Drive; The surprising truth about what motivates us
Daniel Pink
Or rather above a fair wage paying more won’t get more creativity or better “right brained” work out of us, in fact our performance may go down.
This wasn’t entirely surprising, I’ve known for a long time that what motivates me to go to work and try harder is not the salary but the opportunities to learn, to make things better, and to solve problems. I’m sure other people have a similar pattern of motivation, and yet our whole management system is based on the idea of paying for performance.
Pink draws on a lot of behaviourial research and concludes that not only does increasing the reward have no effect on our motivation, it can decrease the performance. Rewards work when they’re connected to routine or mechanical work, but as soon as the work has an element of cognitive skill rewards destroy performance. There is, it seems, a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.
So what does motivate people in the creative and cognitive realms?
- Mastery; gaining skill or knowledge, “the desire to get better and better at something that matters”
- Autonomy; being in control how we work, “the freedom to great work is valuable”
- Purpose; working towards a larger goal or wider good, “those who work in the service of some greater objective can achieve even more
Pink finishes the book by offering 9 strategies for individuals to get into “Drive” motivation from asking yourself “Was I better today than yesterday?” to taking a year long sabbatical to recharge and learn. He also offers 9 strategies to take your team or organisation into “Drive”, including using “now that” rather than “if then” rewards so that your team gets a reward as a celebration for achieving something, rather than holding out a reward on condition of something being achieved.
It’s a good read, full of ideas and humour, thought-provoking, practical and well written. He’s also a good speaker, and talked about some of the ideas behind “Drive” at TED, here’s the clip.
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