So you’re passionate about what you do now and that comes across in the way you talk and the decisions you make. The next challenge is how you’re going to pass this on to your staff and your team so that they feel the same way. And you can’t expect them to be as passionate about everything as you, to begin with. Sure, it would be nice if they were and if they had that ‘implicit’ motivation. But in reality, a lot of your staff are just there to make money so that they can go home to their partners and kids. They have their own dreams.
So how do you motivate them and get them on board?
Why Incentives Don’t Work
One method is to try and use incentives: that means offering money or other rewards. Unfortunately, though, this simply doesn’t tend to work – it fosters poor teamwork and can actually prevent your team from working their best.
It can even make a team less motivated!
This is best illustrated by something called the ‘candle experiment’, which is an experiment designed to test creativity. Specifically, it is designed to test the ability to overcome a ‘cognitive bias’ called ‘functional fixedness’.
Essentially, functional fixedness causes us to get stuck in one way of thinking, usually about a tool or a task. Here, we tend to fixate on one way of doing something, to the point where we can no longer think of any other solutions or any other contexts.
So for example, if someone were to give you a hammer and ask you to open a window, you might smash the glass rather than use the hammer as a lever to pry the window open. Why? Because you can only think of the hammer terms of its main use: hitting things. It requires an extra level of creativity to think outside of that box and to look at a hammer as an implement that can be used in any of a wide number of different ways.
To test this ability, the candle experiment presents participants with a box of tacks and a candle and then asks them to attach the candle to the wall so that it can burn. Most people will attempt to tack the candle to the wall and will find it continually falls off.
But the solution is in fact to tack the box to the wall and then to stand the candle inside it. This requires participants to think outside that box and to think of the box as a part of the experiment and a resource. One way you can do this is by using the psychological experiment of breaking down all the items you have into their constituent parts and materials: you don’t have a candle, you have a candle, wax, and string for example. A box of tacks is tacks, a box, cardboard, and metal.
What’s interesting and relevant about this study is that when an incentive is introduced (a reward for the person who first comes up with the solution), performance actually goes down. This makes sense from a neuroscience perspective because motivation gives us focus and focus makes it hard for us to see all possibilities.
Flow states on the other hand encourage the brain to produce anandamide – a neurotransmitter that is correlated with creativity and lateral thinking. So you need to move your team away from working toward a reward and toward thinking of the work as rewarding in itself.
Plus, we all know that as soon as we start doing something for money or for grades it becomes less fun. This is why no one enjoys their college courses – even though they chose the subject!
Teamwork and Incentives
The other problem with incentives is that they actually make us less likely to work as teams. One way to think about this is by looking at the military.
In the military, one member will often be willing to give their life for the rest of the team. And they are rewarded for this mentality – they are rewarded for sacrificing their own needs for the betterment of everyone else.
But in the case of business, we are often encouraged instead to sacrifice others in order to get ahead. We are rewarded for making the most sales in our team, which encourages us to pilfer sales from other salesmen and women.
Rewarding individuals gives them a good reason to tread on each other to get ahead.
Ownership, Autonomy, and Understanding
So if you can’t just pay your staff to work harder, what can you do?
The answer is to give them ownership, autonomy, and understanding.
In other words, you:
- Let them take credit for what they do and put their name on it
- You give them the freedom to do things their own way
- And you give them the understanding so they know why they’re doing it
This first part is important because it gives your staff a certain amount of pride in what they’re doing. If your team feel as though they are working on their own projects and as though they will get rewarded for the work they do, then they have a very good reason to work harder. Again, in this case, the work becomes its own reward.
Give someone a ‘project’ and let them put their stamp on it and they can use this as a way to prove their skills, something to add to their CVs,e and a challenge. Let someone create their own sections on your website with their name on it and it becomes something they will be proud of and that they can show their friends and family – they will work harder on it!
And finally, you need to make sure your team understands the ‘why’. This is important because it allows you to stop micromanaging and to give your team agency over the way they do their products. That and we’ve already seen how motivating a simple ‘why’ can be.
So instead of telling someone to ‘move those boxes from A to B using the forklift and in no less than 2 hours, tell them ‘the pickup truck is coming tomorrow to collect the inventory, make sure it’s ready. This not only gives them the ability to work their way, to be smart about it and potentially get time off and to get the sense of reward that comes from solving problems; it also allows them to make critical decisions without referring to you for help every time there’s a stumbling block.
Imagine giving those first sets of instructions and then the forklift breaks down. In this scenario, your team may now not know what to do! They were told to use the forklift so all they can do is to come and ask you what plan B is.
But with the second set of instructions they were never explicitly told to use the forklift so they might instead decide to get the team to chip in and lift the palettes. Or they might find a way to get the pickup truck further into the warehouse. It’s up to them – and this is when people do their best work and you can stay less involved.
But remember, you still need to take responsibility for their decisions. This is the mark of a good leader and it is what will give your team the confidence to make those kinds of choices.
