Daniel Pink’s new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, is very refreshing given that the upside down version of the theory behind his book has been embedded for years in Corporate America as well as government, not for profits, education institutions and parenting practices. The very thing that folks were convinced improved motivation turns out to diminish it and vice versa. That theory being that “we are motivated by incentives rather than being able to act with autonomy, purpose and in pursuit of mastery.” It is encouraging to me, who has written about intrinsic motivation for almost 25 years, to see this popularized. I find fewer people everyday who tell me I am crazy. Drive is now a recommended book for Christmas lists for your management team. But there is a new challenge now. What I find as I talk with people who have found the book, is they now know one thing not to do- don’t use incentives to improve performance. But then what? What does it mean to engage people with autonomy, purpose and mastery.
Today’s blog is part of a chapter from my upcoming book, The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success, with help from a few examples of the many that have been implementing such systems for decades with outrageous success and have gone way beyond the “stop incentives” mantra. The success is based on understanding an idea behind intrinsic motivation which gives the leverage needed to make it the basis of all work. It leads to a fundamentally different management philosophy and work system. The idea is called “internal locus of control,” a way of life where people take responsibility for their own actions and outcomes and never place it outside of themselves. This chapter in the book is how to design work systems to make that possible.
Articulate Management Philosophy
Management philosophy requires that an organization come to grips with its beliefs about people, their management, and development. A company’s philosophical stance with regard to people plays a significant role in defining who it is. In their book The Future of Management, Gary Hamel and Bill Breen state that management philosophy is the best predictor of an organization’s long-term viability and status. It is interesting to note that by examining their own cultures, the companies whose stories I share, became aware of the social and business imperatives for shifting to a more organic, self-organizing team approach, one that encouraged individual initiative ungoverned by organizational hierarchy.
A compelling story of one timely shift took place in Colgate Palmolive, South Africa in 1992-1995. When Stelios Tsesos, General Manager for Colgate Africa took the job, he knew that beliefs about people and their roles in business had to change. He was to articulate beliefs and shift the philosophy to fulfill the new constitution of the New South Africa. But he also took the job because he believed he could regenerate a company while contributing to the regeneration of a country. South Africa. The beliefs had to go beyond platitudes such as “People are our most important asset,” the kind of phony symbol that elicits groans from employees, and instead ask some really hard questions. When Stelios, told his management team in South Africa just before the first free elections, “I believe every individual has a significant and meaningful contribution to make and an intelligence that can be engaged and developed,” he redefined for them the beliefs that would guide their operations. The culture was so toxic in South Africa that Stelios had to make its acceptance a non-negotiable condition.
He then invited his managers, and a few others added from deeper in the organization, including black managers, to establish principles based on such beliefs to guide its management of people. Developing meaningful principles required dialogue as well as a ritual for periodic reflection on how well the organization was living up to its principles and how they could be improved. Colgate, South Africa, adopted the principles, “Each person will be developed to the full potential that he or she sees possible,” and “Level of contribution will not be limited by role or position.” These were such new ideas that the teams reflected on them daily as a way to raise the level of consciousness. This not only allowed but also encouraged them to work outside their job descriptions to contribute to the new direction. They had to redesign work as a result.
Make Promises-Beyond-Ableness
The first priority for work redesign was a developmental personal practice called promises-beyond-ableness. Every individual was expected to generate meaningful and significant ideas that would require them to stretch beyond their current capabilities in order to contribute to the overall strategy of the business. They did not have to stay within the bounds of their current job or role, though as they began to step outside of that role they would engage others to gain alignment from the part of the organization they sought to affect. This is how the Responsible Business ties intelligence development and expression to pursuing and achieving business strategy and marketplace non-displace-ability.
These promises-beyond-ableness took the form of business initiatives, functional projects, or targeted changes in work practices. Though these promises came out of an opportunity or hazard about which the individual felt great passion, they also had to meet certain criteria. They always had to be rationally defended in terms of their relevance and significance to the corporate strategy and the effects on stakeholders. They had to include a rigorous financial plan for the time and resources required. They had to include systemic performance indexes that could be measured with regard to the effect on the market, the business, the team, and the individual. And they had to place a significant demand for personal growth and professional learning on the individual.
The resulting personal development plans specified the work to be done and set up “deliberative practices” intended to ensure success. That term has now been popularized in Geoff Colvin’s highly useful and paradigm-changing book, Talent Is Overrated. According to Colvin, “Deliberative practice is characterized by several elements, each worth examining. The practice is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help. It has to be engaged over a sustained period of time, with a desire for improvement, not a few days of repetitious practice. Reflection on results must be continuously developed with a teacher or mentor.”1
Kingsford Charcoal, in a five year redesign process that took them from a regional product to a national brand that still dominates all markets in which they compete, set up such work systems. Kingsford, as well as South Africa Colgate, instituted development plans based on Promises Beyond Ableness. Critical thinking skills development was core to these personal development plans and was explicitly evaluated as part of the learning process.
Individuals had to justify their plans and the resources required to a self-chosen team, all of whom would be affected by the promise and its delivery. This helped extend accountability and support beyond individuals into teams, which often found themselves drawing together in pursuit of large, compelling promises. Along the way, individuals led timely evaluations of their accomplishments, their learning, and the understanding they were developing of the next phase of planning and action. Over time, individuals took on increasingly challenging and significant tasks, growing themselves and the contributions they could make. Through this process, workers were able to conceptualize and carry out transformations that affected the entire company. Promises-beyond-ableness were a critical factor in Kingsford’s rapid and strategic growth.
A key aspect of each plan was predicting what was sought in terms of financial outcomes (improvements in earnings, margins, and cash flow). The predictions were based on changes expected in sales, market penetration, sourcing improvements, or production improvements. Generally the people developing and implementing these plans were not accountants. They were adopting financial thinking as a means to increase their understanding of how the business worked as a whole, to dispel myths and the overconfidence that myths can produce, and to evoke their own curiosity and commitment.
Years later, I discovered that the validity of this approach had been demonstrated through research. In their book, Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath tell the story of Eric Mazur, a physics professor who came up with a learning approach called, “concept testing.” He asked students to make a public commitment to finding an answer. He found that the simple act of committing made the students more engaged in the dialogue and more curious about the outcome.2 Committing also woke people up to gaps in their knowledge or understanding, which stimulated their curiosity. At Kingsford, any sense of failure was quickly overcome because people had set their own predictions and were curious to find where their assumptions had been off. It was a self-guided learning experience that stuck with them forever.
An exemplary Kingsford promise-beyond-ableness story is that of Bob Raynsford, a successful sales director at Kingsford who was particularly good at building relationships. Because he knew his customers so intimately, he was often invited to consult early on in new product offerings to provide perspective on their likely acceptance in different markets. From this experience, he knew how costly it was to develop a new product, market test it, and then take it to a national brand—and that the longer it takes the more costly it gets. Because he moved between functions, he could also see that what slowed things down the most was the lack of an elegant and integrative planning process.
Bob Raynsford committed to figuring out how to halve the go-to-market time for new product development. Though Bob had a well-developed capacity for one-on-one relationships, he had always shied away from coalition building. Yet it was clearly a capability the organization needed, particularly if it wanted to achieve its strategic objectives in the arena of developing products and taking them to market. And Bob knew that if he ever wanted to move on to leading whole businesses, he needed to develop those skills, too.
Together with Gary Lillian, another bright and creative contributor and a senior marketing colleague, Bob pulled together a cross-functional team that included R&D, distribution, manufacturing and sales. Their task was to design an elegant process for moving rapidly from idea to profitable national product (or, alternatively, for quickly abandoning products that weren’t going to be successful). They anchored their work to the increased success of their distributors by improving the ability to evaluate the “excitement-producing effect” of any newly introduced products. They applied the thinking processes they had learned in the business education meetings to the flow of activities from ideation to market success. By seeing in this systemic, value-adding-process way, they identified critical decision points, places where collaboration was needed to make good judgments. And they agreed on criteria for making those judgments.
In the past, these decisions had caused major internal conflicts because individuals or departments would advance and defend pet projects. Through reflection, they could see how their own past behaviors were doubling the time it took to make good decisions. They developed new principles and practices for group process, decision-making, and technical procedure. Their time to market was reduced by 60 percent and they radically improved their ability to kill products early that failed to demonstrate potential for national success.
The increased speed and accuracy with which Bob’s team could generate successful products represented a significant improvement for the distributors, who spend thousands of unreimbursed hours and dollars staging a product introduction. The team was able to achieve these results by starting from an understanding of the effects consumers were seeking from Kingsford’s products, which yielded much better results than any focus group or market test. It enabled them to rigorously ask how each step from sourcing materials to shipping was likely to affect the consumer’s integrated experience. This tripled their predictive accuracy and cut go-to-market outlays in half.
In addition, they learned to identify products in the incubator with high potential but no immediacy. These formed a reservoir of future offerings that could be introduced when market conditions evolved, filling the pipeline for years to come. Finally, Bob transferred this capability to other teams and individuals, a key requirement for any promise-beyond-ableness plan.
There is a postscript to this story. Bob Raynsford went on to use what he learned from his time at Kingsford, and from this and other promises-beyond-ableness commitments, to build a number of companies of his own, continuing to contribute to the field of holistic business thinking. This work has made him a very successful man, and he attributes it to what he learned at Kingsford. Like dozens of others who have gone on to found small but industry-changing companies, Bob radically expanded his capabilities through participating in cross-functional education teams.
Factors Critical to Design of Self-Initiating Management Systems
Frank Barrett, a professor of Systems Management at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California has called self-organizing processes like the one at Kingsford jazz improvisation. He is a jazz musician and describes a jazz ensemble as a diverse group of specialists who make fast irreversible decisions, are highly dependent on one another to interpret equivocal information, and are dedicated to innovation and the creation of novelty. They perform without a prescribed plan and without certainty of the outcome. They discover the future as actions unfold. Though it looks like chaos to an outsider, it is a highly disciplined endeavor that requires continual development and conscious attention.
Barrett’s jazz metaphor fits Kingsford and Colgate well. A group of diverse and uniquely proficient individuals dedicated themselves to creating distinctive, meaningful effects for their customers. We can see this at work in Apple, Google, Facebook, W. L. Gore, and other innovative companies as well. These characteristics of jazz performance were reflected in the work at these businesses.
- The teams at Kingsford and Colgate deliberately tried to break patterns, avoiding being mechanical at all costs. They extended themselves beyond what they could already do easily because personal and professional development was an important part of what they were seeking.
- They redefined mistakes as indicators for as-yet-undiscovered answers, approaches and capability. They avoided performance measures that limited them from going out on the edge of their knowledge and experience.
- They worked with minimal structure to ensure maximum flexibility in the context of a shared desire to innovate.
- Tasks were not hierarchically assigned but distributed by teams themselves and constantly changing based on what was emerging and could be synchronized in the dynamic interplay.
- Reflection, the ability to self-observe in order to manage one’s behavior and thinking, was built into each task. They constantly sought to discover how they got where they were and what shifts might generate different outcomes.
- They were more than colleagues—they were a community united by a shared practice of reinventing a business and a nation. They met for breakfast or at the end of day. They wanted to be together to challenge their thinking and learn from and with one another.
- Each person was equally valued because they all contributed by means of their promises-beyond-ableness and their participation in various teams and dialogues. No honors were given to exemplary people because everyone was exemplary. To distinguish particular players would disregard the fact that they all took turns being both leaders and supporters. There were no incentives, rewards or recognitions. Celebrations were created by teams themselves as they reached milestones and shared widely.
What was critical to the personal growth process at Kingsford and Colgate was the continuous development of the capability to think, reflect, and work as teams toward innovation. The employees knew that building standards and measures that oriented the mind toward following familiar patterns was the death knell for growth. They held to a strong motto: To grow the business, you have to grow the people. They fostered skills in themselves and others that enabled highly creative improvisation and opened the way to rapid transformation.
Theory Base Behind Promises Beyond Ableness
Developing Self Efficacy and Internal Locus of Control: One of the most debilitation factors in organizational, family, and personal lives is persons who hold and live from the belief, and reinforced experience, that life is not under their own control. Events are seen a resulting from external factors such as luck, favoritism, and power structures. The psychological name for this behavior is external locus of control—outcomes are controlled outside of me and beyond my influence. It leads to organizations and families filled with politicking, passing the buck, covering your ass, and lack of self-accountability. These outcomes are inevitable since people feel they can do very little if anything to effect outcomes in their lives or events around them. The predominate outcome is excuses for not delivering on our promises.
As leaders of organizations or in community groups, we unknowingly foster and evoke this behavior in people. We do this by how the performance appraisals are designed and carried out, in the engagement we have to set goals and objects and in giving feedback for course correction. And we do it in how we design and lead training and organizational processes for change. We do this though how we structure work roles and responsibilities and in pay and progression systems. Without being aware of how “locus of control” works in our psychology, we cannot be a resource to foster a culture of self-efficacy and internal locus of control. And we cannot design it into work and management systems.