How to motivate others to help you
Understanding the basics of motivations will help you understand how to get other people to help you succeed. Motivations are what get people to act and do something. Hunger motivates you to find food. Offering food is a classic way to motivate somebody to sit down and be friendly for a while.
Of course, once they are finished another motivation will take over and determine how they act. They will likely leave unless you deliver a new motivation for them to stay.
You need people to act in ways to help you for more than just one meal. Getting people motivated to help you over long periods of time is tricky. There is a ton of research on how you motivate people, but the classic way in business is to pay somebody.
This is known as an extrinsic motivation, because the motivation comes from someone else offering you some enticement to do something. The enticement could even include forcing you or manipulating you to act in a way that could hurt you. Over time, extrinsic motivations make people feel confined and grumpy about what they are doing. This includes working to get paid.
The best method for getting people to be happy to help you for long periods of time is to offer three things that simulate feelings that we would associate with a model childhood. We call these intrinsic motivations and all people in all cultures share three strong desires: 1) to feel independent, 2) to feel competent in making the world change in the way they want and 3) to feel part of a loving family or group.
To get people to want to change their lives to work with you and support your vision you want to structure work so every person personally feels autonomous, masterful, and purposeful. These feelings of autonomy, mastery of some activity, and purpose closely align to the basic intrinsic motivations all people are born to want. This is well described in an easy to read book by Daniel Pink called Drive. The trick is how to build some combination of these three qualities into a structured job that you want people to perform to help you achieve your vision.
How you build these principles into work will be different for every type of business, product team and even every job function within every company. And it will always require trade-offs between creativity and process design.
Designing work to make employees feel more autonomous and masterful
Feeling that your decisions directly impact how you perform your work is intrinsically motivating to everyone. Unfortunately, as enterprises grow they get more complex and each employee and contractor’s job becomes more interdependent and constrained by the work of others. For some jobs in some businesses, such as assembly-line work, almost every movement is proscribed. With layers of management making sure nothing happens that isn’t proscribed, people complain, “we have become totally bureaucratic.” People become unhappy in their work.
You want to be smart in how you design the work needed to deliver your product or service. Productivity derives from how effective every work-related action is at creating value for a customer. The work output of one group is often the work input of another. How integrated and synchronized workflow is between groups directly impacts productivity and quality. How a founder leads her/him/themself and others in designing work that is both productive and autonomous directly impacts the motivation of the team and the culture of the enterprise they build.
People feel autonomous when they can make decisions for themselves about how to live their lives and do their work. Even relieving just one or a few constraints in how they do their job will make them feel more autonomous if you let them know it. And you likely have the power to relieve constraints in some combination of the following dimensions:
Flexibility of work hours
Flexibility of work location
Flexibility in which work is assigned
Flexibility in who you are assigned to work with
Flexibility in asking for and receiving help
Flexibility in how the work is performed to achieve quality and quantity standards
Understanding how the quality and productivity of the work performed relate to someone’s ability to make more money and get promoted
Letting employees know that you have designed their work to have these added flexibilities has the additional benefit of increasing their understanding of how their work creates value for the enterprise.
In not-so-ancient times, many manufacturing businesses—like pottery-making—were loose associations of people that would show up when they wanted, evaluated what work was available in which area, and then decided if they wanted to sign-in to work and get paid that day. Today, because products and work are much more complex, the ancient level of flexibility for anyone other than the founder would create chaos.
Mastery and autonomy are related
Employees skilled in tasks that create value in the organization are valuable in providing ideas that improve the methods used to organize and perform their tasks. It is good practice to let workers with similar tasks have an opportunity to discuss and experiment with ways to make their work more productive. It is also good practice for members of teams whose work products interact with one another to meet to discuss and experiment how to improve how their work-product is transferred between teams. If you contract out work or service support, you want to know that your contractor lets their workforce have some autonomy to organize their work and master their craft; if not, they will suffer high turnover and lapses in quality.
Time to practice and get coached
In general, people master skills by practicing it, preferably as directed by experienced and empathetic coaches. If you want your team to get better at their tasks, then you want to provide them the resources to practice and get coaching on being better at their jobs and at designing their own workflows. You also want to let your ambitious team members know how being good at their jobs can enable them to advance—you’ll lose your ambitious employees if you do not.
A note about using “being too busy” as an excuse
Unless you and your team are in a crisis, you cannot use “we are too busy to help you improve” as an excuse. Improvement needs to be part of how work is designed and not as something that it done “in our spare time.”
Instilling a sense of purpose for everyone involved
Everyone wants to feel proud about what they do. Even if they feel unsuccessful in getting the job they dreamed of, everyone intrinsically prefers working for someone or a company they feel proud to be associated with. In making your teammates, employees and contractors proud of being associated with your enterprise, you motivate them to do what they can to help you succeed. That becomes a purpose for what they do; they are helping make something they are proud of be more successful.
Making them proud
Entrepreneurs have an advantage over professionally managed larger businesses in instilling purpose with their stakeholders because entrepreneurial businesses succeed based upon the Fundamental Principle of Entrepreneurship that we discussed in sprint 2: “Entrepreneurs succeed by making others so happy that they gladly give money in return.” By emphasizing to your stakeholders how you are making many people happy you are instilling a sense of purpose for them to help you.
Emphasizing that your purpose is to become richer or a make your company profitable or increase its profitability does not make many people, other than bankers, proud to be associated with you. If your profitability comes from making lots of people happy for more than one second, nobody will hold that against you, provided they feel you have acted ethically.
For example, very few people will feel proud about working for someone that makes senior citizens feel momentarily happy because they were tricked into thinking they won the lottery. You can pay employees large amounts of money to help you, but they will not be motivated to help you get better at behaving unethically.
Sincerity counts
It is one thing to say you are dedicated to making other people happy, it is another to show it and show it constantly. You can do that best by behaving as follows:
Phrasing how you ask others about what they are doing, and about the results of what they are doing, in terms of how they are making customers happy.
Giving recognition and rewards to employees and contractors for making customers happy.
Publicly demonstrating and explaining how you are making it easier and easier for everyone to make more and more customers happier and happier.
These actions help create and perpetuate a culture where employees feel responsible for, and proud of their work making the world a happier place.