Most business leaders have lost sight of what motivates people at work. In fact, some companies haven’t updated their management practices in years, which means they’re incapable of creating high-performance teams.
Companies continue to ignore the obvious: Offering incentives and rewards is less effective than tapping into truly meaningful intrinsic motivation. Leaders operate on old assumptions about motivation despite a wealth of well-documented scientific evidence.
The old “carrot-and-stick” mentality may actually inhibit employees from seeking creative solutions, partly because they focus on attaining rewards instead of solving problems.
So, how can you successfully tap into workers’ inherent motivation and creative drive? How can you boost the number of actively engaged employees from the paltry 33 percent reported by the Gallup Organization? And how can you sustain employees’ enthusiasm after their first 30 days on the job?
In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, former U.S. Department of Labor aide Daniel H. Pink says businesses are out of sync with what scientists have been telling us over the last 50 years.
The hackneyed carrot-and-stick approach, now dubbed “Motivation 2.0,” encourages poor leadership practices, including Pink’s “seven deadly flaws”:
- Extinguishing motivation
- Diminishing performance
- Crushing creativity
- Crowding out good behavior
- Encouraging cheating, shortcuts and unethical behavior
- Becoming addictive or obsessive
- Fostering short-term thinking
In fact, Pink holds Motivation 2.0 partly responsible for the economic chaos of 2008. Mortgage brokers, for instance, were so hungry for commissions that they made questionable loans, which helped bring the nation’s banking system to its knees.
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This is a brief synopsis of a 2000 & 1000-word article suitable for consultants’ newsletters for executives and leaders in organizations. It is available for purchase with full reprint rights, which means you may put your name on it and use it in your newsletters, blogs or other marketing materials. You may also modify it and add your personal experiences and perspectives.
The complete 2,000 word article includes these important concepts:
- Seven Deadly Flaws
- The Hawthorne Studies
- Scientific Management
- Freud, Skinner & Maslow
- The Third Drive
- Negative Impact of Rewards
- Open Source Innovations
- Unleashing Motivation
- Creating Flow
- Rethinking Management
- Rethinking Human Nature
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Everyone’s talking about ways to find opportunity amid economic chaos. Yet there’s something right under our noses that’s being overlooked: Times of crisis present unprecedented opportunities to stretch and develop real leadership capabilities.
What’s needed, specifically?
Hire more executive coaches, step up sessions, and implement more training and development programs.
In tough times, you cannot rely on talent and luck. Even when you have a talented team at the top, people need help in stretching their capabilities to meet the economy’s overwhelming demands. Your leaders can’t go it alone. You can’t, either.
Scientific research on great performance has persuasively shown that key abilities are developed. They don’t occur naturally. In fact, there may be no such thing as natural talent. It’s certainly not something you want to rely upon to help solve current problems.
Great leaders aren’t born; they’re made—the research to support this is overwhelming. What we previously thought of as innate can often be taught. Leadership capabilities are acquired through constructive practice and developmental opportunities, and today’s business volatility calls for both.
“The key to this development is pushing people—or people pushing themselves—just beyond their current abilities, forcing them to do things that they can’t quite do, “ according to Fortune Senior Editor Geoff Colvin, author of Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else (Portfolio, 2008).
The upside of a financial crisis and recession is that they offer all of us the opportunity to stretch our skills in our current jobs—and I mean everyone. That means you. But you already know you’re being stretched, don’t you? You feel it.
The question is, how are you going to welcome your own particular crises and use them to benefit your personal and professional development?
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This is a brief synopsis of a 2000 & 1000-word article suitable for coach/consultants’ newsletters for executives and leaders in organizations.
It is available for purchase with full reprint rights, which means you may put your name on it and use it in your newsletters, blogs or other marketing materials. You may also modify it and add your personal experiences and perspectives.
The complete 2,000 word article includes these important concepts:
Crisis or Opportunity?
Is Talent Irrelevant?
Talent or Hard Work?
10,000 Hours or 10 Years
What Is Deliberate Practice?
Why We Avoid Hard Work
What About Passion?
Talent Is Never Enough
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Click HERE:
Debunking the Talent Myth Apr09- 2000 word Article
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Debunking the Talent Myth Apr09- 1000 word Article
Patsi Krakoff, Psy.D.
Content for Coaches
Customized Newsletter Services
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Patsi Krakoff, Psy.D.
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