I stumbled across this video from the very good TED the other day, and given my recent post about achieving results through others decided to post it for you.

Dan Pink, shows some very good scientific research into the nature of intrinsic motivation and the circumstances when extrinsic motivation works, and when it doesn’t (which is most of the time).

Evidence of repeatable studies where people performed worse when incentives where provided for creative problem solving tasks. The carrot and stick approach, is a vestige of Taylorism and scientific management which turns out, isn’t very scientific.

I can recall one of my first managers (whom I am still very good friends with), deciding that no one in the call centre could have email access, not even internally. He felt that people would be distracted and unproductive. We eventually wore him down and gave access to email (internally only) and there was no productivity change whatsoever (positive or negative). But I am sure they felt a little more trusted to behave like adults, and spared the Team Leaders time in handling ‘paper messages.’

This big brother command- and-control mindset still exists, we talk about empowerment, which requires even the (lowly?) call centre operator to know hundreds of minute details about hundreds of products, listen to the inflection in a customers voice that says “I am about to lose it,” and make a split second decision about the whether to reverse a fee or not.

Yet during a meeting the other day with a certain telco they have implemented spying software on their staff so they know when they have been slacking on facebook when they should have been attending to the customer or something.

This is lazy leadership, because if you go with Dan Pink’s autonomy, mastery and purpose, you have as a manager have to be a better person. You must set the benchmark, for standards of behaviour, creativity and values.