Advanced Search

Intentions often melt in the face of unexpected opportunity.

A motivator is a passion that increases when satisfied.

The enjoyment of property that [man] has in this state [the state of nature] is very unsafe, very unsecure. This makes him willing to quit a condition, which, however free, is full of fears and continual dangers: and it is not without reason, that he seeks out, and is willing to join in society with others, who are already united, or have a mind to unite, for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property.

America strikes world-weary Europeans as an adolescent nation. It revels in junk food and has adolescent clothes and tastes. It accepts some types of extreme behavior, such as guns and drugs, which some find distasteful. These flaws are balanced as a whole, though, by the enthusiasm of adolescence and the inability to see the downsides of situations. That's why I like to get to America at least once a year, to get my energy and enthusiasm and my sense of the possibilities of life reaffirmed.

[The concept of] restoration acknowledges that people need to have something "put back", restored to them through their daily work. This is especially true where the knowledge economy denies people the familiar satisfactions of predictability and of the regular production of tangible goods.

(Some people) always tend to clamour for a final solution, as if in life there could ever be a final solution other than death. For constructive work, the principal task is always the restoration of some kind of balance.

In short, "Do this and you'll get that" makes people focus on the "that" not the "this." Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.

The trouble is there are too many companies that basically believe in socialism. They give stock options to everybody, give pay increases that are the same to everybody within the same salary scale. If you don't differentiate, you can't possibly be an execution company! And if you don't single out for reward the people who get things done for you, then you won't keep the people who will ultimately run the company successfully.

People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing-that's why we recommend it daily.

The flip side of rewards is risk. A commitment to delegation and empowerment raises a host of thorny questions. For example: How do you strike a balance between trust and security? Senior managers want people to be bold enough to do "what's right" for the company - but what if what's right for the company means shutting down their project or cutting back research dollars for their operation? If top management doesn't give people the security to make the right decisions, can they expect people to act against their own interests? On the other hand, if teamwork eliminates all personal risk ("just be a good team player and don't worry"), will people be motivated to perform?

Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.

Willpower goes a decisive step further than motivation. It implies a commitment that comes only from a deep, personal attachment to a certain intention. Willpower springs from a conscious choice to make a concrete thing happen. This commitment to a certain end - not to doing something but to achieving something - represents the engagement of the human will.

What I have a problem with are the amounts of money that corporate America is spending on motivational training. I've attended presentations by...leading figures in "training and motivation" who present this very expensive, rah-rah cheerleading nonsense. These people are getting paid $1,000 to $5,000 a minute, but they aren't accomplishing anything more than a sales manager can accomplish simply by taking his staff out to eat once a month, which is far cheaper.

Corporate America is structured to give people what they want. We need to get away from that mentality and, instead, give people what they need. Skills training may be boring and pedantic, but it doesn't have to be, and a lot of people need it. Instead, we hire people to motivate us to have a better attitude. It's all part of the nonsense that's pervasive in society -- that attitude alone is enough to prevail.

Many a business has fallen in love with the idea that the best way to get people to do things well is to have them compete with one another.That mindset derives from a sloppy sports analogy: People run faster if they run against someone else. That may be true for track, but when it comes to learning, people learn best when they're operating in a mode that is less competitive.

Diagnosing motivation accurately is one of the easiest management tasks to do poorly and one of the most difficult to do well. Most managers have lots of experience at diagnosing another's wants, but though the admission comes hard, most are just not very accurate when trying to figure out what another person wants and will do.

Vendors often try to change what the buyer wants or which class of benefits he or she responds to most strongly. My view of motivation suggests that such an approach is almost always unsuccessful. Selling strategy needs to work with the buyer's motivations, not around them.

Motivational speeches are about making people feel good about themselves and enthusiastic about where they can go. But in my experience, it doesn't work to paint a rosy picture and say "Doesn't it look great over there?" and expect everyone to drop what they're doing and go in that direction. What I do is, instead of trying to make people feel good about where they could go, I make them uncomfortable with where they are.

Â…you don't need to know a lot about people's weaknesses. But you need to know about their strengths. Trying to correct someone's weaknesses can be a demotivator. People gain confidence when you build on their strengths.

If you can find people who are good at motivating others and getting the best out of people, they are the ones you want. There are plenty of so-called experts, but not as many great motivators of people.

Morale is the state of mind. It is steadfastness and courage and hope. It is confidence and zeal and loyalty...It is staying power, the spirit which endures to the end - the will to win. With it all things are possible, without it everything else...is for naught.

Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he could be, and he will become what he should be.

The most surprising thing was that if terrorists rolled a hand grenade down the middle of a room, all our CIA employees would jump out of their seats and throw their bodies on it to protect everyone else. They would all give up their lives for one another and their country. However, if someone ran into the room and said, ‘I need someone to make a decision, but if it’s the wrong one it will be the end of your career, but I need an answer now,’ all of them would run toward the door.

Research by a number of leading thinkers in the social sciences, such as Danah Zohar, has shown that when managers and employees are asked what motivates them the most in their work they are equally split among fve forms of impact—impact on society (for instance, building the community and stewarding resources), impact on the customer (for example, providing superior service), impact on the company and its shareholders, impact on the working team (for example, creating a caring environment), and impact on “me” personally (my development, paycheck, and bonus).

This fnding has profound implications for leaders. What the leader cares about (and typically bases at least 80 percent of his or her message to others on) does not tap into roughly 80 percent of the workforce’s primary motivators for putting extra energy into the change program. Change leaders need to be able to tell a change story that covers all fve things that motivate employees. In doing so, they can unleash tremendous amounts of energy that would otherwise remain latent in the organization.

Some people seem to have unlimited self-generated morale. These almost always succeed. At the other extreme, there are people who seem to have no ability to do this; they need a boss to motivate them. In the middle there is a large band of people who have some, but not unlimited, ability to motivate themselves. These can succeed through careful morale management (and some luck).

Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love and something to hope for.

Jim March says there are two very different kinds of logic for making decisions. One is the logic of consequences. We’re great in business at changing behavior by changing consequences. If we want customers to buy more, we lower prices. If we want salespeople to sell more, we increase their bonuses. But the second kind of logic is the logic of identity. Many of the most profound decisions we make in life are made because of identity, not consequences.

That’s useful in business, especially in a change situation: if we can harness the power of identity, it helps motivate the Elephant to undertake a long, arduous journey. In a change situation, you want creativity and flexibility—and that’s more likely to come from identity than from consequences. Consequence-based logic is great at narrowing people’s focus, but it can backfire for the same reason. If you give people incentives to sell a lot of mortgages, for instance, they will do so. But they’re not necessarily selling the right mortgages to the right people.

In the only scientifically valid study of the motivations of a cross-section of the entire U.S. workforce, researchers unveiled the secret of why leaders...have been able to create working conditions that effectively tap into the deep wellspring of worker motivation. This 2002 survey of 3,000 workers, undertaken by the U.S. Census Bureau, found that there are two main sources of employee motivation, loyalty, commitment, and productivity: one, participation in decision making, and two, participation in the economic returns of the organization. The researchers found that the greater the participation in decision making, the greater the loyalty, commitment, and productivity of the worker. The greater the extent of participation in economic returns — in the form of profit sharing, stock ownership, stock options, and the like -- the greater the worker loyalty and commitment. And, when the two forms of participation were combined — that is, high levels of employee involvement and ownership -- the more positive the effect. In addition, it was found that the greater the level of participation, the more ethical the behavior of workers (for example, employees in high-involvement cultures were the most willing to intervene when a co-worker is under-performing or misbehaving).

Indeed, there is an ethical principal underlying these scientific findings: participation in decision making without participation in financial gains is unjust because executives and shareholders then reap the fruits of employees’ contributions. And participation in financial gains without participation in decision making is also unjust because workers are then powerless to influence the conditions that determine the size of their paychecks. The two forms of participation are thus positively linked, morally and practically.

This linkage has long been recognized in reward systems designed for top executives. But it also has been shown to motivate lower-level employees, as well, even with those with relatively little education.

Two questions demand the attention of leaders. The first is familiar: What keeps you up at night? What are the problems that nag at you? The second is less familiar, but even more important: What gets you up in the morning? What keeps you and your people more committed than ever, more engaged than ever, more excited than ever, particularly as the environment around you gets tougher and more demanding than ever?

That’s a question every organization needs to ask and answer if it hopes to prosper in an era of hyper-competition and nonstop dislocation. Even the most creative leaders recognize that long-term success is not just about thinking differently from other companies. It is also, and perhaps more importantly, about caring more than other companies—about customers, about colleagues, about how the organization conducts itself in a world with endless temptations to cut corners and compromise on values. For leaders, the pressing question isn’t just what separates you from the competition in the marketplace. It’s also what holds you together in the workplace.

A decade of research on high and low performance teams by psychologist and business consultant Marcial Losada shows just how important it is. Based on Losada’s extensive mathematical modeling, 2.9013 is the ratio of positive to negative interactions necessary to make a corporate team successful. This means that it takes about three positive comments, experiences, or expressions to fend off the languishing effects of one negative. Dip below this tipping point, now known as the Losada Line, and workplace performance quickly suffers. Rise above it—ideally, the research shows, to a ratio of 6 to 1—and teams produce their very best work.

Richard S. Wellins, Paul Bernthal, and Mark Phelps of Development Dimensions International wrote in a 2005 article, “for the past two decades we have been trying to realize the benefits of empowerment, teamwork, recognition, people development, performance management, and new leadership styles.“

If you want to know why efforts to engage the workforce have failed so dismally, look again at that list. It contains not a word about work itself. Industrial psychologists have long understood that few workers are motivated to excel by pizza parties, bonuses, lunches with the boss, employee-of-the-month awards, or even the promise of annual raises. What does motivate workers is work: interesting work, useful work, work that challenges them, work whose completion satisfies both ego and the social self.

Unfortunately, the focus of conventional management, from hiring to evaluation to compensation to status, is on jobs, not work. The two are not the same, and it’s time we began shifting focus from the former to the latter.