“Carrots & Sticks” Aren’t The Only Key To Talent Motivation

Talent Motivation, one of the most important responsibility of HR managers, is a difficult question for ever. The most common method is of course "Carrots and Sticks". However, Dan Pink in his TED talk said, it may not always be effective.

In "The Puzzle of Motivation"(D. Pink,2009), Dan Pink explores what motivates people and how company leaders can apply this research to their own organizations. He goes on to explain what social scientists know, but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think.

1, “There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.”

In business, when you need to meet a specific sales goal or want employees to help brainstorm a new product, it's natural or even expected to offer a financial incentive as motivation. But Pink reveals that social psychologists have proven incentive-based rewards not only fail to inspire, but can also dull thinking and block creativity. "This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored," We need to find a new way to motivate employees—one based on intrinsic factors rather than extrinsic ones.

2, “The new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose.”

Scientists who have been studying motivation have found these three elements are key to intrinsically motivate people. People want autonomy over their lives. They want to master their craft. And they want to be involved with something greater than themselves. If we can find a way to incorporate these three things into the company culture, you will be much more successful at motivating people to be creative and thoughtful.

3, “Traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement, self-direction works better."

In today's "always-on" world of work, employers often struggle to find the best way to engage their employees. But maybe the solution comes down to rethinking the way we manage people. Providing employees with autonomy can inspire more personal investment in the work. Dan Pink offers Google as an example: Every engineer at Google gets to spend 20 percent of their time working on anything they want. The result? About half of Google's new products in a year are "birthed" during that 20 percent time—including things like Gmail and Google News. But actually I did prove this example yet.

Dan Pink wanted to tell us, "carrots and sticks" doesn't get people to perform at peak efficiency in creative tasks. Instead, the more important elements  in 21 century are 'autonomy, mastery, and purpose'. This is a reliable experimental finding, it has important implications for business and society at large.

However, it does not mean we should eschew “carrots and sticks” all together.

If people hadn't made "carrots and sticks" contingent on our behaviors when we were younger, we would never have developed into autonomous, mastery-driven, purposeful adults.

Therefore, if you are a boss, have a business that runs on creative energy, don't tell your employees "Do something on time and I will give you an extra cash reward", pay your employees well, this is basic, and tell them "Get something done on time and I don't care where you do it." Working from home (or Coffee Been, or Tea Leaf) is still a reward; it is just a different kind of reward. Of course, If they couldn’t do it on time, definitely there must be a bigger stick waiting for.

Reference

Daniel Pink (2009) The puzzle of motivation [online]. TED Global. Available at: <https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation> [Accessed on July 2009].