C
Comment | Catalyst
Going beyond purpose: the
secret to motivating people in work
T
en years ago, the US
psychologist Daniel
Pink published a
groundbreaking
book, Drive, in which
he outlined three factors that truly
motivate people in work: autonomy,
mastery and purpose. In the past few
years, organisations have come to grips
with the idea of purpose. But autonomy
and mastery have proved harder to
crack. Now, thanks in particular to
demands from a millennial workforce
for work that motivates, their time
has come.
Autonomy is a sense of the extent
to which someone can choose what
they do, when they do it, and how. It’s
not, despite some managers’ fears, a
recipe for anarchy or chaos. Instead,
it’s the way-overdue acknowledgement
that humans in the workplace are
intelligent beings, rather than cogs
in a bigger process, able to manage
themselves and their work in a truly
smart way.
It means being allowed to work at
home or overnight if that suits us, to
work without micro-management and
oppressive supervision, and having
our own sense of how our own focus,
energy and ability to think vary during
the day respected and taken account of.
Mastery refers to how often (or
how seldom) we find ourselves facing
interesting, medium-sized challenges
at work. These are not the challenges
that are so large that even thinking
about them paralyses us. Nor are they
those almost negligible challenges
that we can do with our attention
barely engaged. Rather, they are
tasks that require us to take a small
step outside our comfort zone, that
involve us making an extra effort to
accomplish, but which give us, when
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we complete them, that wonderful
feeling of satisfaction and the sense of
a job well done.
What’s startling about modern
work is how little autonomy people
are really given and how few satisfying
challenges they face. Many managers
still correlate people’s performance
with the time they spend in the office.
(It’s not their fault that they do this, by
the way; it’s the lack of being trained
in alternative ways to assess them.)
David
Baker
“It’s ridiculous
in the 21st
century, with all
the tools
available to us,
that work for so
many people is
still drudgery”
And having members of their team out
of sight and out of touch – autonomy
also implies the right not to be
contactable if you are concentrating on
a project – gives them understandable
feelings of anxiety.
Similarly, managers tend to hand out
tasks to people they know can do them
well (an apparently logical choice – we
like people to “play to their strengths”),
but one that keeps everyone in their
comfort zone and results in virtually
no one being stretched.
Instead, we need to promote
autonomy and mastery to the top of the
values of work. As long as they deliver
what we need by the time we need it, we
ought to trust others to work to their
own rhythm, in their own way.
We need to reward people for
working smartly by giving them the
rest of the day off if they finish a task
early, rather than punishing them
by giving them something else to do.
And we need to cultivate our teams’
brains and souls by giving them tasks
that are well thought-out, interestingly
challenging and rewarding to complete.
When Pink discovered the triad of
autonomy, mastery and purpose, he
uncovered a formula for good work
that still applies today. It’s time for
us to embed all three of them in the
way we work. It’s ridiculous in the 21st
century, with all the tools available to
us, that work for so many people is still
drudgery, something they dread when
they wake up in the morning.
Work with autonomy, mastery and
purpose is the opposite of this: it is the
work that talented people demand and
everyone should expect.
David Baker is a writer, coach and
consultant. He was the launch
managing editor of Wired in the UK.