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What is the true value of creativity to organisations?
Just read this post!
And then reflect on what you do to suppress or promote creativity.
Remember that your team is a perfectly evolved repsonse to YOUR management style.
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Carmine Coyote has written a provocative post which explores the fundamental dishonesty of motivation.
But I think Carmine has given motivation a bum rap!
What has been called ‘motivation’ is really ‘manipulation’. Manipulation to get people to do something that the manager wants them to do.
Now I don’t think any manager can ‘motivate’ anyone beyond the short term fix of the pep talk. (I think that we should set trading standards onto speakers who claim to be ‘motivational’. The good ones might educate about motivation – but in my experience the motivational, as opposed to the educational, impact of their presentations tails off within a few hours of their closing remarks.)
What managers can do is to help each employee to get really clear on their (the employees) self interest and how working towards organisational objectives serves it. Once this is done motivation will follow as sure as night follows day. Or the employee will leave to find a place where they can pursue their self interest more effectively. And this really forces employers to look at the value proposition that offer to their employees. Why should good, compassionate, competent people choose to spend their working hours with us? If it is just for the money then “Houston, we have problem!”
Self interest, rightly understood, properly negotiated with others and then pursued with vigour and power leads to remarkable results and one of its many by-products is ‘motivation’. Others are inspiration, creativity, innovation, passion, energy, vigour, strength. But the proper negotiation with others is critical. Blending self interests, weaving them together, ensuring that they reinforce rather than undermine each other, lies at the root of all high performing teams. And this is the real craft of the progressive manager.
The trouble is most of us feel uncomfortable about pursuing self interest. We are uncomfortable talking about it. We don’t even like to give ourselves the time to think about it. We have been socialised to suppress our self interest and look for opportunities to serve others. And VERY few managers build the kind of relationships where self interest (of all parties) can be clarified and negotiated fully to the benefit of all.
Carmine’s point about the fundamental dishonesty of motivation, that it is about getting people to ‘do more work for less reward’ is, I believe, a misrepresentation. Employees who create value deserve a proportionate share of that value and this depends on the proper negotiation of self interest. If the negotiation is not proper, but unfair, then self interest is not fully served and as a result motivation erodes.
Increasingly the nature of the reward is more than simply financial. Employees are looking for a diverse and intensely personal cocktail of rewards with ingredients that include fulfilment, challenge, flexibility, creativity and personal and professional development. These are essential components of self interest for most of us and help to keep people motivated at least as much as money, which is just a hygiene factor.
Appreciation also needs to be part of the mix. It absolutely is part of the package of ‘rewards’ that most of us look for at work. And it is a part of the job that many managers struggle with as they tend to leave things alone until they go wrong.
And perhaps we (professional management educators) need to do more with managers on ‘motivation’ as an emergent property – the preconditions for which require a full and proper negotiation of self interest(s) and the development of the employees power to pursue it with vigour.
And while I don’t think that people are any different in the third sector, I do think that the cocktail of self interest often needs to be much more carefully balanced. And many third sector managers forget this at their peril. Few of us join social enterprises to be overt vehicles for the delivery of government policy. We join social enterprises to promote social justice. And the ‘self interests’ of politicians and the promotion of social justice are rarely properly negotiated.
Your thoughts….
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Some gentle jolts around diversity, stereotypes, celebrity, Kanye West and social marketing/Web 2.0.
And a lot of laughs!
Another video – and you will need sound for this one.
[youtube = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-DeWHIIXhY]
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I have just come across a really good online video, thanks to Phil Gerbyshack, called Change is Good. It seems to sum up so many of the principles that I try to teach people how to practice in my PMN workshops. (There are still someplaces left on Giving and Getting Great Feedback on 20th May in Leeds).
The film is only a couple of minutes long but contains so many great hints, tips, reminders and pointers to profound truths that should have immense implications for personal and organisational change.
Why not show it at your next team meeting and see what reactions, suggestions and feedback it elicits.
The video has a soundtrack – but still works if you are not sound enabled!
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This is the title of a piece in a LinkedIn conversation. Here is my perspective:
I think we need to be careful about what we learn from The Apprentice and other reality shows in the ‘business genre’.
‘Cost control’ is paramount in some organisations and in really simple tasks that only have to work in the very short term. Keep costs low and con your way to a victory. As long as you can keep finding new ‘marks’ you will be ok. In the real world, appropriate investment and tolerance of ‘failure’ in the right market experiments is vital if you are looking to encourage creativity and innovation.
We could learn from The Apprentice that lying, backstabbing and cheating work. As does staying off the radar for as long as possible. All great tactics for having an ‘OK’ career in a traditional bureaucracy, but not what I would recommend to many of my clients who are interested in exploring their potential though and doing ‘good’ work.
Why do so many bureaucracies still reward such behaviour? Because they are too scared of sacrificing the short term gains that they achieve in order to build long term value. Managers often lack the courage, or do not know how, to do what is right. I meet this situation OFTEN – especially in sales teams! I also meet a lot of sales trainers who train this type of approach! In fact I have seen highly successful teams that specifically recruit to this mode and just cull the worst performers every year. It works a treat to shift units. The costs in distorted and broken lives are externalised – so who cares….
What we can learn from The Apprentice depends very much on what we are trying to do and what ideas, models and values we use to frame it with.
My worry is that for anyone who has not been involved in ‘business’ they just learn that we are lying, cheating, money grabbing, backstabbing, environment wrecking, delusional dummies. That business is about snake oil salesmen and the short term pursuit of cash and profit over any other value.
For aspiring ‘business people’ who just want material rewards as quickly as possible I think it legitimises a completely inappropriate set of behaviours that we should be sniffing out and eliminating.
For many managers it leaves them questioning whether they should maintain their faith in working with good, compassionate caring individuals – or whether they too should recruit from The Apprentice mould.
More perspectives inspired by the Apprentice: