A good article by Chip and Dan Heath on incentives. Here’s the first paragraph:

Ken O’Brien was an NFL quarterback in the 1980s and 1990s. Early in his career, he threw a lot of interceptions, so one clever team lawyer wrote a clause into O’Brien’s contract penalizing him for each one he threw. The incentive worked as intended: His interceptions plummeted. But that’s because he stopped throwing the ball.

(And for a bonus, you’ll also learn why the really cold upper-Midwestern winters don’t make the people here less happy overall.)

I’m jumping into the middle of a story here from Good to Great (p. 206), but I think you’ll get the point. This has far-reaching implications for many things (including — and perhaps especially — churches):

Of equal importance is what they don’t waste energy on. For example, when the head coach took over the [cross country] program, she found herself burdened with expectations to do “fun programs” and “rah-rah stuff” to motivate the kids and keep them interested — parties, and special trips, and shopping adventures to Nike outlets, and inspirational speeches.

She quickly put an end to nearly all that distracting (and time consuming) activity.

“Look,” she said,”this program will be built on the idea that running is fun, racing is fun, improving is fun, and winning is fun. If you’re not passionate about what we do here, then go find something else to do.”

The result: The number of kids in the program nearly tripled in five years, from thirty to eighty-two.

A friend emailed me the link to this talk and said that it was definitely worth the 18 minute investment of time. He was right.

I highly recommend this TED talk by Dan Pink. Here’s the key point: “There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does” when it comes to human motivation.

And it is very interesting that, as he touches on at the end, the science of motivation naturally demonstrates the value of some of the more significant emerging workplace practices, such as a results-only-work-environment and 20% time.

(Although I acknowledge that 20% time isn’t necessarily new — it was practiced at 3M more than 50 years ago. Come to think of it, ROWE was also the basic operation of many people before the rise of the modern organization and the concept of an employee — a relatively recent occurrence. It is interesting how what is “new” is often actually “old.”)

(Final note: By pointing out the relatively recent occurrence of the concept of an employee, I am not implying that I think it is a bad concept. I do, however, think that many of the primary early practices for managing employees, which focused on control, were wrong-headed and we are still seeing their effects today. Employees deserve autonomy, not tight controls, and this leads to better results for organizations as well. This will be an interesting course of discussion for future blog posts.)

Remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? I recall learning about it for the first time back in about 7th grade social studies. Still today, I see it referred to all the time in management and productivity books. Even books on project management talk about it.

Starting with the lower-level needs and moving to the higher-level needs, the hierarchy is:

1. Basic physical needs: food, clothing, shelter.
2. Security: physical welfare and security of belongings.
3. Social: sense of belonging, acceptance, friendship.
4. Self-esteem: accomplishment, respect for self, capability.
5. Self-actualization: performing at your peak potential.

(That’s the best summary I’ve seen; it’s from The Project Management Professional Study Guide, p. 323).

Whether you agree or disagree with Maslow, here’s what’s really interesting: According to Stephen Covey and Rebecca Merrill in First Things First, Maslow revised his hierarchy later in life.

He realized that the highest need is not self-actualization, but self-transcendence — namely, living for a purpose higher than self.

That’s significant. Even Maslow recognized that, ironically, a real sense of fulfillment does not come from seeking simply your own welfare, but from living and doing things for a purpose beyond yourself.

This could be pondered at so many levels. I’m going to make the application to career and management (I hope that’s not a let-down!). One of the reasons people feel a lack of significance in their jobs is because they don’t see how it relates beyond themselves (and their company).

In fact, people today are more and more looking for this connection to wider significance in their jobs. They want to do things that fit a larger purpose and do good on a wider scale than just meeting the bottom line, or accomplishing the next task at hand.

To keep people in your organization motivated — genuinely motivated — keep before them a line of site to the wider purposes that their work serves.

And that’s probably more important to most people than what they are paid.