Scott Jeffrey

THE BIG IDEA: The old paradigm of employee motivation can actually be hurting your business’s performance. Social psychology offers fresh insights on what drives modern humans to perform at their best.

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If there was a strategy that would simultaneously improve your personal effectiveness and organization growth, would you adopt it today?

How about if we told you it could make your life and the work of your employees a whole lot more enjoyable too?

Rethinking Employee Motivation

The primary form of motivation in the workplace has been the old carrot-and-stick approach: you work for us and we’ll pay you for your time.

Over the past century, money was the primary motivator in corporate America. In the past, money as a primary motivation worked because employee tasks were routine, unchallenging, and controlled.

Our current work environment is very different, characterized by complexity and rapid change.

In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, author Dan Pink provides substantial evidence that the carrot-and-stick approach is actually destructive to organizations in today’s dynamic workplace.

Focusing mainly on financial compensation as the primary employee motivator has been found to reduce lower performance, inhibit creativity, foster addiction, and promote unethical behavior in organizations.

Three Psychological Needs for Intrinsic Motivation

Money is an external factor. Study after study show that people improve their performance when they are motivated by something within themselves. Psychology calls this intrinsic motivation.

Self-determination theory suggests that there are three psychological needs that form of the basis for intrinsic motivation. Applied to your organization, they can improve employee health, wellbeing, and performance:

1. Competence: allow employees to become better at something that matters to them.
2. Autonomy: allow employees to be self-directed with control over key aspects of their work (which can include when they work, how they work, with whom they work, and exactly what they are working on).
3. Relatedness: provide means for employees to contribute to a cause greater than themselves, to experience caring for others.

As a chief executive, you understand the importance of autonomy and the sense of freedom that comes from being the captain of one’s own ship.

Last week’s quote from PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi stuck with us: “If you want to improve the organization, you have to improve yourself and the organization gets pulled up with you … I cannot just expect the organization to improve if I don’t improve myself and lift the organization.”

Nooyi’s statement speaks to the motivation of competence and the drive to achieve greater mastery of one’s self. According to a survey of 267 C-level executives of Fortune 500 companies, chief executives invest an average of 30 minutes in personal development each day.

The Power of Purpose

Nooyi’s stated end goal is to “lift the organization.” This is the drive of relatedness, or what authors like Dan Pink and Tony Hsieh have called purpose. This universal need to connect and care for others doesn’t just motivate individuals—it translates to bottom-line profits too.

Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant ran an experiment with call center employees who were tasked with calling people to ask for donations.

He randomly separated them into three groups. Each group had the same conditions except for a five-minute story each group read before their shift.

The first group read stories from other call center agents about how their job helped teach them transferable sales skills (a personal benefit).

The second group read stories from university alumni who benefitted from the donations raised by the call center and how the scholarships helped them (a purpose that connected the agents with something greater than themselves).

The third group read stories that had nothing to do with personal gain or purpose (the control group).

Grant couldn’t believe the results of his study. He replicated it five more times to be sure: while the personal benefit group showed no change in their performance, the purpose group more than doubled their dollars raised.

The call center employees in the purpose group couldn’t identify what exactly was driving their behavior. They simply doubled their productivity!

Could helping others and making a difference in people’s lives be a secret factor in motivating people to higher performance? It certainly appears so.

How to Improve Employee Motivation

Here are three steps to improve employee motivation through purpose:

#1: Clearly define your business in the context of your customers: who are they as human beings? How are you committed to serving them and adding value to their lives?

#2: Communicate this customer-driven message throughout your organization. Everyone in your organization should know the purpose of the business so they may find their own ways (autonomy) of contributing to that purpose.

#3: Be consistent. Never stop “selling in” to your organization. Inspiring leaders always find fresh ways to reinforce their organization’s purpose through words, personal behavior, and corporate decisions.

Feeling motivated? Let’s get going …

THE BIG IDEA: When executed well, core values provide an unparalleled competitive advantage for leaders because they define a specific set of idealized behaviors they want their people to uphold.

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If you could wave a wand and magically have all of your employees behaving in certain ways, how would you want them to behave?

It’s easy to get frustrated when an employee is behaving in a manner that doesn’t support the organization—arriving late to meetings, speaking over others, or making rash decisions.

When you observe a negative behavior, you can try to correct it by calling the recalcitrant into your office and giving him or her feedback.

For this approach to be effective, the feedback needs to be well-timed (right when the undesirable behavior occurs) and consistent (more than once).

Humans don’t change their behaviors too readily or quickly. Conditioning new behaviors takes time, consistency, and patience.

How to Improve Employee Behavior

While its beneficial to train your leaders to become effective in-house coaches, when you’re heading an organization with thousands of people, the feedback approach alone cannot foster the behavioral changes you seek on a company-wide scale.

The alternative approach, used by a minute number of extraordinary business leaders, is to determine, in advance, the idealized behaviors they want their employees to embody. Then, to encapsulate these behaviors into a set of core values that permeates throughout their organization.

Now, any company can put together a list of values.

Enron, for example, listed core values in their 2000 annual report including “Respect: We treat others as we would like to be treated” and “Integrity: We work with customers and prospects openly, honestly, and sincerely.”

Obviously, listing a set of values isn’t enough.

The Behaviors and Skills Your Organization Values

Core values answers the question, “What does our business stand for?”

More than anything else, what your business stands for is defined by the actions and behaviors of your people.

The actual values of an organization are determined mainly by where it invests its resources and how its employees behave, not what the leader says or what’s posted on a company website.

Businesses that use core values to build extraordinary organizations—like Zappos, Southwest Airlines, and Netflix—take their values very seriously.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings explains, “Actual company values are the behaviors and skills that are valued in fellow employees.”

Businesses that consciously cultivate their culture hire and promote employees who demonstrate their established set of core values. They train and enforce these idealized behaviors at every turn.

Core Values Require Specificity

To be able to hire, train, and promote employees based on a set of values, your core values need to be specific so they can be measurable.

Enron’s lofty value of integrity and its brief description sounds nice, but could a manager easily evaluate if an employee was working with customers “openly, honestly, and sincerely”? (And what about open, honest, and sincere communication within the organization? Clearly, that wasn’t valued at Enron either.)

In contrast, look at Netflix’s core value of honesty, a value similar to integrity. For Hasting’s organization, honesty means:

“You are known for candor and directness.”

“You are non-political when you disagree with others.”

“You only say things about fellow employees you will say to their face.”

“You are quick to admit mistakes.”

Can you see how these definitions make it easy for leaders to evaluate their employees and potential hires?

Core Values are the CEO’s Responsibility (Not HR’s)

Ultimately, businesses that use core values to create a unique corporate culture have leaders who embody the very same values they want their people to emulate.

Humans learn best through observing behavior, not words.

If a leader isn’t conducting herself with integrity, for example, you can be certain that the employees aren’t going to go out of their way to do so either. Research shows that employees are seven times more likely to demonstrate loyalty to leaders they believe have high integrity than to those they do not.

This suggests that chief executives must be clear on two things.

First, they must know what behaviors are necessary to move their organization towards their inspiring vision. Second, they must resolve to live these behaviors, to the best of their ability, each and every day.

This is not a small commitment. Could this explain why so few organizations succeed in creating thriving cultures with engaged employees?

SIDEBAR: Will Your Core Values Hold?

Here’s a quick checklist to test the integrity of your core values:

1. Does each value speak to at least one desired behavior?
2. Will each value help you make decisions (especially the difficult ones)?
3. Are your core values memorable? Will every team member be able to encode them in their minds?
4. Does each value represent distinct elements of your overall culture?
5. Will you be willing to uphold these values 50 years from now?
6. Are your values congruent with the behavior of your leadership team? Are these values BS-tested? Will an employee be able to observe hypocrisy?
7. Can your organization hold up these values in stressful and difficult situations (like increased competition, product recall, stock devaluation, or downsizing)?
8. Are you willing to defend these values unequivocally? That is, does each value permeate through the entire organization?

For concise instructions on how to discover your core values, click here.

THE BIG IDEA: Considering the staggering amount of time CEOs spend in meetings, investing time in improving meeting effectiveness is prudent for any outperforming leader.

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Management guru Henry Mintzberg was one of the first researchers to provide a glimpse into the daily lives of CEOs.

Mintzberg followed a handful of business leaders around the office for his Ph.D. thesis at MIT Sloan. His primary observation appears obvious: CEOs go to a lot of meetings. Roughly 80 percent of their work hours are spent in meetings.

That was over four decades ago. A more recent study by Oriana Bandiera of London School of Economics and colleagues had the personal assistants of 94 CEOs provide detailed time sheets over a pre-specified week.

The results were similar to Mintzberg’s observations: 85 percent of the CEO’s time was spent working with other people through meetings, phone calls, and public appearances.

Why CEOs Need Meetings

Meetings dominate a CEO’s day because personal interactions provide valuable information critical to effectively running an organization.

Harvard Business School professors Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria argue that the ability to extract critical details needed to inform big decisions from employees is partly what defines the most effective CEOs.

Meetings also provide CEOs with an opportunity to communicate what they think is vital for their teams to know.

The Dark Side of Meetings

Another management guru, Peter Drucker, had strong views about meetings. He wrote, “Meetings are by definition a concession to a deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.”

Or, as economist John Kenneth Galbraith said, meetings are “indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”

The problem is two fold. First, we have too many meetings. Second, too many of them are unproductive.

12 Tips on Conducting Effective Meetings

Your goal, of course, isn’t to eliminate meetings, but to optimize their effectiveness as well as reduce their duration and frequency whenever possible.

Here’s a list of 12 ways to help you master the art of conducting effective meetings:

1. Clarify the purpose of the meeting when it’s scheduled. Request that participants come to the meeting prepared in advanced.
2. Clarify the objective of the meeting at its start. Every meeting should have purposeful direction.
3. Be mindful of meeting duration. Many 60-minute meetings can be done in 30 minutes. Many 30-minute meetings require only 15 minutes.
4. Start meetings on time regardless of who is late.
5. Reward the behavior you seek: Don’t invest time in reviewing meeting content with latecomers. Doing so rewards tardiness and penalizes timeliness.
6. Evaluate who really needs to attend each meeting. The more people, the more challenging it is be productive.
7. Avoid holding meetings for informational purposes; that’s the proper function of digital communication.
8. Elect a meeting moderator responsible for guiding the discussion toward the desired end goal. Don’t let specific participants dominate the meeting with endless conversation.
9. Whenever possible, end meetings early. The extra time can create a positive experience for participants.
10. Reduce distractions by closing the door and requesting that members do not use their phones during meetings.
11. Ask participants distracted with things unrelated to the meeting to leave. A meeting should be an active dialogue with all members involved.
12. End every meeting with a committed action plan.

Each of the above suggestions can greatly improve the quality, effectiveness, and results of your meetings.

A Bold Experiment: Cut All Meetings in Half

If you’re intrigued and brave enough, commit to cutting the duration of every meeting in half. Try this experiment over the course of the next two weeks and observe the results.

If you’re like many of our clients, you’ll find that you accomplish just as much. More importantly, you’ll discover a reservoir of free time that can be invested in more important matters.

If you have a clear objective, the shorter the meeting, the more focused the attention and the better the outcome.

Conducting more effective meetings will give you more time to focus on what matters most: leading with vision, cultivating a thriving organization, and better serving your customers.

THE BIG IDEA: Cohesive organizations and customer communities are created by the same mechanism. If you know what’s at the heart of both, you can build a thriving organization that fosters passionate customers.

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Like a hand full of marbles pouring into a bowl, when you put a bunch of people together, there’s chaos.

Egos bump heads like marbles colliding.

But then, a group begins to constellate around the center.

This center can take various forms.

In sports clubs and political groups, the center is a common goal, like winning a championship or an election.

In activist groups, the center is a cause, a slogan, or a set of beliefs.

In religions, the center is a God-image.

In corporate cultures, the center can be an inspiring vision, mission, or set of core values.

In destructive cults, the center is a charismatic leader with narcissistic and messianic qualities.

In Cult Brands, the center is usually an ideal, a set of values, or a theme of interest.

What Draws Groups Together

The group’s center acts as a magnet, attracting members to its core. The more powerful the center, the more cohesive the group.

Here’s the secret to transforming your organization and your customer relationships: the more archetypal the center, the more solid, enduring, and cohesive the group.

Archetypes draw people together. They inspire loyalty and connectedness.

As inherited dispositions in every human being, archetypes cause us to react in typical (instinctive) ways. Archetypes bind us together as members of the human family.

An Illustration of Archetypes in Action

Historically, world religions have kept the largest groups of humans together. The center of these religions (Christ, Buddha, Krishna, Muhammad) is the archetype of the Anthropos, the cosmic man, a collective soul that unites all people.

Destructive cults, too, constellate around this God image. Its members project this powerful archetype—what Jung called the Self—onto the leader.

The Self, as well as God or Nature, has been described by many ancient philosophers as an “infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” (We can all ponder that on our lunch break today.)

Symbolic images that point to the Self, like the circle, the apple, the star, the tree, and the egg, are found in countless religious narratives, myths, fairy tales, and individual dreams.

The Self, in its masculine expression, often takes the form of the wise old man, the guide, the mentor with supernatural aid. This archetype is expressed by characters like Merlin from the Arthurian legend, Gandalf in the The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit series, and Yoda in the Star Wars franchise.

In its feminine expression, the Self may take the form of an earth mother or love goddess. Southwest Airlines, for example, is aligned with the feminine expression of the Self. Their organization is guided by the principles of relatedness, care, and love—all attributes of the feminine Self.

Putting Archetypes to Work in Your Organization

How do you put archetypes to work?

Start at the center. The center is unique for each organization. Your strengths hint at it. Your organization’s passions point you in the right direction. The forces that drive your customers to do business with you provide invaluable clues.

This center should be expressed in your ultimate vision, your core values, and the language of your corporate culture.

How will you know when you’ve found your center? Your heart will awaken. Your employees will come together as teams. Innovation will increase by virtue of the passions of the men and women guided by archetypal forces deep within them. Your stakeholders will observe it. Your customers will hear the call.

Remember: the more archetypal, the more essential, and the more human your center is, the more cohesive your organization will become. And, the more easily you’ll attract customers who want to join forces with you.

THE BIG IDEA: Cohesive organizations and customer communities are created by the same mechanism. If you know what’s at the heart of both, you can build a thriving organization that fosters passionate customers.

__________________

Like a hand full of marbles pouring into a bowl, when you put a bunch of people together, there’s chaos.

Egos bump heads like marbles colliding.

But then, a group begins to constellate around the center.

This center can take various forms.

In sports clubs and political groups, the center is a common goal, like winning a championship or an election.

In activist groups, the center is a cause, a slogan, or a set of beliefs.

In religions, the center is a God-image.

In corporate cultures, the center can be an inspiring vision, mission, or set of core values.

In destructive cults, the center is a charismatic leader with narcissistic and messianic qualities.

In Cult Brands, the center is usually an ideal, a set of values, or a theme of interest.

What Draws Groups Together

The group’s center acts as a magnet, attracting members to its core. The more powerful the center, the more cohesive the group.

Here’s the secret to transforming your organization and your customer relationships: the more archetypal the center, the more solid, enduring, and cohesive the group.

Archetypes draw people together. They inspire loyalty and connectedness.

As inherited dispositions in every human being, archetypes cause us to react in typical (instinctive) ways. Archetypes bind us together as members of the human family.

An Illustration of Archetypes in Action

Historically, world religions have kept the largest groups of humans together. The center of these religions (Christ, Buddha, Krishna, Muhammad) is the archetype of the Anthropos, the cosmic man, a collective soul that unites all people.

Destructive cults, too, constellate around this God image. Its members project this powerful archetype—what Jung called the Self—onto the leader.

The Self, as well as God or Nature, has been described by many ancient philosophers as an “infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” (We can all ponder that on our lunch break today.)

Symbolic images that point to the Self, like the circle, the apple, the star, the tree, and the egg, are found in countless religious narratives, myths, fairy tales, and individual dreams.

The Self, in its masculine expression, often takes the form of the wise old man, the guide, the mentor with supernatural aid. This archetype is expressed by characters like Merlin from the Arthurian legend, Gandalf in the The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit series, and Yoda in the Star Wars franchise.

In its feminine expression, the Self may take the form of an earth mother or love goddess. Southwest Airlines, for example, is aligned with the feminine expression of the Self. Their organization is guided by the principles of relatedness, care, and love—all attributes of the feminine Self.

Putting Archetypes to Work in Your Organization

How do you put archetypes to work?

Start at the center. The center is unique for each organization. Your strengths hint at it. Your organization’s passions point you in the right direction. The forces that drive your customers to do business with you provide invaluable clues.

This center should be expressed in your ultimate vision, your core values, and the language of your corporate culture.

How will you know when you’ve found your center? Your heart will awaken. Your employees will come together as teams. Innovation will increase by virtue of the passions of the men and women guided by archetypal forces deep within them. Your stakeholders will observe it. Your customers will hear the call.

Remember: the more archetypal, the more essential, and the more human your center is, the more cohesive your organization will become. And, the more easily you’ll attract customers who want to join forces with you.