[Music] group of social scientists all over the world have taken this very hard-headed look at what motivates people to do good work and what they found is that the traditional kind of motivators money but not ever but other things promotions rewards bonuses particularly if they are what I call if-then rewards if you do this then you get that those if-then rewards are great for simple work not so great for creative work it's it's not even a close call in the science so money does matter in way money is actually important you got to pay people
enough you can't you have to treat people fairly but once you pay people enough if you really want innovation the secret is not hanging out more sweets or carrots or money or promotions but giving people intrinsic value in their job a sense of autonomy the capacity to make progress and a sense of purpose let's take a step back and talk about our notions of management ok management as it is it really just a technology it's a technology for organizing people into productive capacities it's a very old technology it's a technology from the 1850s and it's
really about getting people to comply to get people to do what you want them to do the way you want them to do it but what we don't we need some compliance today but what we need more than anything else is engagement we need people to be engaged and the way that human beings engage is not by being managed it's not by being controlled it's by getting there on their own and so autonomy means giving people some amount of sovereignty some amount of control over what they do when they do it who they do it
with so if people have a modest amount of self direction they can engage more and there's some very interesting practices that seem weird that seem bizarre that are actually fostering that kind of behavior human beings like to get better at things they'd like to make progress why because they like to get better at things it's inherently satisfying when people make progress when people do better when people get better at something it's inherently satisfying and that's a big part of what it is to be a human being it's a big part of productivity and engagement at
work and at least in my view it's mostly ignored inside of companies and if we recast the workplace just a little bit help put people in positions where they make progress help people see the progress they make help people set their own goals give enrich the feedback environment considerably then I think we can people will just do better work we tend to think that management is about telling people how to do things here's how you do it do it the right way but we don't talk enough about why why are we doing these things in
the first place what you know how does what you do contribute to a larger hole and I this is actually an easy problem to solve if we talk a little bit more about why and a little bit less about how and if we connect what we do each day to a larger purpose then then the evidence is very clear that that boosts performance I mean there are a lot of really really interesting examples of companies that are doing particularly on autonomy that are doing really interesting things so let's take a company like the American company
Netflix very disruptive company Netflix had like most companies most companies have a vacation policy a holiday policy you get three weeks of vacation for versification Netflix is vacation policy they don't have one people can take as much vacation as they want whenever they want it full autonomy over when you go to work there's another example of a practice that's emerging called the results only work environment our Oh W e where people don't have schedules they don't have to be in the office at a certain time they don't have to be in the office at any
time they have to get their work done but when they do it it's completely up to them if you look at another great examples is an Australian company called Atlassian software company and they do something really cool once a quarter they say to their software developers on the Thursday afternoon go work on anything you want do it the way you want do it with whoever you want full autonomy the only thing we ask is that you show what you've created to the rest of the company on Friday afternoon and this fun meeting they call these
things FedEx days because you have to deliver something overnight this one day of autonomy has led to a whole array of fixes for existing companies for existing products a whole array of ideas for new products improvements to internal processes that it otherwise never emerged so this is not it's a very different approach to motivation it's not saying hey if you do something good I'll give you a cookie it's saying we hire good people good people want to do good work maybe one way to have good people do good work is to get out of their
way for a day and so there are a lot of these really really interesting emerging practices that are not about controlling people but about providing autonomy one of the companies that did the results only work environment is a very traditional company it's a no it's a company called Best Buy here we are at the Best Buy Theater it's a big American retailer no they don't do this in their stores but in their corporate headquarters in Richfield Minnesota ninety percent of the employees there don't have schedules they don't have to you know most people on Sunday
night say oh no I have to go into the office on Monday morning they don't have to go into the office on Monday morning they have to get their work done if they don't get their work done it's all over for them but they can show up whenever they want so this is a big company public company that made that kind of transition now that's that it's harder in established companies than an entrepreneurial company autonomy doesn't mean I do whatever I want and tell with everybody else one of the interesting things going on right now
is steps to allow people some autonomy over their team so let me give you a couple of interesting examples of this I mean Tony Shea talked about how if the shuttle bus driver who picks you up for your interviewer Zappos doesn't like you you don't get hired so everybody has to say and who gets hired and there number of retailers like that where the manager will bring somebody will bring somebody in that person will work say for 30 days but the team decides whether that person stays so that's giving people so that's autonomy that autonomy
over your team Facebook does something really interesting in that they hire engineers they put them through this Facebook bootcamp the engineers go and decide go and meet with various product teams various technology teams and then at the end of that two or three week period the individual decides where she wants to work so the company hire is the talent but the talent fix the team so I think it's very you know the most powerful teams in any kind of enterprise are teams that are self-directed not teams that are managed by somebody else but teams that
have their own autonomy so teams themselves can be autonomous and self-directed and the fashioning of teams can be done in an autonomous way and that's just demonstrable more effective we have a set of motivators that are really that were really built for 19th century even 20th century work and they're very good for things like turning the same screw the same way on an assembly line or stuffing envelopes or that kind of work but very few people are doing that kind of work people are doing work that requires judgment critical thinking creativity innovation and for that
kind of work those kind of motivational mechanisms are just not effective they just don't work very well and so I think eventually more and more organizations are gonna go in this direction now it might I don't know whether it's going to become widespread in two years 10 years or 20 years but I think that it's inevitable I mean I think that the nature of the conceptual age which is built more on these right brain artistic and Pathak abilities calls for a different approach to motivation that is you can't I mean if you have a team
of artists you don't artists are not going to respond I mean this is it seems intuitive but there's also actual social science on this if you want artists to do great work you don't treat them like envelopes you don't say I'll pay you 10,000 bonus $10,000 bonus for a great painting give you really tight deadlines monitor your work that is not how artists do things and more and more of us are operating like artists we're creating things for solving complex problems and what artists need is freedom security some amount of kind of base security and
freedom to do things and the capacity to do things their own way and and that's the kind of workplace arrangements we need rather than trying to perfect an outdated model much of the science has been taught in business schools it's been taught you know Douglas McGregor and Edward DC and Herzberg has been taught in business schools and then mostly ignored so I think that you know in many ways as Roger Martin one of your other folks here at this event has said in the past business schools really teach the ability to use quantitative analysis to
decide between known options and that's an important skill but it's not the only skill and that's not the skill that leads to great innovation it's not the skill that leads to Twitter it's not the skill that leads to the iPad it's not the skill that leads to breakthroughs in science what leads to breakthroughs in science in any kind of field is hiring great people and putting them an environment where they have some amount of where they have some freedom where they get feedback on what they're doing and they show up and they know why they're
doing stuff in the first place [Music]
