Luc Hoebeke on Koldo Saratxaga, IRIZAR and Pride in Your Work

Forrest ChristianManaging, Motivation, podcast Leave a Comment

A little teaser for the forthcoming Part 2 of my conversation with Luc Hoebeke, the Belgian organizational expert and author of Making Work Systems Better: A Practitioner’s Guide. In this 30-second excerpt, Hoebeke talks about the most important thing Koldo Saratxaga did to help IRIZAR create a high-performance, team-focused work culture. If you’re not Spanish or Basque, you probably have …

Why Work Levels Are Rejected: Others Are Selfish Fallacy

Forrest ChristianManaging, Motivation, Theory Leave a Comment

While reading the excellent and highly recommended book by Heath & Heath, Made to Stick, I came upon this passage about Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs: Imagine that a company offers its employees a $1,000 bonus if they meet certain performance targets. There are three different ways of presenting the bonus to employees: Think of what that $1,000 means: a down …

Defense.gov News Photo 120324-M-AV740-001 by Staff Sgt. Clinton Firstbrook, U.S. Marine Corps (2012)

Power of Intrinsic Motivation

Forrest ChristianMotivation, Reviews - Books 1 Comment

It’s the problem that management wants HR to solve: how do we get these people motivated to do what we want them to do. Even then I knew the answer: the only way to make someone do something that they don’t want to do is to coerce them. You make the reason for them doing it outside them.

There are other ways, of course, but they mean reframing the problem to be sensical to the person. And you have to give them a voice in their own life. Otherwise, you end up with non-motivated workers.

Winter at Lofoten (2008). By Tackbert. Public Domain.

Vaill on High-performing Systems

Forrest ChristianMotivation, Organizations Leave a Comment

A second kind of evidence to suggest that the evolving success of the system has a powerful developmental effect on the leadership comes from the way members of high-performing systems talk about the early formative period of the system. There are consistent statements such as, “We had no idea things would turn out like this”; “In the early years, we …

Rose hip on trellis

Change your motivation? Change your interpretation!

Forrest ChristianCareers, Coaching, Motivation 4 Comments

Amazon’s self-help categories are filled with books by so-called experts who tell you that what you really need to correct this or that deficiency is to change. You need to become motivated by these things, they tell you. Before you spend years trying to follow this wretched advice, here’s a hard learned lesson and I’m giving it to you for …

Time for success!

How Hope Breeds Success

Forrest ChristianMotivation Leave a Comment

People who have always been fully employed often pooh-pooh the idea that simply being unemployed can have detrimental effects on people, especially men. Even though they have never struggled to find work, usually moving seamlessly from one position to another, they have strong opinions on the laziness of the long-term unemployed. Studies in unemployment show how a long-drawn-out idleness affects …