I’ve talked a lot on this blog about making investments in our employees. For the most part, that talk has been framed in terms of increasing our employee’s pay as much as possible. But there is much more to investing in our employees than merely paying them more.
In 1968, Frederick Herzberg wrote a now-classic article for the Harvard Business Review titled How Do You Motivate Employees? The basic premise of his article was that there are two kinds of factors that employers can use to increase the output of their employees. He calls the first a hygiene factor (he also euphemistically calls it a KITA, always abbreviated just so); the second, he calls a motivator. A hygiene factor works by applying an external stimulus to the employee, while a motivator increases the employee’s internal motivation for accomplishing any given task. While hygiene factors often result in short-term gains, they’re insufficient to achieve truly lasting growth.
Fred illustrates the concept with a simple question about motivation: “If I kick you in the rear (physically or psychologically), who is motivated?” Answering his own question, he explains, “I am motivated; you move.”
Turning it around he asks, “If I say to you, ‘Do this for me or the company, and in return I will give you a reward, an incentive, more status, a promotion, all the quid pro quos that exist in the industrial organization,’ am I motivating you?” Fred reports that the overwhelming majority of managers respond affirmatively, that this is indeed motivation.
Unfortunately, they’re wrong.
Just like the threat of physical punishment, the promise of a reward is external motivation. If Fred gives his dog a biscuit and his dog moves, the dog doesn’t move because it wanted to but because Fred wanted it to.
It’s a profound insight.
The answer, Fred explains, is to install a generator in an employee; to give or to help the employee find a reason for wanting to accomplish the work with which they’re tasked. Fred discusses several factors that help to install that generator: achievement, recognition for achievement, the work itself, responsibility, and growth or advancement.
As leaders, our primary responsibility is to build a team that can accomplish the task at hand. Sometimes it’s a team of one, sometimes it’s a multinational corporation. But whatever the size of the team, we are responsible for its creation and for helping it to achieve its purpose. In order to do that, we’ll need to invest the members of our teams with the ability, and the responsibility, to fulfill their roles effectively. This means, as James Surowiecki points out in The Wisdom of Crowds, that we’ll need to decentralize decision-making as much as possible, for “people with local knowledge are often best positioned to come up with a workable and efficient solution. The virtues of specialization and local knowledge often outweigh managerial expertise in decision making.”
Using Fred’s motivators and James’ wise crowds both amount to making an investment in our employees. We’ll explore the relationship between them over the next few weeks.
