How To Motivate Large Numbers Of People To Want To Help You
One of the realizations that comes with being skilled in relationship building is how much time and effort is required to make each relationship powerful and productive … unless you permanently retreat, which results in a loss of control. As we discussed, you can only have a handful of productive relationships at any point in time, and you’ll want to focus your skills and efforts on the few that will most help you succeed.
But you still want and need to motivate large numbers of people to want to help you with entrepreneuring; the good news is that there is another skill set, labeled “Motivating Others” that can do that. It works because it does not require you to share a specific shared objective with people you do not, or only barely know. The key to this skill set is to understand the psychological constructs of all humans’ deepest intrinsic motivations, which serve as universal shared objectives.
Decades of observations and research have led us to understand that the deepest most profound intrinsic motivations of people from all cultures share three characteristics.
First, individuals want autonomy. They want time to do things that make them feel good, including those things they think are important—they want time to feel ‘free’.
Second, they want to feel good about how they do the things they do. They want to feel competent or a ‘master’ of doing things they are proud of. They do not want to feel incompetent or foolish.
Third, as a social animal we want to be part of a group, and we want to feel proud of that group.
The skill of motivating others involves designing jobs, assignments, products and services that make any individual you might barely know feel autonomous, masterful, and purposeful.
What about money as the universal motivator?
Many jobs are designed to not have any autonomy, require people to do simplistic mindless work where mastery doesn’t matter, and to not expect to associate with the founder and not care what he or she stands for. At these jobs people work for the next paycheck. But they also do not care about the quality of the product or the friendliness of the service they give and they do not care about helping identify and solve delivery problems; they do the minimum work needed to keep their job until they can find a higher paying one.
With a money motivated workforce, you can only distinguish your product or service by being the cheapest. While money works as the only form of motivation for many businesses around the world, it results in competitive advantage coming solely from how little you pay for work to be done. With relatively little effort and cost you can create a workforce that actually cares about the business, the quality of their work and the satisfaction of the customer, and about what you and your business stand for.
Three subsequent blogs describe how to build autonomy, mastery and purpose into a job and how it is performed:
Making employees feel autonomous
Helping employees feel masterful
Instilling a sense of purpose for everyone involved