Leadership Summit Session Ten :: Daniel Pink

Daniel Pink is a speaker, an author, and former speech writer for the White House.  He is the author of the recent book "Drive."

• We each have a biological drive, a reward and punishment drive, but also a curiosity drive.  This third drive is routinely neglected in the context of an organization.
• Organizations usually have a two dimensional view of human beings - trying to restrain the biological, and manage the reward and punishment.
• Even the most rudimentary cognitive skill can not be rewarded by the science of reward and punishment.
• Straight, simple, straightforward tasks can be rewarded by the science of punishment and reward.  But when you're dealing with complicated tasks that require creativity, these kinds of rewards are ineffective, because they encourage tunnel vision.
• When we see these "carrots and sticks" fail before our eyes, we don't try to be more creative in our approach to our work.  We instead cry out for more carrots and sticks.  People try to manipulate the system of reward rather than try to improve their work when we are simply trying to reward/punish.
• We make the wrong assumptions about people in our organizations: 1) That human beings are complicated but mechanistic machines.  If you push the right buttons, you can get them to do what you want them to do; and 2) That human beings are blobs - that people are basically passive and inert, who need to be rewarded or punished to get them to do what you want them to do.
• It is in human nature to be active and engaged (just look at kids).  This is our default setting.  And while events and circumstances can mess with this setting, we still have this in us.

• So: what works for complicated, conceptual, and creative people doing this kind of work?

• Autonomy - Management is an inventional/technology from the 1850s.  It is a technology designed to get compliance.  We don't want compliance in our organizations; we want engagement.  Self direction - autonomy - leads to engagement.  People report their best bosses as being the types that gave them the most autonomy.
• Giving people autonomy over their time, their team, their task, and their technique leads to engagement.  Example: giving people a Thursday afternoon to work on anything they want that is not work-related, and presenting it to the company on Friday.  It's a "FedEx Day" - delivering something overnight.
• Another example: 20% time by Google - people can spend 20% of their paid time doing working on whatever they want.  Out of these times have come Google News, Gmail, etc.  Almost all of Google's good ideas have come out of the 20% time.
• To implement this in your organization, you have to go slow, because people are used to being compliant.  Use scaffolding: try a FedEx day, or some other modified version of 20% time (maybe 10% time).  Do it with the people who would use it the most effectively, and do it for a predetermined period of time.

• Mastery - The single most powerful motivator at work are those days in which people are making progress.  Therefore, a manager's role isn't to help people gain compliance, but helping them see their progress.  People want to gain mastery at things, because of their curious drive.
• Flow - the place where what you are doing is so in line with your passion and giftedness that you lose a sense of time and self.  These moments are most likely to happen during work.  We want to help people get into the flow.
• You also have to give people feedback - feedback that is rich, robust, frequent, and authentic.  We need to encourage people to take their feedback into their own hands, doing their own reviews, by setting their goals at the beginning of the month, and then assessing themselves every month against those goals - perhaps informally with a supervisor over coffee.

• Purpose - we are seeing the limits of the profit motive.  There is a rise of the purpose motive.  
• When the profit motive becomes unmoored from the purpose motive, ethical problems arise, but even more so, mediocrity and uninspired, insufficient motivators.
• People are telling the profit sector to act more like the private/non profit sector - to be driven by purpose.
• Use this diagnostic tool - listen to the pronouns people use when they are describing the organizations they work for.  The "we" organizations are high performing; the "they" organizations are not.

Organizations are not simply changed, overnight, with a silver bullet.  Rather, we should be asking if we can change what we do.  These cumulative changes will effect change in the organizations.  These changes begin with a conversation.