What Motivates You?

Why does a figure skater spend two hours, after her coach has left a six-hour practice, attempting to perfect her routine?

 

Why does a fifteen year-old stay wake until 3:00 a.m. to advance to the next level of a video game?

 

Why do some people arrive at the office by 6:00 am, and rarely leave before 6:00 pm?

 

Why do billionaires show up every day to work at all?

 

Motivation is the driving force by which we achieve our goals.  It is a very personal thing.  Motivators are the source of our motivation.  Understanding the motivators that are both relevant and important to individuals opens a door to understanding why people respond in different ways to the same situation.

 

Understanding the principles and mechanisms of motivation help us to:

1. Identify why and how buyers make purchases, so that we can better sell to them.
2. Build and develop high-performing workplace teams.
3. Understand our own passions, and tap into the energy that fuels our success.

Theories of Motivation

There are easily a good dozen theories of motivation - models that help explain why people act in the way they do.  Some are well-known and straightforward; others are developed for specific applications, such as education and learning.  

 

Here are the common ones, with links to more information if you want to deep dive into any of them.

 

Theory 1: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

This is probably the best-known theory of motivation.  Who isn’t familiar with this?  The basic model suggests two things:

1. our unsatisfied needs dictate our behavior
2. the lowest levels of need hierarchy must be satisfied first; in other words, our focus is on satisfying deficits in any lower level before shifting our focus to the next higher level.

 

You can find our more about Maslow’s theory here and, if you are into scholarly pursuits, here as well.  Alderfer’s ERG theory - dealing with the core needs of existence, relatedness, and growth - is an offshoot of Maslow’s theory.

 

Theory 2: Incentives

This is likely the second best-known theory of motivation, explaining the influence of positive and negative reinforcement in shaping our behavior.  Learn more about it here.

 

Theory 3: Drive Reduction

This is actually a composite of several theories, all to do with drive.  Partly embedded in Maslow’s theory, drive theory helps to explain the underpinnings of our basic physiological and psychological needs.  It is explained here.

 

Theory 4: Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory

A standard offering of most management courses, this theory suggests that two factors - extrinsic and intrinsic - determine job satisfaction in the workplace.  They include motivators which give positive satisfaction (e.g. challenge, recognition), and hygiene factors which when absent or insufficient, become demotivators (salary, job security).

 

Theory 5: Self-Determination

This focuses on intrinsic motivational factors such as curiosity, care, hobbies and interests.  The  theory explains why people devote themselves to the mastery of endeavors like playing an instrument, developing expertise in a field, or being altruistic like Mother Theresa.

 

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivational Factors

Extrinsic (external) factors come from our environment, outside of us - monetary gain, trophies, threat of punishment, fear for our lives, etc.  Intrinsic (internal) factors come from within us.  When someone refers to another as “motivated” they usually mean that their behavior is driven by something internal to that person.

 

What Are Your Intrinsic Motivators?

It helps to understand what makes us tick.  By and large, most of us are going to respond to extrinsic motivators (fear, reward) in fairly predictable and observable ways.  However, our internal drivers are entirely personal.  What is relevant and important to one person (for example, the need to compete and win) can be entirely irrelevant and unimportant to another person.

 

Here’s a list of commonly recognized categories of internal motivation drivers.  Determine which ones characterize your behavior.  There are no right or wrong answers.

•  
  • Acceptance - approval from others
  • Achievement - the desire to excel, and avoidance of failure
  • Affiliation - harmonious relations with others
  • Curiosity - yearning to learn
  • Eating - enjoyment of food
  • Family - raising children
  • Honor - loyalty to family, ethnic, or organizational values
  • Idealism - social justice altruism
  • Independence - individuality, and freedom from control by others
  • Order - organization, stability, predictability, repeatability
  • Physical activity - exercise, physiological development
  • Power - telling others what to do, or organizing others to achieve a common goal
  • Romance - sex, being sexually attractive to others
  • Saving - keeping, collecting, protecting assets
  • Social contact - having friends and acquaintances
  • Status - social standing, importance and recognition in society or a social group
  • Tranquility - safety, peace, harmony, freedom from violence
  • Vengeance (competitiveness) - striking back, conquering, winning

 

Hard Goals Are the Best Motivator

You might be surprised to learn that motivation, as a serious topic for psychological study, was pooh-poohed 50 years ago.  So begins a 2002 paper published by business professors Edwin Locke and Gary Latham titled Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey.  It’s worth a read.

 

Basically, Locke and Latham surveyed the literature on goal-setting and motivation, and drew several conclusions.  Here they are in a nutshell.

 

Goal-setting works, and hard goals work best

1. Difficult goals yield the highest level of effort and performance.
2. Encouragement (“Do your best”) is not as effective as goal setting.

Motivation increases because hard goals:

1. Focus our attention on goal-relevant activities, and away from irrelevant activities.
2. Energize us, resulting in more effort.
3. Prolong our effort either to make deadlines, or stay in it for the long haul.
4. Compel us to test out know-how and strategies until we find a solution. 

Our level of motivation is influenced by:

1. Commitment - the most important factor when goals are difficult
2. Importance - our belief in the need to achieve a goal
3. Confidence - our belief that we can succeed
4. Feedback - knowing our progress in relation to the goal
5. Task Complexity - our ability to master the skills needed to achieve difficult tasks

Is all this new?  Probably not.  But it serves as a good reminder that:

• we work most effectively when we rise to the occasion
• understanding the underlying principles of motivation are helpful in pulling together a goal framework that works effectively for us
• what works to motivate us, works to motivate others, too

Why Steve Jobs is Missed

I expected the Steve Jobs’ passing would garner considerable headline media coverage and tributes from around the world, but I underestimated the extent of the outpouring.

 

I cannot recall a business person’s passing that was as profoundly felt as that of Steve Jobs.  Not ever.  The reaction from people upon hearing of his death has been compared to that for Princess Diana and Michael Jackson.  After all, Steve Jobs was, in his own right, a global celebrity who had achieved “star” status.

 

I’ve both read and listened to comments from journalists, computer analysts, industry observers, as well as colleagues and contemporaries of Steve Jobs.  During the past week some have drawn a comparison to Thomas Edison, the icon of American inventors who gave us light bulbs, the phonograph and the motion picture camera.

 

Like Edison, Steve Jobs was one of those individuals who comes along once every 75 years to do things that affect lives and hearts, and do it in a way that stirs emotions.  Of the reasons that Steve Jobs is missed, for me there are three:

• Jobs was a visionary and a creator, first and foremost.  His dreams were brought to life through the company he co-founded.  Importantly, his dreams connected to the dreams of tens of millions of people who, through his products, experienced the joy and wonder in using them that Jobs had envisioned in creating them.
• He was imperfect, just like the rest of us.  Adopted, raised in a humble environment, and a first semester dropout at college, Steve Jobs was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth.  He was brash, impatient, demanding, intolerant and difficult to work for and work with.  Achieving early success that made others envious, he suffered the ultimate indignity when he was fired from the company he co-founded by the very same person he had hired to help it.  Even his most ardent adversaries felt for the man at this sad turn.
• Yet, he was his own Phoenix, rising from the ashes.  Jobs defied the odds, making a comeback to Apple as its CEO, and then set out to achieve accomplishments that even the best of fairy tales cannot match.  Steve Jobs became to personal technology what Walt Disney became to childhood imagination, and what J.K. Rowlings became to children’s fantasy books.  Apple redefined the personal technology landscape not through brute competitive force, but by creating offerings that were irresistible to tens of millions of us.  In his own language, Jobs wanted to “seduce” us by cloaking functionality under the most elegant of designs, and creating an experience with the customer that was unique, compelling and without substitute.  

 

Steve Jobs achieved enormous success by giving us things we could only imagine, and appealing to the universal desire for novelty, simplicity, wonder and delight, with functionality sandwiched in between.  Just like Thomas Edison did.

 

Getting a Buzz from Potatoes

Something to inspire!

Situation: You handle sales and marketing for a commodity product that’s been around for hundreds of years, defies attempts to differentiate it, is bashed by the medical establishment, and is suffering from declining sales.

Question: Given the choice, would you look for a job in another industry, or attempt to turn things around?

If you’re Chris Voigt, Executive Director of the Washington State Potato Commission, you turn things around.

Source: USDA

Voigt chose to change public attitudes by going on an all-potato diet for 60 days in 2010, and promoting it via social media.  The video shows what he did, and what he accomplished.

<p>60 Day Potato-Only Diet from Washington St. Potato Commission on Vimeo.</p>

Results

• A Yr/Yr survey showed the percentage of people who believed potatoes are bad for your health declined from 24% in 2010 to 18% in 2011.
• For the grand sum of $366.90 Voigt established two websites, and let viral marketers take care of the rest.  This is less than 0.1% of the Washington State Potato Commission’s annual marketing budget.

Do you have a potato in your hands?  Hot or otherwise?  Then take a lesson from Chris Voigt.  As Trout and Ries have advised for 40 years, no product is a commodity unless you treat it like one.