How Will You Measure Your Life?. James Allworth

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СКАЧАТЬ company, a lot of the senior executives used to be engineers. During that period of their lives, they seemed to be motivated by the work itself. They didn’t need incentives—right? So then what happened? When they became executives, did they morph into other beings—types of people that needed financial incentives to work hard? Is that what you are telling me?”

      As the discussion in the class continued that day, I sensed a broadening rift between my world and that of some of my students. In their world, it seemed that incentives made the world go round. And in mine—well, I had worked with Diana and her colleagues.

      How could we see something so fundamental in such different ways?

      A Better Theory of Motivation

      The answer lies in a deep chasm about how the concepts of incentives and motivation relate to each other. There are two broad camps on this question.

      Back in 1976, two economists, Michael Jensen and William Meckling, published a paper that has been committed to memory by those in the first camp. The paper, which has been one of the most widely cited of the past three decades, focused on a problem known as agency theory, or incentive theory: why don’t managers always behave in a way that is in the best interest of shareholders? The root cause, as Jensen and Meckling saw it, is that people work in accordance with how you pay them. The takeaway was that you have to align the interests of executives with the interests of shareholders. That way, if the stock goes up, executives are compensated better, and it makes both shareholders and executives happy. Although Jensen and Meckling didn’t specifically argue for huge pay packages, their thinking about what causes executives to focus on some things and not others is financial incentives. Indeed, the drive toward top performance has been widely used as an argument for skyrocketing compensation under the guise of “aligning incentives.”

      It is not just my students who have become believers in this theory. Many managers have adopted Jensen and Meckling’s underlying thinking—believing that when you need to convince others that they should do one thing and not another, you just need to pay them to do what you want them to do, when you want them to do it. It’s easy, it’s measurable; in essence, you are able to simply delegate management to a formula. Even parents can default to thinking that external rewards are the most effective way to motivate the behavior they want from their children—for example, offering their children a financial reward as an incentive for every A on a report card.

      One of the best ways to probe whether you can trust the advice that a theory is offering you is to look for anomalies—something that the theory cannot explain. Remember our story about birds, feathers, and flight? The early aviators might have seen some warning signs in their rudimentary analysis of flight had they examined what their beliefs or theories could not explain. Ostriches have wings and feathers but can’t fly. Bats have wings but no feathers, and they are great fliers. And flying squirrels have neither wings nor feathers … and they get by.

      The problem with principal-agent, or incentives, theory is that there are powerful anomalies that it cannot explain. For example, some of the hardest-working people on the planet are employed in nonprofits and charitable organizations. Some work in the most difficult conditions imaginable—disaster recovery zones, countries gripped by famine and flood. They earn a fraction of what they would if they were in the private sector. Yet it’s rare to hear of managers of nonprofits complaining about getting their staff motivated.

      You might dismiss these workers as idealists. But the military attracts remarkable people, too. They commit their lives to serving their country. But they are not doing it for financial compensation. In fact, it’s almost the opposite—working in the military is far from the best-paid job you can take. Yet in many countries, including the United States, the military is considered a highly effective organization. And a lot of people who work in the military get a deep sense of satisfaction from their work.

      How, then, do we explain what is motivating them if it’s not money?

      Well, there is a second school of thought—often called two-factor theory, or motivation theory—that turns the incentive theory on its head. It acknowledges that you can pay people to want what you want—over and over again. But incentives are not the same as motivation. True motivation is getting people to do something because they want to do it. This type of motivation continues, in good times and in bad.

      Frederick Herzberg, probably one of the most incisive writers on the topic of motivation theory, published a breakthrough article in the Harvard Business Review, focusing on exactly this. He was writing for a business audience, but what he discovered about motivation applies equally to us all.

      Herzberg notes the common assumption that job satisfaction is one big continuous spectrum—starting with very happy on one end and reaching all the way down to absolutely miserable on the other—is not actually the way the mind works. Instead, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are separate, independent measures. This means, for example, that it’s possible to love your job and hate it at the same time.

      Let me explain. This theory distinguishes between two different types of factors: hygiene factors and motivation factors.

      On one side of the equation, there are the elements of work that, if not done right, will cause us to be dissatisfied. These are called hygiene factors. Hygiene factors are things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices. It matters, for example, that you don’t have a manager who manipulates you for his own purposes—or who doesn’t hold you accountable for things over which you don’t have responsibility. Bad hygiene causes dissatisfaction. You have to address and fix bad hygiene to ensure that you are not dissatisfied in your work.

      Interestingly, Herzberg asserts that compensation is a hygiene factor, not a motivator. As Owen Robbins, a successful CFO and the board member who chaired our compensation committee at CPS Technologies, once counseled me, “Compensation is a death trap. The most you can hope for (as CEO) is to be able to post a list of every employee’s name and salary on the bulletin board, and hear every employee say, ‘I sure wish I were paid more, but darn it, this list is fair.’ Clayton, you might feel like it is easy to manage this company by giving incentives or rewards to people. But if anyone believes that he is working harder but is being paid less than another person, it would be like transplanting cancer into this company.” Compensation is a hygiene factor. You need to get it right. But all you can aspire to is that employees will not be mad at each other and the company because of compensation.

      This is an important insight from Herzberg’s research: if you instantly improve the hygiene factors of your job, you’re not going to suddenly love it. At best, you just won’t hate it anymore. The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction. They’re not the same thing at all. It is important to address hygiene factors such as a safe and comfortable working environment, relationship with managers and colleagues, enough money to look after your family—if you don’t have these things, you’ll experience dissatisfaction with your work. But these alone won’t do anything to make you love your job—they will just stop you from hating it.

      The Balance of Motivators and Hygiene Factors

      So, what are the things that will truly, deeply satisfy us, the factors that will cause us to love our jobs? These are what Herzberg’s research calls motivators. Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. Feelings that you are making a meaningful contribution to work arise from intrinsic conditions of the work itself. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work.

      Hopefully, you’ve had experiences in your life that have satisfied Herzberg’s motivators. If you have, you’ll recognize the difference between that and an experience СКАЧАТЬ