Posted on
What Gets You Motivated?
by Tim Frick
In Drive, Daniel H. Pink digs deep to discover what really motivates us in our personal and professional lives.
Do you wake up every day and get excited about the idea of going to work? If not, have I got a book for you. In his follow up to A Whole New Mind, Daniel H. Pink explores the many facets of things that motivate us on professional and personal levels. Using the tenets of a phenomena he calls Motivation 3.0, in which our desire to learn, make choices, and achieve supersedes any sort of 'carrot and stick' rewards-based system, Pink offers many rich examples of companies and individuals who have aligned their lives, businesses and culture around these principles to great success.
Pink obviously favors motivation over management and outlines three primary goals for helping you get motivated:
- Autonomy: increasing engagement by having control over your own work life.
- Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters to you.
- Purpose: aligning your desires to causes larger than yourself.
Among many other things, Pink touches on ROWEs (Results-Only Workplace Environments where time plays a much less significant role in productivity than in your standard office), corporate social responsibility, and Hungarian Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow, wherein one is so fully involved and energetically focused on a task that they experience feelings of spontaneous joy and their subjective relationship to time is altered. Much like many concepts outlined in his previous book A Whole New Mind, the ideas in Drive are focused, easy to digest, and backed up with extensive examples, historical data, and quotes from industry experts. The writing flows easily in Pink's signature journalistic style and the book is intuitively organized into three parts, including:
- An exploration of personal motivation and its historical relationship to our work lives.
- The three elements of motivation (mentioned above).
- A toolkit for implementing these practices into your own work life.
The comprehensive toolkit that closes out the book will help readers integrate these approaches and practices into their own every day lives. Here are some examples:
- Strategies for awakening motivation
- Improving an office, company or group
- Approaches to compensation
- Instilling these ideas in future generations
- Essential books
- Guru interviews
- Exercise motivation
- A book recap
I must have been in a state of flow when I read Drive because it was a quick and immersive read during which I rarely noticed the clock (though I can't say the same about writing this review, which I originally started in April). The ideas are clear and inspiring and if I can talk some of my co-workers into reading it, I look forward to exploring ways in which we can implement some of its practices into our own. If you're not sure whether this is your cup o' tea, check out this great video animated by the fine folks at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts (RSA) from a lecture Mr. Pink gave there.
Like what you see? If the workday's drudgery is getting to you, check out Drive and see if it can't help get your passions back on track.
1 Comment
Business leaders and employees will learn a lot from this book. Leaders should read this book, get a copy for each employee to read, and lead a discussion about how to create a ROWE (Results-Only Workplace Environment).
Some additional thoughts on this topic:
Leaders need to clearly articulate the organization’s vision, which is ultimately the purpose of the organization. Mihaly Csikszentmihali says that having a purpose that provides context for all of one’s effort is one of the chief criteria for flow. It allows a person’s mind, body, and soul to commit to the task at hand. It turns work from a necessary evil into a completely absorbing experience, where talents are being pushed to their outer limits and energy is eagerly channeled to the purpose at hand.
Employees need to earn their leaders trust by taking ownership of their projects and show that they are getting better and better at their job. Leaders must allow their employees considerable latitude in their jobs in order to let employees prove themselves and earn that trust. I once read, “Ownership breeds ‘High Trust’ – if you take away trust, you immediately operate in the old paternalistic model of our forefathers who believed in a carrot and stick approach to personal development. You controlled people’s growth because they could not be trusted to enhance their careers by themselves.”
Post a Comment
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.