What Drives You?

Have you ever wondered how to motivate your team best? Or get your child to do their chores? Or even why you’re disengaged from your work? Then check out the book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” by Daniel Pink. This book focuses on intrinsic motivation, which goes hand-in-hand with positive psychology.

During my psychology studies, the area of positive psychology was being infused throughout the whole curriculum. It’s permeating throughout society, too; ever heard of gentle parenting? The kind of parenting that someone will definitely make fun of you for trying with your kids? Well, this book explains why gentle parenting works! I love how this book takes this idea of intrinsic motivation and clearly defines it while telling you how to apply it to business.

So, what is intrinsic motivation? The official definition is “the drive to do something for its own sake, rather than for an external reward or consequence.” Intrinsic motivation is powerful, and this book dives into how reworking businesses to foster intrinsic motivation will result in a better society and more financial rewards. My biggest takeaway: the carrot and stick approach will lead to less productive and creative employees. Pink dives into how our whole system was built on carrots and sticks to motivate workers, with money being the biggest stick of all. Then, he flips the script, showing how carrots and sticks (known as external motivation) hurt not only people but also companies.

Here are some of my favorite parts of the book:

1. Companies that allow employees to take 20% of their time to be creative or follow Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) guidelines can significantly improve employee performance and creativity. When we stop telling employees that they have to do things a certain way or that they have to hit a certain number of billable hours, they can focus on projects that intrinsically motivate them, resulting in higher creativity and, therefore, better products.
2. On the flip side, Pink describes how law firms and other companies that make employees focus on their billability rates will have less motivated and creative employees. This can lead to disengagement, high turnover, and lost opportunity costs. For example, take Post-It Notes: these weren’t invented because a C-Suite manager had an idea and told an engineer to create it. They were invented because a scientist was frustrated that his scraps of paper kept falling out of his hymnal, and he had time at his job at 3M to pursue his own projects instead of just following corporate mandates.
3. Younger generations no longer subscribe to the idea that “for-profit” companies are the best places to work. A study by Deloitte found that 76% of millennials consider a company’s social and environmental commitments when deciding where to work. Workers want to work for places that have a mission or cause they can get behind instead of only focusing on places that make the largest profits.
4. The more employees are motivated by intrinsic motivation, the happier and more engaged they’ll be. This will require a huge shift in mindsets change for managers, and involves a lot of trust. So work on building team trust, and allow the creativity to follow and the turn-over to stop!

Ever since I joined the workforce, there’s been one catastrophe after another. Recession, recession, COVID, whatever weird economic reality we’re living in now is called … and businesses always react the same way: work people harder for less. The whole system is designed to destroy intrinsic motivation, making a workforce of less motivated and less creative minions. This book should be required reading for all business leaders. I highly recommend this book to everyone who wants to understand what drives people and how to improve business and personnel morale. Not only did it give me talking points to go back to my company, but it also gave me great ideas I can implement right away in my life, personally and as a leader. Finally, if I ever decide entrepreneurship is right for me, this book will help me build a business plan to harness intrinsic motivation for good.