts at motivation are forcing you into a position where you have to apply more and more of your reward and coercive power. This is both exhausting on a personal level, and, if unsuccessful, it also reduces the effectiveness of that power. It’s time to try something different.
August 27th,2013
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As published in the CEO Refresher
For a great many years, the majority of discussions I’ve heard about the Superbowl focused on the ads. This year, of course, was different. Sure, there was plenty of speculation about the ads, but most of the discussion had to do with the New Orleans Saints finally qualifying. It’s not easy to have an even more losing reputation than the pre-2004 Boston Red Sox. At least Red Sox fans knew that their team had won the World Series once upon a time, albeit so long ago that the event was very nearly mythical. Indeed, the Sox qualified many times, only to snatch defeat from the very jaws of victory.
The Saints never got that far. They just lost. Until this year, when suddenly the big news was that they were playing in the Superbowl.
Naturally, the pundits were out in force in the days leading up to the game: detailed explanations for why New Orleans couldn’t possibly win, how the Colts were simply too strong, too well prepared, too skilled a team to be beaten, and so forth. The opinions were logical, well thought-out, and seemed to make perfect sense.
The reality, however, was something just a tiny bit different. On the Sunday before Mardi Gras, the Saints won the Superbowl.
How could so many experts have been so wrong? Frankly, outside of people who are extremely serious about football or people who bet large sums of money on the Colts, probably no one actually cares. In a business environment, however, having the experts be dramatically wrong can be expensive for more than just a few people. It can harm not just the people who made the mistake, but the rest of the organization as well. So perhaps the real question is what can be done to improve decision making accuracy and expert predictions within an organization?
The fact is, all those experts who were predicting victory for the Colts were relying on, well, expert opinion and “previous experience.” In this case, their “previous experience” with the Saints was that the Saints were not particularly good players. The Colts, on the other hand, were well-known to be a strong team. The pundits thus made the mistake of comparing the Colts of today to the Saints of yesterday. What they missed was that something had changed. The very fact of the Saints making it to the Superbowl was a signal that something was different this time around: either everyone else was playing a lot worse, or the Saints were playing a lot better.
In a business, the tendency is to apply expert opinion and previous experience to many situations. When the business is facing a difficult or intractable problem, potential solutions are often evaluated based on opinions of how that solution should work out based on its perceived similarity to some other situation. If the previous situation and the current situation are sufficiently similar, then you can make some reasonable predictions based on the past; indeed, the past is generally one of the most powerful methods available for predicting the future. The ability of an expert to correctly recognize points of similarity and draw valid conclusions from them is a very valuable one.
A break in similarity, however, is a clue that something major may have changed. It is a clue that the previous situation and, therefore, opinions and judgments based on that previous situation, may not apply. When that happens, it’s critical to recognize the change and be willing to disregard all of our expert judgments in favor of a slower, more careful evaluation.
Of course, if the pundits had recognized that the situation was too different to make a meaningful prediction, there wasn’t much they could have done: at some point, only actually doing the experiment, that is, playing the game, will give you an answer. In football, or most other sports, that’s part of the fun: if we always knew in advance who would win, it would be awfully boring.
In a business, though, boring can be good. So what do you do when you’re evaluating a potential solution to a problem?
It helps to look at the points of similarity between your solution to a problem and the situations you view as similar. What is the same? What is different? Do those differences represent a fundamental incongruity between the two situations? Or perhaps you can only see a small piece of the other situation. This is not all that unusual when one business looks at how another business is solving a problem: I worked with one small software company that decided to adopt the Microsoft Way, whatever that was. It didn’t matter though: they were going to price like Microsoft, develop like Microsoft, act like Microsoft. Unfortunately, they weren’t Microsoft. It didn’t work for them. It may have worked for Microsoft, but Microsoft had resources that this company did not. Pointing out that Microsoft didn’t do things that way when they were small didn’t gain any traction.
In this case, it can help to study other companies that look like your company to see how they are addressing similar problems. The greater the similarity, the more likely you are to get valuable information. Sometimes, the present, rather than the past, is the best predictor of the future!
Sometimes, of course, the best way to evaluate your solution is to rely on none of the above: personal experience, expert opinion, even a study of similar situations and companies, don’t provide you with enough valid data to evaluate your solution in the present. In that case, you might have to actually play the game: you need to figure out how you’ll know if your solution is successful in the long-term and the short-term. You need to know not just where you want to go, but also how you’ll know if you’re on track to getting there.
In the short-run, this is the most difficult approach. It involves taking some risks. It may also involve the biggest return.
Or you can settle for predicting the results of the game.
My first jujitsu sensei liked to frequently remind us that if you wanted to go from San Francisco to LA, you didn’t go by way of Portland, Oregon. Naturally, the wise-guys in the class, which included me, would make cracks about the airline schedules. I don’t know if there actually were flights that went from San Francisco to LA via Portland, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest!
Of course, the point my sensei was trying to make was that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. While this is certainly true in normal mathematics, fans of “A Wrinkle in Time,” might recall that a tesseract is the shortest distance between two points. While traveling via tesseract is purely science fiction, the fact remains that sometimes the direct route, that is, the straight line, is not the most rapid means of getting to your destination. Sometimes, you’re better off with a metaphorical tesseract. This is true in business and, as it happens, also in jujitsu (although that’s a separate topic). As a case in point, let’s look at the increasingly popular Results Oriented Work Environments (ROWE).
Read the rest at Corp! Magazine
I was recently interviewed on Youth Sport Radio on how to build confidence in young athletes. Funny thing… the same techniques work for older athletes and, with a very little modification, in a business setting as well.
August 17th,2009
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