The surprising truth on what motivates us!
Well, luckely for us at 3DIMERCE.com it’s not quite a surprise. We don’t believe in extrinsic motivation, but in the ability of each employee to grow and develop in which everybody realizes his or hers fullest potential. And that’s exactly what the terrific book is all about. Apparently a lot of companies still believe in giving high bonuses and other financial stimulants to motivate their managers and employees. Dan Pink proofs in Drive that this doesn’t work, it even brings out worst in most people. In the book there is an abundance of studies and tests that we conducted during this and last century, that give an insight in why extrinsic motivators makes us less creative, perform less, focus on short term and even provoke unethical behaviour.
In the early days of the industrial revolution and during the 20th century, the “carrots & sticks” approach was working well. Dan calls this motivation 2.0. Simple tasks that don’t require much creativity and initiative can be stimulated by external ‘if-then’ rewards. So straight-forward production work benefits from financial incentives to make people work harder.
However employees in the 21st century ask for another approach! With much more brain capacity and creativity needed in all the current jobs we’re doing, we need “Type I” behaviour in order to deliver maximum performance. “Type I” behaviour (as apposed to “Type X” behaviour) is less focused on external rewards and more on the inherent satisfaction of a job itself. People with “Type I” behaviour are the heros of today, not those money-grubbers of the past (who are partialy to blaim for the current worldwide recession).
The good news is that “Type I” people can be created! Dan pink distinguishes three elements of motivation 3.0:
1. Autonomy
2. Mastery
3. Purpose
By triggering your people on these three elements of true motivation, you will get people that are driven mostly by inner rewards. And this means they work much harder and better, have strong long-term performance and healthy well-being.
You are probably asking yourself how? Well at the end of the book there’s a tool kit section which shows, amongst others, how to identify activities that generate the coveted “flow” state, in which a person’s abilities and challenges are perfectly matched.
For 3DIMERCE.com I already read some cool and inspirering tips, which I will bring back to the team to see if we can put that into practice. Along side all the other things which we were already doing before I read this book. This teaches me that a lot of the interesting stuff mentioned in this book, follows the natural way of good business. We are apparently doing the right thing by simply following ancient values such as honesty, respect, modesty, courage and responsibility.
So please buy the book, read it and start changing the world with us!
Here’s the direct link to Amazon.com
Finally please also view the interesting TED Talk of the master himself: