In 2011, Daniel Pink suggested in his book Drive that the secret to workplace motivation is a combination of mastery, autonomy, and purpose which combine to form Drive. We examine this idea and how we can use it to troubleshoot your life.
Hunter Powers: Hello and welcome to The One. I'm your host Hunter Powers, broadcasting live from our nation's capital, DC proper, Washington, D.C. And today's one idea is troubleshooting your life. In 2011, Dan Pink wrote the book Drive, the surprising truth about what motivates us. I came across this book as I was diagnosing an engagement issue with a number of employees at a company. Productivity was down, the quality of the work was down and people just weren't happy. And one of the secrets, when you're faced with a problem that you aren't entirely sure how to diagnose, is to go and find what are considered the best books on the subject.
Hunter Powers: Yes, you can go and do a quick Google search and read two or three articles, but it really doesn't compare. Great authors spend years and compress their best thoughts and ideas into these books, which you can usually buy for 10 to $20 and extract their core essence. An even further trick is once you identify what are the best books about a problem is to go and find the executive summaries for each of these books and start by reading those. You can get through them ridiculously quick. Then the ones that truly peak your interest, go and read the actual book. For me, Drive was one of these books.
Hunter Powers: Dan's book is about trying to find what motivates people in the workplace. And he suggests that many of the traditional models don't actually work or the science behind them doesn't actually support their viability. And he refers to the majority of these methods as variations on carrots and sticks. The carrot is something that you hang in front of someone, a potential reward for doing something well or accomplishing a task, and the stick is something that you have behind them, if you don't do this, if this isn't done on time, if we don't hit these numbers, here's this punishment.
Hunter Powers: And most management theories are some variation of the two. There's either a reward for getting the job done or a punishment for failing to get the job done or some sort of a combination of both. It's done well enough; there's a reward, it's done poor enough; there's a punishment, and then there's that lovely area in between the doldrums. But what Dan Pink found was that the carrot in the stick got rid of the intrinsic motivation for people to do the tasks, to do the work at hand. They only wanted to do their jobs because there was a reward in front of them or there was a punishment they were trying to get away from. That when their mindset switched to this, that the quality or the performance of their work diminished significantly, that the creativity of their solutions suffered significantly, that these ideas promoted variations on cheating or unethical behavior because the work became less about the work and more about the carrot or the stick.
Hunter Powers: Now, one aside and we'll get back to the primary idea of troubleshooting your life is, Dan did find one area where carrots and sticks are effective. And that is in boring work that requires no creativity and nobody wants to do it otherwise. So if there's a job that just has to be done and it's the kind of job that, maybe in the future, robots might do, but nobody wants to do it. No one's really hyper engaged about the idea of doing this. But that's a great job to just put a reward on, because there is no intrinsic motivation to begin with. And so you're not squashing it, and there's no need for creativity. And it really is just about accomplishing the task. And that's where, at least as Dan suggests, carrots and sticks work.
Hunter Powers: So if carrot and sticks are a bad methodology, then how should we be motivating people? And this is where Dan gets to the idea of Drive. There are three things that motivate us. Three ingredients of motivation. These are the motivating psychological conditions to getting more done. And they are autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy is the desire to direct our own lives. To choose what it is we're working on, our working on it, our engaging with the subject matter. When everything is strongly dictated to us, go here, do this, do that. Complete this task. Exactly like this, there's no autonomy. We are not the directors of our life. And shockingly, having some autonomy is something that's important to us. That's important to intrinsic motivation.
Hunter Powers: The second is mastery. Mastery is the urge to get better at something, and something that matters. It's important to us that we see progress, that we can look back and confidently say that we are farther along today than we were yesterday, a week ago, a year ago. Because as the old saying goes, "If you're not growing, you're dying." And so mastery is important. Learning new things, increasing our skills, getting better at something that matters.
Hunter Powers: And the last ingredient, purpose. The yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. We want what we do to matter, to have impact, to be aligned with some greater ideal. We want to be able to see the connection between the work that we're doing and a potential future outcome. Again, three things. Autonomy, mastery and purpose. Dan Pink says these are the three keys to driving work force engagement. Give the workers more autonomy, give them more choice in their day to day, the projects that they're working on or maybe how they're working on those projects, how they're engaging with them. Mastery, the ability to learn new skills or learn new subject matter. And I've even found that it can be important to simply call out where they are learning new things so that they can acknowledge.
Hunter Powers: A lot of people are learning all the time. They just don't realize it. They don't take a moment to think about it. And sometimes, you can accomplish the mastery part by just calling it out. And then purpose, the constant connection with where the company is going? Why am I doing this work? And at least suggesting that it is in connection with this larger mission that you are aligned with. Now, this is all about workforce engagement. And the one idea for today was troubleshooting your life. Though, once again, this book, Drive, it's one of my favorite books. And the reason it's one of my favorite books is because it's the book that I apply the most.
Hunter Powers: And the very small leap that I took from this book is that this same methodology of diagnosing a lack of engagement, a lack of autonomy, mastery and purpose can be applied to life in general. You're upset about something in your life. Something just feels off, a lack of fulfillment. There's a lack of something and you can't figure it out. You're trying to troubleshoot, but all the basics seem to be there. Got a job, it's okay. Got a relationship, it's okay. Got some stuff, it's okay. But the fulfillment isn't there. The happiness isn't there. Why?
Hunter Powers: Well, I would suggest that you're probably not engaged with your life. You probably don't have enough drive. And if you want to figure out where it is you're lacking, look at these three areas. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy, how much choice do you have in your life? To what degree is everything prescribed? Go here. Do this. You have to follow this exact plan. You've got a calendar where every single moment is already filled out and you aren't the one that is driving that calendar. How much choice and freedom do you have in your day to day?
Hunter Powers: Mastery. Are you learning new skills? Are you learning new material? Are you becoming better at things or are you just going through your days, relying on accumulated knowledge to get to the next one? Because once again, if you aren't growing, you're dying. The old... What goes up must come down, and the secret is to keep going up. And then the last one, purpose. Do you have a direction? Do you know where all of this is heading? Or where you want all of this to head? Does any of it mean anything? And if you can't answer these three questions, if you can't describe your sense of autonomy, mastery, and purpose, well that's where you should begin.
Hunter Powers: And most likely what you will find is, one of these areas is lacking. You're probably doing okay in two out of three, but one of them is pretty far down, and that's the one you should focus on. And there are a lot of practical ideas on how you can increase each of these areas. Increase your autonomy, increase your mastery, and increase your purpose. But I think we'll save those or another episode of The One.
Hunter Powers: So for today, ask yourself, "Where do I rank myself in these three areas?" Or perhaps you are fully engaged, in which case those rankings should be pretty high. No issue there. But if there is an issue, this is where I would start. To troubleshoot your life, figure out where it's not quite adding up and what you can do to establish the motivating psychological conditions that are going to allow you to get more done and enjoy doing it. And that was your one idea for today. I am Hunter Powers, broadcasting live from D.C., proper. Until next time.