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HOW TO MOTIVATE PEOPLE

My experiences in professional sports and in business consulting have, or course, been very different in many ways, but there is a common feature that relates to the productivity tangle. The lesson I've learned both on the field and in the boardroom is this: People don't change their behavior unless it makes a difference for them to do so.

It sounds simple, doesn't it? It is simple, but it's constantly being ignored, at all levels of management and in every industry. Managers who are looking at dipping productivity figures expect their people to "shape up," to regain "pride in their work." But they expect them to do this without being given any reason for doing so. To put it in psychological terms, they expect their people to change their behavior (so that productivity rises), but they are either unwilling or incapable of providing them with the motivation they need to make that necessary change. And without motivation, nothing happens. I firmly believe that the principal reason for the frequent poor showing of "human management" is the neglect, among managers who are in a position to influence people's behavior, of that impulse toward change that goes under the name of motivation.

It's not that managers don't want to motivate their people. They do. They just don't know how to go about it. And the reason is very simple: They simply do not understand what it is that will turn their people on.

In this book, as in our seminars, we focus on this unknown element. We identify what it is that excites people and makes them want to work harder. We show how to use that motivating force to create real behavior change -- and to make that changed behavior remain in place not just for the lifetime of some gimmicky program, but for as long as there are people to manage. If the day ever comes that people are entirely replaced by robots, we won't have to worry about motivation any more. Until then, it will remain the key element in making "human management" actually work.

I've said that motivation, in our productivity system, is the "nonphilosophical" element that sets us apart from most other "human management" programs. That point needs clarifying. I don't have anything against philosophy. But it does seem to me that, in most discussions of motivation, you get a banquet of abstract theorizing and little attention to results. Take your standard college-freshman course in psychology -- the first and last lesson most people get in "motivation theory."

The conventional "Introduction to Motivation" begins with the observation that nobody really knows "what it is" that motivates human behavior -- and then proceeds to define all the "whats" that theorists have come up with over the years as the "root cause" of why we do things. Popular candidates include the "need for achievement," the "fear of failure," the "hunger for affiliation," and "the self-actualization principle." The current favorite seems to be stimulation: motivation geniuses are filling volumes debating whether "homeostasis" or "excitation" is the real, fundamental state of the human psyche.

This is an interesting enough question, but to somebody whose fundamental interest is in motivating people to achieve better performance results, it's about as relevant as the ancient debate over the nature of the human soul. In fact, a lot of the theories you hear about the "ultimate" causes of human action remind me of theologians' arguments about ontology and first causes and free will. It's no accident that, in the early days of psychology, many people were offended by the whole science because they felt it was tampering with "God's domain."

Now, I'm a preacher's son myself, and I'm certainly not suggesting that questions about "ultimate causes" are fruitless. In a way I guess they're the only questions that really matter. But they belong in the classroom and the pulpit, not the boardroom or the factory floor. You can figure out exactly why people perform -- and you can dramatically affect their performance -- without understanding anything at all about the Soul. Or about its secular equivalent, the Mind.

This heretical notion is not original with me. It was first put forward by the behaviorist school of psychology, founded by John Watson just after World War I and brought to wide public attention through the middle years of the century by the Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner. In this series, I'll be supporting a basically behaviorist position. This means that I'll be talking not about ultimate causes, but about those proximate, immediate causes that you can actually measure, and that you can use to change people's behavior.

The reason for my behaviorist bias is very practical. I've found, quite simply, that it works. This has been true in business no less than on the playing field. And it's just as true in every aspect of daily life.

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