I recently heard a tip from an older colleague on managing a department. ‘Everyone is primarily interested in one of three things,’ he said. ‘To motivate them, all you need do is discover which one drives them most.’
People want some leeway to apply their imagination, creativity and knowledge
What are the three? They are power, money and autonomy.
I wish I had heard this 20 years ago, as it explains a great deal about the stark differences between colleagues’ working motivations which had often baffled me in the past.
A huge amount is written about power and money, but very little thought is devoted to autonomy. Yet it is probably the need for autonomy that drives people to become entrepreneurs much more than greed. The neuroscientist Paul Rock lists it as one of five primary drivers of human working behaviour. In his SCARF model, the five emotional hot buttons are Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness.
I suspect autonomy is often unfairly perceived as disobedience. It isn’t that at all. People who value autonomy are happy to be told what needs to be done, but they want some leeway to apply imagination, creativity and their own tacit knowledge in deciding how to do it. This is hardly unreasonable, as without this discretion, it is impossible for anyone to cultivate a skill. Much of the pleasure and purpose of work then disappears.
No, the people who baffle me most are those who are happy to perform repeated bureaucratic tasks even when they are obviously pointless to everyone involved.
I cannot imagine what it is like to work at a retail bank nowadays, where a moronic compliance culture demands that you quiz 80-year-old spinsters about their identity ‘in accordance with money–laundering and anti-terrorist legislation’.
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