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 …
Power of Intrinsic Motivation
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.
Change your motivation? Change your interpretation!
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 …
Increase Sales 30% In A Recessionary Flat Market
I wrote the following for another site. It will be pretty heavily edited and changed prior, but I’m pretty pleased with it as is. So I’m posting it here for y’all’s enjoyment. I will upload the image files later. They aren’t necessary but you get a good idea of the structural changes that this company underwent. When Mike Thieneman and …
Controlling Language Doesn’t Motivate People to Follow the Rules
How you set limits to others and to yourself (along with your personal interpretation of the limit setting) determines whether your motivation comes from within and works or comes from without and destroys enthusiasm.