Photo by JeffBelmonte

On 24 April I’m running a half day seminar for members of The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, about How to Motivate Creative People (Including Yourself).

Here are the details:

How to Motivate Creative People (Including Yourself)

A practical seminar to help you get inside the heads of creative workers and bring out their best work.

Objectives / Benefits

• Understand how motivation affects performance – especially creativity
• Use non-monetary motivations to get the best out of people on a limited budget
• Turn problems into inspiring challenges
• Get better work out of creative people
• Avoid (inadvertently) crushing people’s motivation and harming performance
• Use rewards effectively
• Understand and influence many different types of people
• Facilitate better team collaboration
• Adjust your approach according to how the recession affects your agency

Content

• What makes creative people tick
• Why motivation is crucial to performance
• Why offering rewards can sometimes harm performance
• The 4 most powerful types of motivation
• Practical ways to use each type of motivation
• Which motivations to use in the best/worst case recession scenarios
• What Iggy Pop can teach you about management
• How to write 47 novels before breakfast
• Why some people seem so weird – and how to deal with them
• The positive side of peer pressure

Who should attend

Managers, creative directors, account managers – and anyone else charged with facilitating outstanding performance.

What People Say About the E-book – How to Motivate Creative People (Including Yourself)

“If you’re a creative director like me, it’s a must-read.”
Tim Siedell, Fusebox

“The kind of reading that should be required for new supervisors as well as those in the creative professions.”
Steve Roesler, Roesler Consulting Group

Mark McGuinness is a coach and trainer specialising in work with creative professionals and creative industries companies. He writes two popular blogs about creative business: www.wishfulthinking.co.uk and www.lateralaction.com.

Please note — the seminar is open to IPA members only.

To book your place(s): Login to the IPA CPD Zone. Once logged in, click on ‘Training Courses’, then ‘Friday Morning Energisers’ – my session is on 24 April.

Non-IPA members — if you are interested in booking a seminar on this topic for your organisation, please e-mail me or call me on 020 8691 2475 for a confidential discussion about your needs.

Photo by Alaskan Dude

Jon Ingham is hosting an HR blog carnival — or as he calls it ‘Carnevale delle Risorse Umane’. Why la lingua bella? Well, Jon points out that it’s carnival season in Venice, which is as good an excuse as any to include a beautiful image of one of the stunning Venetian costumes on. So I’ve followed suit.

After you’ve marvelled at the masks, check out the great collection of articles he’s assembled from HR professionals offering solutions to the management problems raised by the current recession.

Nestling among them, you’ll find my piece on How to Motivate People during a Recession.

Now where did I put my orange ruff…?

Photo by JeffBelmonte

A few weeks into 2009, and we don’t need to look far for doom and gloom, hysterical headlines and grim-faced news readers. The main debate now seems to be how long, deep and bad the recession will be.

But what if it’s your job to inspire and motivate people to do their best? How can you stop all this negativity corroding your team’s spirit and damaging their performance?

If you’re a manager or leader, you’re probably as concerned as anyone about the economic situation. But your success – maybe even your company’s survival – depends on your ability to get top-class performance out of your team. Which isn’t going to happen if they are so stressed and depressed by circumstances that they are not 100% focused on their work.

Even in some of the better case scenarios, where the organisation’s future is reasonably secure, you may well not have much to offer them in terms of pay rises, bonuses and other incentives.

And you’re only human, so there may well be days when you struggle to motivate yourself, let alone people around you.

In this article, I’m going to offer some practical tips to help you motivate your team members in spite of – or even because of – the present challenges you face together. And I encourage you to use these same principles to maintain your own enthusiasm and commitment.

I’m going to draw on the new model of motivation that I created in my e-book How to Motivate Creative People (Including Yourself), but here I’m going to broaden the focus beyond ‘creative’ professions and focus on things you can do to raise morale and energy among people in any industry.

I’ll start by explaining why money isn’t the most important motivation for most people, nor the one that has the biggest impact on performance. Then I’ll introduce the four most powerful types of motivation. Finally, I’ll look at a range of scenarios you may be facing – from the ‘best case’ to the worst – and suggest which forms of motivation may be most effective in each case.

Obviously, the big-picture situation is serious and I don’t have a magic bullet. But I’m sharing these ideas in the hope that they will spark your managerial creativity and help you and your team rise to the challenges you face.

Money Isn’t the Most Important Motivator

I was prompted to write my motivation e-book after hearing several managers ask how they could motivate their teams when they could no longer offer large pay rises or bonuses. To me, it sounded strange question. Obviously money is important – but in most cases it’s not the critical factor that influences performance. And in some cases, offering more money can actually harm performance.

If that sounds naive in the current climate, let’s consider one of the worst-case scenarios for a moment. This is where somebody loses their job or their business fails, and as a consequence loses their home. They and their family have to move out into poorer quality accommodation, lose many of their possessions and survive on a far more meagre budget than they are accustomed to.

Now there’s no denying the pain of the financial hardships they face, and the practical difficulties this causes. But they have lost a lot more than money and a nice home. They also have an acute sense of losing:

• their job satisfaction
• their status
• their independence
• their sense of control
• their sense of purpose
• their sense of making a contribution
• their sense of being appreciated
• their reputation
• their social life at work
• their place in society
• their dignity

This is the real pain of recession – not the financial indexes or the balance sheets, but the loss of meaning and purpose in people’s lives.

If we’re looking for the positives, we can flip this list over and reveal what really motivates people while they are gainfully employed:

• job satisfaction
• status
• independence
• a sense of control
• a sense of purpose
• a sense of making a contribution
• a sense of being appreciated
• reputation
• a social life at work
• a place in society
• dignity

Again, money is important, but for most people it won’t outrank all of the items on that list. Even Gordon ‘greed is good’ Gekko would probably draw the line at a money making scheme that would limit his control and independence. And I’m guessing you and your team are nicer than him.

Why You Don’t Always Get What You Pay for from Employees

So far so touchy-feely. But with your hard-nosed business head on for a moment, you’re paid to deliver results, not just keep people happy – surely, when it comes to performance, you get what you pay for?

Actually, there’s a lot of research that suggests otherwise. Creativity is my own specialism, so I’ll take the research on creative performance as my starting point. Harvard Business School Professor Teresa Amabile has carried out extensive research into the effects of motivation on creative performance, which has led to her ‘intrinsic motivation principle’:

People will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself – not by external pressures.

Interest, satisfaction and challenge are all forms of intrinsic motivation, i.e. factors related to the work itself, not to rewards for work, such as money, status or privilege. Amabile explains that intrinsic motivation is crucial to success, since people do a better job when they are fully focused on the task — which is clearly more likely if they find the work enjoyable for its own sake.

When you put it like that, it sounds like common sense. Yet in many corporate cultures we are used to thinking of motivation principally in terms of rewards. The danger of this, as Amabile points out, is that focusing on money and other extrinsic motivations can actually distract people from the task in hand, and damage performance. If people are thinking about money — whether feeling resentful that they are not paid enough or hopeful that they will be paid more — they aren’t thinking about their work.

In my motivation e-book, I quote the words of Chris Jones, Chief Executive of J Walter Thomson worldwide:

People who are really good aren’t motivated by more money. They set themselves extraordinarily high standards. You won’t get their standards to go any higher by saying ‘ here’s some more money’.
Quoted in Tantrums & Talent: (How to Get the Best from Creative People), by Winston Fletcher, p.78

The quotations I’ve cited relate to creative performance, but I would suggest that the implications hold true for any kind of complex, challenging work – whether or not it’s labelled ‘creative’. I believe most people take pleasure and pride in doing a good job, over and above satisfying the requirements of their contract.

So if you’re a hard-nosed manager focused on results, then you’re in big trouble if your motivation strategy consists solely of dangling rewards in front of them. Especially when those rewards are in short supply.

More Than Money – The Four Most Powerful Types of Motivation

My model of motivation is based on four basic types of motivation:

1. Intrinsic motivation – satisfaction in the work itself (pleasure, stimulation, learning etc)
2. Extrinsic motivation – rewards for doing the work (money, promotion, perks etc)
3. Personal motivation – individual values (a love of knowledge, power, security, self-expression etc)
4. Interpersonal motivation – the influence of other people (competition, collaboration, commitments etc)

The links above will take you to my original blog posts about the different types of motivations. (Or you could download the e-book, where I have a lot more to say about all of them.)

Human beings are complex creatures, and we are typically motivated by a mixture of all four elements. This diagram can help make sense of this complexity:

The types of motivation combine to produce four key areas to focus on when trying to motivate people (including yourself):

For example, before taking a job, you will probably have a minimum expectation in terms of salary and opportunities for career advancement (personal rewards). You will also want to be sure that it offers you an opportunity to use your skills, learn and stretch yourself in pursuit of a meaningful challenge (personal satisfaction). Chances are you will also want to be given due credit for your contribution (public recognition). And given how long you are going to spend in the company of your co-workers, you will probably want them to be stimulating and enjoyable company (social interaction).

Most people will be motivated by a similar combination of factors, whether or not they think about it consciously. So if you are a manager and you only take one thing from this article, make it this:

Make use of all four types of motivation – not just personal rewards.

Combining different forms of motivation will have the biggest impact on performance. Taking a more balanced approach to motivation will also help you develop better relationships with everyone on your team. And the good news is, it needn’t cost you a penny more from your budget.

For example, you’re managing a team of skilled professionals. You recently had to deal with requests for pay rises (personal rewards), not all of which could be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. You were initially surprised when some people who seem perfectly happy with their salary started requesting more – but as the conversation is developed, you realised the problem wasn’t so much the money itself as competition between team members (social interaction), sparked when some of them realised they were being paid less than the others.

You decide to redirect this competitive spirit by making certain performance indicators public (social interaction) – but because you don’t have more money to offer (personal rewards), you make it clear that the top performers will be rewarded with the most interesting (personal satisfaction) and prestigious (public recognition) upcoming projects.

This gives the malcontents a focus for their energy – instead of bottling it up in resentment, they channel it into this opportunity to prove their worth and spend their time on the most exciting work. You still have some work to do to make sure the competition is balanced by a healthy team spirit, but by utilising their competitive motivation you have transformed a festering problem into a desire to achieve excellence.

1. Best Case Scenario – Business As Usual

In this scenario, the organisation’s survival is apparently guaranteed, and there is no perceived threat to jobs. The business may even be thriving, due to opportunities created by the current climate. E.g. the cobbler in the City of London who’s doing a booming trade mending the expensive shoes of (ahem) well-heeled bankers who are too nervous to splash out on a new pair.

The big dangerhere is complacency – after all if we can survive this, what do we have to fear? Which ironically might make it harder to motivate people in this situation than the ones below.

There is an opportunity for a leader to frame the situation as ‘a chance to get ahead’ – either pull away from the competition, create/exploit new markets or simply to set one’s house in order and invest resources in initiatives for the future.

Personal satisfaction:

Raise the bar. Make it clear that the challenge you all face is not mere survival but achieving excellence. There’s a real opportunity to pull away from the competition and/or to set new standards. Which translates into personal opportunities for everyone to learn and take satisfaction from making a meaningful contribution.

Personal rewards

One theme to emerge from the banking crisis has been a tighter link between performance and rewards. As far as it’s in your power, make it clear that excellence will be rewarded and there’s no room for freeloaders.

Social interaction

If there’s a lack of external competition, maybe you can promote healthy internal competition. This doesn’t exclude collaboration, which can thrive in a situation when people feel relatively secure, so utilise team structures, working methods and communication tools that promote mutual support and learning. Many people are motivated by the chance to make a significant contribution to the economy or society through their work — does your organisation do this? If so, make this explicit to the people who care.

Public recognition

Excellence loves an audience – which should be relatively easy to attract if you’re achieving extraordinary things. If you’re operating from a position of strength, you can experiment with different ways of getting your message out to the world – including huge opportunities in online social media. Fame is a huge motivator for some people — how can you make your team famous?

2. Next Best Case – Operating under Constraints

In this scenario, some business operations have been significantly curtailed, and some jobs are at risk or have already gone. The outlook is uncertain.

The danger is that people will focus on the negatives and become disheartened.

There is an opportunity to encourage people to use their creativity to find new market opportunities and ways of helping customers and clients. This has potential to forge a more innovative culture that rewards initiative and responsibility.

Personal satisfaction

Challenge people to find the opportunity in the crisis. Emphasise the opportunities for learning and creative problem solving. (Check out my article Spark Your Creativity by Thinking inside the Box.) Ask yourself ‘what’s the story here?’ — a powerful narrative can infuse daily activity with meaning and purpose for everyone. When you find a story that resonates with your team, do everything you can to communicate and share it with them.

Personal rewards

The link between performance and reward is even more important here. Be very explicit about the (new) behaviours you’re looking for, and how they will be rewarded. Remember that privileges and personal opportunities can be at least as powerful as money.

Social interaction

Frame the situation as a competition – either with competitors or simply the situation itself (’we’re going to buck the trend’). A common enemy can be a powerful motivator. Facilitate ways for the team to support and encourage each other. Make full use of communication/collaboration tools, particularly with a distributed team.

Public recognition

Look for opportunities to recognise people’s contributions and to publicise the story you are telling together about the changes in the organisation. An authentic story of transformation may appeal to the press as well as galvanising people internally. There are plenty of ways to communicate your message to the world in a way that can make people feel they are part of something important – including a web, entering for an award, and of course interacting with your customers.

3. Next Worst Case – Fighting for Survival

Here the challenges you face are a matter of life and death for your team or even the whole organisation.

The danger is that people will feel overwhelmed and give up.

There is an opportunity for everyone on your team to be a hero, if they can rise to the challenge and survive against the odds. Make sure they know it!

Personal satisfaction

Ask yourself ‘what is the purpose of this organisation?’ (other than profit) — is it something that is too important to let go of? Why should the world care whether this organisation survives? What isinspiring about the challenge your face? Your storytelling skills can come in handy here too.

Faced with steep odds, it’s only human to worry. Encourage people to immerse themselves in work as an antidote to worry – and the means of averting disaster. (Feel free to pass on my tips about not worrying under pressure.)

Personal rewards

Obviously, success means people keeping their jobs – make sure they know how critical their efforts are to achieving this. And make explicit links between their contribution to the organisation survival and the rewards and opportunities that will be on offer should they succeed.

Social interaction

The approach here is similar to scenario 2. – but more intense, since the competition is a matter of life and death, and the common enemy has the ability to land a fatal blow. It’s also important to acknowledge the strain people are under and to help them find ways to mutually encourage and support each other.

Public recognition

This is their chance to be heroes! Let them know that if they save the organisation, the world will hear about it. Look for PR opportunities and other ways of telling the heroic story – not just at the end of the journey but along the way.

4. Worst-Case Scenario – Impending Doom

This is the endgame: the department or organisation is definitely going under, and everyone is going to lose their job. But there is still work to be done – commitments to be met and projects to be finished all wound up. As a manager, it’s your job to make sure these things happen. And because there is no longer any carrot or stick, it’s even more crucial that you utilise the other forms of motivation.

I should perhaps mention that I’ve experienced this situation myself, a number of years ago, so I know at first hand how dispiriting it can be. If it sounds insensitive to talk about ‘motivation’ in this context, maybe it would be better to think of this scenario in terms of ’support’.

There is no danger, because the worst has already happened. And the opportunity has shrunk to making the best of the remaining time at work, helping people to find opportunities elsewhere and ensuring that everyone can walk out the door on the final day with their heads held high.

Personal satisfaction

If this is your last project, you could either take the attitude that ‘it doesn’t matter’ or that ‘if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well’, whatever the circumstances. Encourage people to take the latter view, and focus on their work as a daily consolation or at least a distraction from the bigger picture. It could make a big difference to everyone’s quality of life during those final days.

Personal rewards

You may no longer be able to offer rewards in this job, but you can help them in their quest for the next position – with advice, suggestions, contacts and references.

Social interaction: support

And encouragement are critical here. Look for ways to provide this for others, and to prompt them to support and encourage each other. A potential silver lining in a situation like this is that people no longer feel the pressure to ‘act professional’ and are more relaxed and honest, simply appreciating each others’ company.

Public recognition

Professional pride goes a long way. As we’ve seen, one of the most formatted aspects of losing your job is the loss of status and sense of making a contribution. Thanking people and recognising their contribution at a time like this can make a big difference to their self-esteem. It references and testimonials are an obvious way of doing this, but to many people private words of appreciation will be at least as valuable.

Conclusion

This has been a long article for a blog post, and even so I’ve just skimmed the surface of a big problem that has no easy solutions. Nothing works all the time, so I hope you’ll take my suggestions, build on them and adapt them to suit your needs.

But I hope I’ve done enough to remind you that money and authority of the most powerful motivators available to you as a manager or leader – and to prompt you to think creatively about ways to maintain energy and enthusiasm in yourself as well as your team during tough times.

Over to You

Did you find this article helpful? If you so, which parts resonated most strongly for you?

What advice and suggestions would you add to it?

Feel free to share any of your own experiences of motivating yourself and/or others during difficult times.

Table of contents for How to Motivate Creative People

1. How to Motivate Creative People
2. Motivating Creative People – The Joy of Work
3. Motivating Creative People – Rewards for Work
4. Motivating Creative People – Personal Values
5. Motivating Creative People – Peer Pressures
6. Motivating Creative People – Getting the Balance Right

Image by Sandra Renshaw

Manager: “I just don’t understand it. I’ve tried everything, but he still doesn’t get it. He just carries on doing the opposite of what he’s supposed to do.”

Me: “Well I’ve heard a lot about why you want him to do it, and a lot of reasons why he ’should’ do it. But the question I haven’t heard the answer to is ‘What’s in it for him?’”

(Long silence.)

Manager: “That’s a very good question.”

I’m in no danger of breaking confidentiality by telling you this conversation – I’ve had it hundreds of times, with managers at all levels, in many different companies. And I hope it doesn’t suggest that I’m a particularly brilliant coach – it is a good question, but I didn’t invent it. And the main reason it occurs to me when it doesn’t occur to a manager is that he or she is immersed in the situation, while I’m in the position of a privileged outsider. To the manager, it’s obvious why a particular outcome is important – for the company, for the team, even for the individual concerned. He or she can’t understand why the team member in question doesn’t take it as seriously.

Sometimes the situation can be resolved by explaining exactly what, why and how things should be done differently. But at other times the employee carries on regardless, apparently oblivious to the manager’s threats and entreaties. Words like ‘difficult’, ‘lazy’ and ‘unmotivated’ start to be bandied about.

It’s time to look at things differently.

The basic problem is one of empathy. It is partly down to the situation – because the manager sees the big picture clearly and is under so much pressure to deliver results, it’s easy to forget that others may not have the same understanding or urgency. But it’s also down to a fundamental blindspot of human beings – it’s so easy for each of us to assume that everyone has the same values and priorities that we do.

Why do some people spend all their time slaving away in an office to amass money and status, while others renounce all worldly possessions and live in a monastery on one meal a day? Why do some people travel the world as serial vagabonds while others live in the same place all their lives? What drives some people to seek out danger and adventure while others plump for a quiet life at all costs? What makes someone spend their whole life in the library, in pursuit of arcane knowledge, while others dedicate their lives to relieving poverty and suffering? How come some people get up early to work, even at weekends, while others are content to take it easy?

Because we all have different personal motivations - otherwise known as values. Or rather, we may well share many of the same values, but may not rank them in quite the same way. Most of us value fun and enjoyment, but some of us may think they should be saved for the evenings and weekends, whereas others expect to enjoy themselves every day, even at work. Most of us value knowledge, but not all of us want to do a Ph.D. And so on.

Recognising and respecting other people’s values is often the key to happiness in relationships. And it’s critical to success if your job involves managing or influencing people. ‘Treat others as you would like to be treated’ works a treat – as long as the others in question are exactly like you. For example, a manager or creative director may be a self-confident individual who has little need for praise from other people. All well and good, until he starts managing people who do value praise and recognition. There is a danger that the manager will fail to get the best performance out of them. They may learn to live without praise, or become resigned to it – but it’s unlikely that they’ll get really fired up without it. By contrast, a really skilful and creative manager recognises that different people have different values – and will be prepared to dish out praise if he thinks it will raise performance.

So should you mollycoddle people and treat them with kid gloves? Of course not. Nobody gets everything all their own way, especially at work. But if you’re serious about getting top performance out of everyone on your team, surely it makes sense to look for the ‘hot buttons’ that will get them fired up to give you 100% commitment?

It may make sense, but how can you do this without a degree in psychology?

The Enneagram – A Tool for Understanding Others’ Motivations

The Enneagram is the one personality typing system that I find practically useful on a day-to-day basis. Not only is it very accurate and powerful, but the Enneagram diagram makes the system easy to remember and apply.

What makes the Enneagram so powerful? For me, it’s the fact that each of the personality types is not just a list of traits, but is based on core values and motivations. For example, point Eight, known as the Boss or Leader, values power and control. This leads the typical Eight to seek leadership roles, shouldering responsibility and challenging others to be ‘top dog’. When lacking self-awareness they can also abuse their power, becoming an overbearing bully. The character traits – such as responsibility, bravery and aggression – are really side-effects of the motivation to seek out power.

Last year I wrote a series about the Enneagram for Liz Strauss’s Successful Blog, which you can download as a free e-book. I won’t describe the types in detail here – I’ll just highlight the core values at the heart of each of the nine Enneagram types, before suggesting ways that you can use these to influence people around you. If that whets your appetite then you can read the e-book for a fuller explanation.

The Heart Types – Emotional Values

Image by Sandra Renshaw

Two – The Helper

Twos value generosity, in themselves and others. They believe we should all help each other as much as possible. They are happy to provide help and support – but they are only human, so they also value appreciation. If you really want to motivate a Two, remember to say ‘thank you‘ and show how much you appreciate their kindness.

Three – The Performer

Threes value success, the more public and prominent the better. They believe life is a competition, with winners and losers. They are very focused on achieving their goals, and don’t mind cutting a few corners along the way – in their world, image is reality. To motivate a Three, make sure you provide public recognition of their achievements.

Four – The Romantic

Fours value authenticity. They believe the most important thing in life is to be true to yourself. They have a highly original style and don’t mind being perceived as outsiders. To motivate a Four, give them the opportunity to express themselves in an originalway. Make them feel unique and special.

The Head Types – Intellectual Values

Image by Sandra Renshaw

Five – The Observer

Fives value knowledge. They believe knowledge is power. They are avid readers and lifelong learners. To motivate a Five, give them opportunities to learn and investigate topics in depth. Treat them as respected authorities.

Six – The Guardian

Sixes value security. They believe there is safety in numbers. They are excellent team players and fiercely loyal to the group. To motivate a Six, give them opportunities to bond with the team and reassure themselves that dangers have been blocked off. Let them know you appreciate their loyalty and take every chance to show solidarity with them.

Seven – The Optimist

Sevens value pleasure and possibilities. They believe life is for living to the full, enjoying every moment. They can be relied on to look on the bright side, suggest new options and jolly everyone along. To motivate a Seven, give them plenty of variety and emphasise the fun to be had in a task. Allow them to put their ideas into action.

The Body Types – Instinctive Values

Image by Sandra Renshaw

Eight – The Leader

Eights value power. They believe you have to fight for what you want in life. They make excellent leaders or formidable opponents, depending on how they perceive you. To motivate an Eight, give them opportunities to take charge and demonstrate their effectiveness. You must also earn their respect by showing you can stand up to them.

Nine – The Peacemaker

Nines value peace and harmony. They believe life would be much easier if we could all learn to get on better together. They are self-effacing, but skilful diplomats, intervening where needed to restore harmony within a group. To motivate a Nine, show how a course of action will promote balance and mutual understanding. Don’t force them to step into the limelight.

One – The Achiever

One’s value achievement, as defined by their own high standards. They believe hard work and discipline are necessary for success. They are perfectionists, which is great sometimes but a pain in the behind at others. To motivate a One, show them you value their diligence and that you hold everyone to high standards. Be scrupulously fair.

Using Personal Motivations to Influence People

Looking at the Enneagram types, it’s as if each person has made a fundamental decision about what is most important in life, and acts accordingly. And the weird thing is, other people have made different decisions to you. This is why they don’t always ‘get it’, no matter how many times you tell them. Once you realise this, a lot of the apparent weirdness about other people disappears. It becomes a lot easier to get on with them. If you are a manager and you spot someone’s Enneagram type, then it gives you a lot more options for helping them and getting the best out of them:

Get to know people

Look at them (without staring). Listen to them (without interrupting). Notice what brings them alive – when they become enthusiastic, animated, productive. What does this tell you about their personal values? And what about the times when they shut down, withdraw, give you lip service or start complaining? What does that tell you about their motivation?

Assume that everything they do and say makes complete sense

This frees you to look at them as they are, instead of as you think they should be. And once you do that, you can start to notice all kinds of things you didn’t see before.

Don’t stick labels on them

We’ve all been there. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t find yourself labelling people, especially when problems arise. It’s easy to see others as ‘difficult’, ‘lazy’, ‘obstructive’ and so on. The trouble is, this makes life more difficult for you. If someone is just plain ‘difficult’ then there’s nothing you can do to influence them, short of rebuilding their personality. But if you take the label off and ask yourself ‘what are they motivated by?’ Then you have an opportunity to use their personal motivations to influence them.

Trade in their currency

It doesn’t matter how many dollars you have in your pocket if you’re in a London restaurant. Unless you can pay in sterling you’ll be doing the washing-up. And have you ever tried to give Yen to a New York cab driver? Think of personal values the same way. Why bother praising somebody who just wants to work on an interesting challenge? A pay rise won’t compensate someone for having their ideas blocked at every turn.

Try ‘trading in their currency’ by speaking to their personal values. Supposing you were looking for someone to take on a difficult or boring task. Talking to an Eight, you might say ‘I need someone to take a lead here’. To a Two, you might emphasise ‘how helpful it would be’ if someone were to take it on. To a Three, you would make it clear that if they did a good job ‘it wouldn’t go unrecognised’. To a One, you could say ‘I’m asking you because I need someone I can rely on to do it properly’. And so on.

Experiment

Treat people the way you’ve always treated them and they will respond the way they’ve always responded. If you get stuck, ask yourself ‘What does this person least expect me to do?’. Try doing something new – and notice the results. Be creative.

You and Your Values

Do you recognise your personal values in any of the Enneagram types?

Can you see how others around you are motivated by different values?

Have you ever had to manage or work with somebody who had very different personal values to you? What was the most constructive thing you did in that situation?

Table of contents for How to Motivate Creative People

1. How to Motivate Creative People
2. Motivating Creative People – The Joy of Work
3. Motivating Creative People – Rewards for Work
4. Motivating Creative People – Personal Values
5. Motivating Creative People – Peer Pressures
6. Motivating Creative People – Getting the Balance Right

Photo by Steepways for Obama!

“I went into the business for money and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can’t help it. It’s the truth.”
Charlie Chaplin, Academy Award acceptance speech, 1972

Show me a professional artist or creative with no ambition and I’ll show you a liar. No matter how much we may love our art for its own sake, very few of us will turn our noses up at the rewards on offer, such as money, fame, status and privilege. Such rewards are known as extrinsic motivations, because they are external to the work itself. In many creative fields, the extrinsic rewards on offer are so spectacular that competition is cutthroat and hordes of young (and not so young) hopefuls are prepared to invest huge amounts of time, effort and energy for a shot at the big time.

‘But hang on a minute — didn’t you say in the last post that intrinsic motivation is critical for creative success? And that most creative professionals are more motivated by the joy of work than by money?’

Absolutely. If you want to produce outstanding creative work, then while you’re working you need to be 100% focused on the task in hand. In fact, you probably need to be obsessed by your work. But that doesn’t mean you don’t care about the rewards. Have another look at the list of IT workers’ motivations in the last post — ‘compensation’ is not the highest ranked motivation, but it still is comes in fourth place, above professional development, peer recognition and ‘exciting job content’. Money may be relatively less important than things like challenge and flexibility, but it’s still important. IT is a reasonably well-paid profession, so it could be argued that these workers are sufficiently well off that they have the luxury of not having to worry about money. Unlike the young Charlie Chaplin, who ended up in a south London workhouse after his father had abandoned him and his mother was committed to an asylum.

Have another look at Chaplin’s words. He didn’t say that his art was driven by money, but that he ‘went into the business for money’, implying that this was a hard-headed career choice. He also said that ‘the art grew out’ of the business, suggesting something separate but related, as if the business and his professional ambition where the soil, and his art a beautiful flower that emerged from it. Or to change the metaphor, it’s as though art and business are parallel rails in any creative career. Both are essential for success and leaning on one at the expense of the other can be disastrous. Lean too far towards the rewards and you become a hack, churning out mediocre work to pay the bills; neglect the money side of things and life becomes too stressful to focus on your work properly.

Managers of creative professionals are faced with the same dilemma. On the one hand, it’s in their interest to spend company money wisely. But if they fail to reward people according to their expectations, this can become a point of contention and a distraction, affecting the team’s performance. Think of the premiership footballer whose form dips during protracted contract negotiations. Before we look at options for striking the right balance, it was reviewing the different kinds of extrinsic reward on offer for creative work.

Types of Extrinsic Motivation

Money

In the last post we saw that money isn’t necessarily the most powerful motivation for creative work. Great creators set themselves very high standards anyway. But money can be spent huge motivation for a creative career, especially if you’re as poverty stricken as the young Chaplin. Like Chaplin, money could well motivate you to put in the hours necessary for success. Which is fine, as long as the work itself is your focus within those hours.

Money is also a clearly defined way of ‘keeping score’, measuring how highly regarded you are by your employer or your audience. You may be very happy with your salary, until you learn that the guy at the next desk is earning twice as much as you — especially if you fancy yourself as better than him. (We’ll be saying more about this when we look at peer motivation later in this series.) And violinist Nigel Kennedy writes in his autobiography ‘I think if you’re playing music or doing art you can in some way measure the amount of communication you are achieving by how much money it is bringing in for you and for those around you’.

Fame and recognition

There’s a bit of a showoff in most creators. Even if you don’t yearn to see your name in lights, you’re probably not averse to a bit of public recognition for your efforts. Your ‘public’ may be your team, a select group of your peers, the industry critics, a subculture of devoted fans, or the public itself.

Fame and recognition can serve as a kind of currency even in fields devoid of monetary rewards. The term ‘egoboo’ is used within the open source programming community, referring to the ‘ego boost’ you receive from being publicly credited for good work. So even though there’s no money involved, it’s not strictly true to say that open source programmers work ‘for nothing’. Poetry is another creative medium with very little cash on offer, but which operates on a kind of ‘reputation economy’ — the higher your reputation, the more prestigious your publisher will be, the more magazines will want to take your work, the higher up the bill you will be on readings, etc. I once asked a famous UK poet whether he thought the spirit of ‘egoboo’ was alive and well in the poetry world: he immediately sat up very straight and looked me in the eye. ‘Oh yes’, he said with feeling.

Awards

Creators love a good awards ceremony — as long as they or their favourites are on the shortlist. Every year, there are plenty of commentators ready to deride awards ceremonies as tacky, elitist or simply irrelevant to ‘hard’ measures of business success. And every year, they are ignored in the feverish speculations, celebrations and recriminations before during and after the ceremonies. In some organisations a mere rumour that a certain project ‘might be up for an award’ can prompt outsiders to flock to the project and insiders to redouble their efforts. Where the rumours begin, and how hard management works to quell them, is often hard to establish.

Praise and appreciation

What fame and awards are to the public sphere, praise and appreciation are to the private. You may be perfectly happy to shun the limelight, while treasuring praise from people you respect — such as your peers, your boss or your mentor. And while a difficult task may be worth your while, a thankless task is not. Katie Konrath left a heartfelt comment to this effect on the first post in this series:

When I started, I threw my heart into that job. I really wanted to help the company succeed, and I was willing to work as much as it took. But I became really discouraged working for a manager who never took the time to acknowledge my efforts (or even notice them!)

Had my manager even bothered to say “thank you so much for helping us get through this crisis successfully” on a regular basis, I would probably still be there working my fingers to the bone for them. But she didn’t and it drove me away.

Status and privilege

In Confessions of an Advertising Man, David Ogilvy has nothing but admiration for his former boss’s habit of rubbing his nose in it:

We cooks were badly paid, but M. Pitard made so much from the commissions which supplies paid him that he could afford to live in a chateau. Far from concealing his wealth from the rest of us, he drove to work in a taxi, carried it came with a gold head, and dressed, when off duty, like an international banker. This flaunting of privilege stimulated or ambition to follow in his footsteps.

It’s not always so blatant, but look around any office or studio and you’ll see signs of status and privilege in people’s behaviour. At meetings, the intern is unlikely to sit at the head of the table. The creative director probably doesn’t do the morning ‘bun run’. As long as status is clearly linked to achievement, and achievement is seen to be fairly assessed, striving for seniority can be a powerful ingredient in the motivational mix.

Opportunities

Why are so many people prepared to work for little or nothing, making tea, running errands, ordering taxis and doing the photocopying, on film sets, in ad agencies, in TV and fashion studios? Because it gives them a foot in the door, an opportunity to be in the right place when more exciting positions become available. Ogilvy didn’t choose the life of a brigade chef for its own sake — he had his eye on M. Pitard’s gold cane.

Obligations and deadlines

As soon as you sign a contract or make a promise to someone else, you have an obligation to fulfil. Sometimes this can be just the push you need to get you through the wall of resistance that would otherwise lead to procrastination. I occasionally have coaching clients who say to me ‘I know exactly what I need to do, but I’m more likely to do it if I’ve promised you do it by a certain date’. The funny thing is, the work is usually quite enjoyable when you get going and intrinsic motivation takes over. But to get you going in the first place place, you sometimes need the extrinsic motivation of ‘deadline magic’.

Bribes

According to legend, Dylan Thomas was so unreliable at fulfilling contracts to write radio plays for the BBC that his producer used to literally lock him in a room with nothing but a typewriter and telephone. When Thomas had finished an act, he was allowed to use the telephone to ring the producer — who would then reward him with a tot of whisky, and the promise of another when he’d written the next act. This kind of thing probably isn’t a viable long-term strategy, but if you know your team’s foibles and desires, then dangling the carrot of an (ethical) bribe could get you out of the occasional tight spot.

Threats

As with bribes, we need to watch our ethical footing here. We also need to be mindful of effectiveness — it won’t be news to you that managing by threats and coercion leads to pretty poor performance. But you can’t let people get away with murder either. Sometimes you need to challenge people’s behaviour, and make it very clear that Bad Things Will Happen if they don’t change their ways. Some of us are more comfortable than others are doing this. If you’re not a confrontational type, then you can often get a surprising amount of leverage by highlighting consequences in a chain of events, rather than making personal threats. For example:

I know you think it doesn’t matter what time you come in as long as you get the job done. But the MD disagrees and it’s his company. He’s asked me why the rule should be different for you than for everyone else in the office, and I’m struggling to come up with a good reason. Can you help me with that?

Sometimes that works. Other times people respond better to a good kick up the backside. (Metaphorical, of course.)

Managing Extrinsic Motivation

Don’t rely on extrinsic motivations

If you try to motivate people using nothing but money, praise, flattery, opportunities, privileges, deadlines, bribes and threats you end up with a crew of mercenaries, egomaniacs, toadies, opportunists and cowards. It worked pretty well for Blackbeard, but it may not be such a good fit for you. Remember, if you want top quality work, focus on intrinsic motivations to get people excited about the work first and rewards second.

Get the balance right

Extrinsic factors may have limited value as motivators but you can’t afford to ignore them — because they make excellent demotivators. If someone feels they are not sufficiently appreciated or rewarded, this will prey on their mind and distract them from their work. Their griping and sniping could also undermine the rest of the team. It can take a fair amount of negotiation and mutual adjustment before all parties are happy with the working arrangements. In fact, a bit of uncomfortable negotiation can even be a reassuring thing — if everyone agrees to your terms too quickly, you may be offering too much.

Calibrate

Satisfaction is usually relative. 60K feels a great salary if everyone else is on 45K. But if a new person is brought in at 80K, it suddenly feels inadequate. If you’re responsible for deciding on financial rewards, calibrating average remuneration within your industry or company gives you a good starting point. You don’t have to follow the market but you’ll have some idea of how well your offer matches people’s expectations.

Calibration, or benchmarking norms, also applies to other extrinsic rewards: I’ve noticed that software developers tend to be pretty robust in giving and receiving feedback, whereas performing artists are often more fulsome in their mutual praise, and more tactful when delivering criticism.

Notice what has the biggest impact

Some people are squarely focused on financial remuneration. Others are more interested in recognition and reputation. Others have plenty of enthusiasm but need a looming deadline before they really knuckle down. The better you know your team, the more obvious it will become to you which forms of motivation they respond to — positively and negatively. And their motivations may be very different from your own — as we’ll see in the next post, when we look at personal motivation.

What Do You Find Most Rewarding?

What kind of extrinsic rewards are most important to you?

Which are the most prominent in your industry or creative field?

If you’re a manager, which extrinsic rewards have the biggest impact on your team?

Table of contents for How to Motivate Creative People

1. How to Motivate Creative People
2. Motivating Creative People – The Joy of Work
3. Motivating Creative People – Rewards for Work
4. Motivating Creative People – Personal Values
5. Motivating Creative People – Peer Pressures
6. Motivating Creative People – Getting the Balance Right

Photo by alexsey.const

In Seth Godin’s new book Tribes, he tells the story of being on holiday in Jamaica, unable to sleep and getting up at 4 AM to check his e-mail in the hotel lobby. As he’s sat there quietly minding his own business, a couple of partygoers roll in from a nightclub. One of them gives him a withering look and hisses ‘in a harsh whisper little quieter than a yell’:

isn’t it sad? That guy comes here on vacation and he’s stuck checking his e-mail. He can’t even enjoy his two weeks off.

And the funny thing is, says Seth, ‘Other than sleeping, there was nothing I’d rather have been doing at that moment — because I’m lucky enough to have a job where I get to make change happen’. Seth is a classic case of a worker driven by intrinsic motivation — i.e. the work is rewarding in itself, something he does for the sheer pleasure of it. Many creative workers say ‘I love my work so much I do it for free’, but Seth take this further — according to one of his recent blog posts, he goes out of his way to avoid making money from most of his work.

I’m not as hardcore as Seth about the money part, but I know how he feels about work. I love my work. I love reading, writing, researching and thinking of ideas. I love spending time with interesting, challenging, talented creative people. I love making new connections, between people, ideas, skills and resources. I love making things — this blog, my poems, my e-books, Lateral Action, my courses, animated films — and who knows what next?

And the chances are, if you use your creativity at work, you feel the same way. You chose your job or your line of business not just because of the money or status but because it’s something you passionately want to do. You started off with a lot of enthusiasm and unless it’s been crushed or blocked, you probably still have it in spades.

Maybe you take this for granted but in a lot of places the idea of enjoying your work would be seen as pretty weird. You’d be regarded as mad or sucking up to the boss. When I worked in a factory it was pretty well universally assumed among the workforce that we all hated being there. No one started work until the buzzer rang. Machines were switched off a minute or two before it rang for breaks, so that you didn’t find yourself shutting it down in a few precious seconds of your own time. At the end of the day, some people literally ran out the door. Whenever we talked about work it was with a kind of gallows humour. The only possible reason you could have for wanting to work late was that you were a ‘grabber’ — i.e. you wanted the extra money from overtime.

But workplaces that foster creativity tend to be different. People want to work there — not just to be there, enjoying the trappings and rewards, but to work there. You might hear complaints about people — colleagues, clients, bosses etc — or about systems and processes. But you are less likely to hear complaints about the work itself — unless it’s not challenging, difficult, interesting or plain good enough. In fact, a large proportion of the complaints about people and systems tend to focus on the negative impact on the work — the client wasn’t brave enough, so the ad is going to be too tame, or the deadline was too tight so you didn’t have time to render the detail properly.

In The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida analyses a survey of IT workers motivations, conducted by Information Week in 2001. Over 20,000 workers were asked the question ‘What matters most to you about your job?’, and given a choice of 38 different factors. Florida points out that not only did money (an extrinsic motivation) rank only fourth, behind three different types of intrinsic motivation, but that ‘nine of the ten highly valued job factors are intrinsic’. Here they are, as ranked in order of importance by the survey respondents:

1. Challenge and responsibility
2. Flexibility
3. A stable work environment
4. Compensation
5. Professional development
6. Peer recognition
7. Stimulating colleagues and managers
8. Exciting job content
9. Organisational culture
10. Location and community

I might quibble over details — does peer recognition count as intrinsic motivation or an extrinsic reward? — but Florida’s analysis makes it overwhelmingly clear that these IT workers were far more motivated by intrinsic motivations (qualities inherent in the work itself) than by extrinsic motivations (rewards given for doing the work). And as he points out, IT workers are a fairly conservative sample of creative professionals:

they have been said to be a fairly conventional sector of the Creative Class. They are certainly a good deal more mainstream than artists, musicians or advertising copywriters. On the other, IT workers are set to care a great deal about money.

If you are responsible for managing a creative team, the exciting implication of all this is that your workers start from a baseline of enthusiasm. If you can act as a catalyst for this enthusiasm, and ensure that it’s directed towards the business goals of the organisation, you and your team have the potential to achieve spectacular results. Thousands of managers out there would love to be in your shoes.

And the frightening implication is, as we saw in the previous post, you have a power to crush that enthusiasm that may well be greater than you realise. Handle with care!

Intrinsic Motivation Leads to Creative Excellence

If you’re a manager then you might be forgiven for thinking ‘That’s all very well for creative types who like to have fun at work, but this is a business, not a poetry class. I get paid to deliver results, not to keep everyone happy. What difference does it make to me whether they’re enjoying themselves?’.

Good question. In some types of work it may not make much difference — you can get better performance by yelling at them or paying them more money. But if you are managing people engaged in complex creative work, be careful. It may not surprise you to know that wielding the big stick will have a negative impact on their creativity, but did you know that you can do just as much harm with the carrot?

Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile has conducted extensive research into the effect of motivation on creative performance. For example, in one study she worked with two groups of children. The first group were given paper and paint and told to paint a picture. The second group were told that if they painted a really good picture they would be rewarded with a sweet. When the resulting pictures were evaluated, the first group were judged to have produced consistently better pictures than the second group. Amabile’s explanation is that the first group were focused on painting for its own sake (intrinsic motivation) whereas the second group were distracted by the thought of the reward (extrinsic motivation) and so failed to give the painting sufficient attention to produce something really good.

The research findings are echoed by these words from Chris Jones, Chief Executive of J Walter Thomson worldwide:

People who are really good aren’t motivated by more money. They set themselves extraordinarily high standards. You won’t get their standards to go any higher by saying ‘ here’s some more money’.
Quoted in Tantrums & Talent: (How to Get the Best from Creative People), by Winston Fletcher, p.78

So if you’re a hard-nosed manager focused on results, make sure your team are focused on the task itself, by facilitating intrinsic motivation rather than dangling external rewards in front of them.

Types of Intrinsic Motivation

Challenge

One day in the late 1970s, Sony co-founder Akio Morita called a meeting of his chief engineers. On the table in front of him he placed a very small block of wood. He told them that their task was to make a hi-fi no bigger than the block. At the time this was an outrageous challenge — but one that fired the imagination of his engineers and led to the release of the Walkman in 1979. Creative people like nothing more than a challenge — the more difficult, the better.

Interest

Creatives have a very low boredom threshold. One of the most common complaints among junior creatives is that the senior people take all the interesting work and leave them with the routine stuff. And they’re usually right. In some companies, the opportunity to work on complex, interesting briefs is seen as a right that has to be earned. Inevitably, a certain amount of fairly routine work needs to be done in any company; a common way of persuading people to do is to promise them something more interesting ‘next time’.

Learning

Challenge and interest fuel the learning process. A large part of the satisfaction of creative work comes from discovering something you didn’t know before and developing new skills in the process. This is what Honda mean when they say that problems are a joy.

Meaning

When the partygoers looked at Seth Godin in the hotel lobby, they only saw a geek checking his e-mail. They didn’t realise that those e-mails connect Seth with a global audience of hundreds of thousands. They had no idea that for Seth, writing e-mails, blog posts, books and presentations means he is helping to change the world. They only saw the superficial activity, not the meaning, and missed the attraction.

Purpose

Work becomes more attractive when we feel it is achieving something important. There’s a world of difference between photocopying an expense claim and photocopying inspiring source material for your novel. It can be fun to design a website, but it’s the website of your favourite band or a charity in the business of saving people’s lives, the task goes beyond fun and becomes compelling. Because it involves external results, you might be tempted to consider purpose as an extensive reward — but I’m not talking about a personal reward you receive for having done the work, but an effect that is integral to the work itself, usually affecting people or situations beyond your usual sphere of influence. So does purpose = completely selfless action? Absolutely not. This sense of purpose is the reward.

Creative flow

I’ve written before about creative flow — the state of intense absorption and pleasure that for many of us is the main motivation for doing creative work. The cause of creative flow is usually a combination of the intrinsic motivations I’ve just listed, particularly a balance between the challenge in front of you and your levels of skill. The result is what happens when all the different elements resolve themselves into a highly focused state, experienced as sheer joy. If you don’t believe me, look at Iggy’s face.

Managing Intrinsic Motivation

I could easily have called this section ‘nailing jelly to a post’. By definition, intrinsic motivation works through spontaneity, pleasure and fascination — none of which can be served up to order. No wonder managing creative people is often described as ‘herding cats’, notoriously wilful and independent creatures. But if you can’t control it, you can coax it to some extent. Here are a few suggestions:

Set them a challenge

Remember, creatives love a challenge. How can you make the brief more difficult? More inspiring? More extreme?

Define the goal clearly

If there’s one thing worse than a boring or easy brief, it’s a vague one. ‘Write a story’ is terrible. ‘Write a superhero story’ isn’t much better. ‘Write a Batman story’ at least gives me something to work with. ‘Write a Batman story in which his identity is exposed’, or ‘where he lets himself and the city down’, or ‘where he loses all his gadgets and has to rely on his wits’ – now I’ve got something to get my teeth into.

Eliminate distractions and interruptions

Help them concentrate. Don’t interrupt them — or let others interrupt them — unless it’s important AND urgent. As far as possible, help them ‘batch’ meetings, conversations, and day-to-day tasks so that they don’t keep interfering with focused work. Whatever distractions arise, remind them that the work itself is their primary responsibility.

Match the work to the worker

Make it your business to know everyone on the team, including the kind of work they love to do. Whenever possible, give them tasks that suit their talents. Their reward will be more job satisfaction. Yours will be better results.

Let them get on with it

This is a tricky one. Creatives hate being micromanaged and told what to do every step of the way. But ultimately you’re accountable for the work, so you need to make sure they are delivering on brief. If you’re a creative yourself, you’ll have to deal with the added temptation to show them how you would do it, and the fact that they may approach it in a very different way. There are no easy answers, but it helps if you’re very clear about what you are asking them to make, and your criteria for success, and then leave how to do it up to them.

Reward behaviours, not results

At the US software developer SAS, managers are trained to reward those responsible for new initiatives before it becomes obvious whether the initiative has succeeded or failed. Why? Because their aim is to foster a culture of innovation. If they only rewarded successful projects, employees would be much more careful about proposing and acting on new ideas. This way, the company benefits from many more ideas and people who are more prepared to take a risk and try things out.

Coaching creative flow

Coaching is a great way of coaxing creative flow out of people — have a look at my post How coaching creates creative flow for some tips.

Right, that’s enough intrinsic motivation to keep us going for today. The next post in this series will look at extrinsic motivations and their effect on creative people.

Over to You

How important to you are intrinsic motivations such as challenge, learning and creative flow — relative to external rewards like money or status?

Can you think of any other intrinsic motivations to add to my list?

Managers facilitating intrinsic motivation?

Table of contents for How to Motivate Creative People

1. How to Motivate Creative People
2. Motivating Creative People – The Joy of Work
3. Motivating Creative People – Rewards for Work
4. Motivating Creative People – Personal Values
5. Motivating Creative People – Peer Pressures
6. Motivating Creative People – Getting the Balance Right

Photo by Ken@Yokohama

A question that often arises in my work with companies is how to keep creative employees motivated. Sometimes the question comes from a manager who doesn’t see herself as ‘a creative’, so she’s looking for a way to engage people with a different mindset. Other times it’s from a creative director who’s cottoned on to the fact that what drives him isn’t necessarily the main motivator for everyone on his team.

So this is the start of a short series looking at motivation, creativity and creative people. It’s primarily written for managers and directors whose job it is to get top performance out of creative teams — but I hope it will also be of interest to creative professionals of all kinds, who would like a bit more insight into their own motivations and creative process.

Before I start let’s get a couple of things straight.

Firstly, I’m not suggesting that people in the creative department are the only ones capable of creativity. I’ve written before about what makes a creative person, so I hope it’s clear that anyone has the ability to be creative at work. However, it’s a fact that in many companies there still is a creative department, and people with the word ‘creative’ in their job titles. And there’s often a sense that ‘things are a little different’ in the creative department. Even in companies where the whole operation is seen as creative, they often see themselves as different to more ‘corporate’ companies.

This is part of a long tradition of seeing creative people as somehow different, deviant, slightly off the wall and incomprehensible to normal people. And let’s be honest, we do like to play up to the image. Psychologists have devoted enormous efforts to trying to analyse, define and measure the ‘creative personality’ — but it may interest you to know that they have not had much success. Where they have succeeded however, is in demonstrating the importance of motivation in creative performance — so that will be my focus in this series.

And secondly …

You Can’t Motivate Anybody

‘Motivation’ is often spoken about as if it were some kind of magic potion that you inject into people, or get them to imbibe before setting to work, like Asterix taking a tot from his hip flask before laying into the Roman legions. According to this view, it’s the manager’s job to motivate employees, like the stereotypical football coach bellowing at his charges through a microphone. Sometimes that can be a great idea, but as Arsene Wenger says, you can only really shout at people a couple of times a season if you want it to be effective — if you do it every week they just get used to it and ignore you. And if you have to shout, encourage and cajole your people to put the effort in every week, then something’s wrong.

I once went to a seminar with psychotherapy guru Bill O’Hanlon where he talked about motivation in therapy. He drew an analogy with curling, the winter sport in which players take turns to throw a stone across the ice towards a target, while their teammates sweep the ice in front of it with brushes, to reduce friction and help the stone slide further. According to Bill, it’s not the therapist’s job to throw the stone — the impetus for change has to come from the client. The therapist’s role is to sweep the ice and help the client keep going, facilitating rather than pushing. I think the same applies to management — if you’ve got people who put plenty of force and direction into their throw, you can do a fantastic job scrubbing away the ice in front of them. But if there’s no energy coming from them, you can sweep all you like but the stone won’t move.

So you can’t ‘motivate’ anybody else. You can show them the target, smooth the way and cheer them along. But motivation is something you draw out rather than put in.

But You CAN Demotivate People

‘Low motivation’ is sometimes offered as pseudo-diagnosis of an employee who is not performing as desired. But just about every time I’ve had the pleasure of working with such a designated ‘problem employee’ I find them to be incredibly motivated — just not about the things their manager wants them to do. Sometimes they are motivated about stuff that has nothing to do with their work — their allotment, their band, their sports team, their recipe for sweet-and-sour pork or their upcoming ascent of Kangchenjunga. These are often people in the wrong job, or people who see their job simply as a way to pay the bills.

I’ve encountered fewer of these cases in the creative industries than in other sectors, probably because the competition for doing sexy creative jobs is usually so fierce that you have to be pretty driven to get in the door in the first place. But sadly I have encountered the other kind of ‘low motivation’ — where someone’s enthusiasm and commitment have been worn down or destroyed altogether by experiences at work, often involving their manager. Rightly or wrongly, these people have got the impression that their manager doesn’t care about (a) them as a person, (b) their contribution to the team, or both. They’re asking themselves ‘Why should I bother if it doesn’t make any difference?’. And the thing is, the manager often doesn’t realise how little it could take to turn things round.

Once upon a time I was managing a software project. At five o’clock the day before our first big demonstration to the client, I received the delivery from the programmers, several days late. To my horror I discovered a major problem that would involve at least a day’s work to fix. Eager to impress, I stayed up all night to do it, painstakingly cutting and pasting hundreds of photos and captions into place. This wasn’t the first time I had worked late into the night. The next morning, the managing director swept into the office and asked for a preview of the presentation. Halfway through, he stopped me and pointed out a missing caption — “Who added these captions?” he asked. “Well I did, but –” I started, before he interrupted: “So that’s your fault then, isn’t it?”

At that moment, he lost me.

I never worked past 5.30 again, let alone weekends or all nighters. It wasn’t long before I started looking for a new job. I was always professional, but I realised it wasn’t worth going the extra mile for him. Looking back on it now, I guess he probably thought he was setting high standards, pushing me to do better next time. He probably never realised he’d shot himself in the foot — and how little it would have taken to maintain my enthusiasm.

Going back to the curling analogy: as a manager you can’t throw the stone yourself, but you can easily block it if you’re not careful.

So How Do I Make Sure My People Are Motivated?

You can’t. Not 100% sure. As Mark Earls would put it, managers are accelerators and influencers — but ultimately not controllers. People always have a choice.

But although you can’t guarantee motivation, there are several things you can do to make it more likely.

It may sound banal, but the most important thing is to hire motivated people. Remember, you can’t put motivation into people, only draw out and amplify what’s there already. Recruitment isn’t my speciality, but whenever I make a decision to work with someone else, the most important question to me — over and above their talent, experience and qualifications — is: How committed is this person to our shared goal? If I can’t answer ‘very’ then I will think again, no matter how good they look on paper.

Once people are on your team, I suggest you ask yourself two basic questions:

1. How do I tap into their core motivations and amplify these?
2. How do I avoid blocking these motivations?

These questions are really two sides of the same coin, but as my example shows, it can be frighteningly easy to fall into the trap of 2 when you think you’re doing 1.

To answer these questions I’ll first look at four kinds of motivation. Then I’ll look at what you can do with them.

Four Kinds of Motivation

My next four posts, I’m going to consider four kinds of motivation — the basic levers of influence available to you as a manager:

1. Intrinsic motivation – the attraction of the work itself
2. Extrinsic motivation – rewards for doing the work
3. Personal motivation – individual values
4. Peer motivation– group influences

All four motivations apply to most kinds of work, but I’ll explain why I think it’s particularly important to get the right balance between them when you’re dealing with creative work and workers who see themselves as creative.

As well as describing the four types of motivation, I’ll suggest some ways that you can use them to facilitate top creative performance.

Over to You

What motivates/demotivates you?

What influence — positive or negative — has a manager had on your motivation?
(Obviously don’t mention their name if it was a bad experience!)

Photo by -bast-

Fellow coach Ed Batista has published a three-question interview with me. I always think you can tell good coaches by the questions they ask, and Ed’s questions prompted me to reflect on my work and explain some things I hadn’t consciously thought about before – thanks Ed!

As well as enquiring about my work and use of technology, Ed held me to account by asking how my New Year’s Resolution is going – if you want to find out whether I’ve kept it, you’d better head over to Ed’s blog.

PS – If you were following my Twitter feed you’d have heard about this interview last week, as well as the Jill Bolte-Tayor video and free tickets for Charles Leadbeater’s talk about creativity and the internet. On the other hand, you’d also have heard about me watching football on TV and using the wrong end of my Wacom pen, so I guess it all evens out.

If you are responsible for getting the best out of a team of creative professionals, my new e-book on Creative Management for Creative Teams is for you. Feel free to download and share it (here are the terms of the Creative Commons licence).

The e-book is a compilation and revision of my blog series on business coaching.

Introduction to the E-book – Why Coaching?

As a creative director, business owner or manager of a creative team, the chances are you already coach your people to an extent – and you may be better at it than you realise. But there’s also a fair chance that you have received little support in developing your people management skills.

In the creative industries, so much attention is lavished on creative ‘talent’ and the products of creativity that vital aspects of the creative process are often overlooked. Such as the massive influence (positive and negative) managers and creative directors have on the creativity of their teams. While many individual managers are doing an excellent job of managing and developing their teams, there is little wider recognition of people management in the creative sector.

It’s hard to develop a skill that goes unrecognised. And you don’t need me to tell you that managing temperamental creatives can be one of the most challenging jobs going.

So how do you meet the challenge? I’m willing to bet that you find most books on management a bit of a turn-off. You’ve probably left or avoided the corporate world because it’s not an environment you feel comfortable with. I know how you feel. As a poet who moved from consulting for large organisations to specialising n the creative sector, I can clearly remember the day I walked into an ad agency and instantly felt at home. Call me superficial, but given the choice between cubicles and suits, or a colourful studio with electric guitars and table football on standby, I know which I prefer.

But creativity needs more than bean-bags and Playstations. And if creativity is your business, you know there’s a lot more to it than ‘thinking outside the box’. For one thing, you probably have to think inside a few boxes – such as the budget and brief, and your client or audience’s tolerance levels. So while you need to encourage blue-sky thinking and risk-taking, you also need to make things happen on time, on budget and to keep the end users happy.

Give people too much creative freedom and they may have a blast working on the project – only to end up frustrated when the client or audience ‘don’t get it’. But if you play it too safe, your creatives will feel constrained and everyone will be underwhelmed by the final result.

Not an easy balancing act to pull off. Even before you factor in a few creative egos. Plus the fact that creative people are not satisfied with just doing the job – they want to be challenged and inspired on every project, every day. They want opportunities to learn and hone their skills. And if they don’t get them in your team, sooner or later they’ll start to look elsewhere.

A lot of it comes down to what you say and do with people day-in-day out. How well you listen. What questions you ask. How you deliver tricky feedback. How well you find the right fit between people’s talents and motivations and the task in hand. How easily you pick up the subtle signals that alert to you to problems before they blow up in your face. In short, how well you facilitate the idiosyncratic creative process of everyone on your team.

Now ‘business coaching’ may not sound like the most inspiring activity in the world, but it does offer you an effective approach to managing and developing creative people. It’s not a miracle solution, or a step-by-step model, but it provides practical answers to the following questions:

• How can you allow people creative freedom while keeping a grip on deadlines and deliverables?
• How can you develop people’s skills while keeping them productive?
• How can you stimulate creative thinking in others?
• How can you avoid the temptation to micro-manage people?
• Why don’t people do what they’re supposed to do?
• How can you keep people motivated while giving them bad news?
• How can you be yourself while adapting to others’ needs?
• When is it better to keep your mouth shut?

This e-book introduces the core principles and skills of business coaching. It considers the role of the manager and how coaching complements other management styles. It describes the most common model for structuring coaching sessions. It also challenges you to think about coaching as an informal process, in which every workplace conversation becomes a coaching opportunity.

The e-book also touches on ways a coaching consultant can help you and your colleagues develop your effectiveness as a management team – but I don’t assume you need a consultant to get started. After all, you’ve probably done a lot of great coaching already, without necessarily putting that label on it. Hopefully the e-book will raise your awareness of your existing skills and encourage you to do more of ‘what works’ in future.

Some of the material in the e-book is similar to that found in other books on business coaching (a few of which I recommend in Chapter 13). What is different is my emphasis on the specific challenges facing leaders of creative teams, and how coaching can develop the individual and collective creative talent of a business.

I hope this e-book gives you some food for thought about the challenges you face in managing talented creative professionals – and some ideas that will make your job a little easier and more rewarding.

Download the e-book – Creative Management for Creative Teams

Table of contents for An Introduction to Business Coaching

1. An Introduction to Business Coaching
2. What Is Business Coaching?
3. Coaching Is Not Training, Mentoring or Counselling
4. Different Types of Coaching
5. The External Coach, or Coaching Consultant
6. The Manager as Coach
7. Coaching and Leadership
8. Key Coaching Skills
9. The GROW Coaching Model
10. Formal and Informal Coaching
11. The Business Impact of Coaching
12. Why Coaching Matters to Creative Companies
13. Recommended Business Coaching Books

To round off my Introduction to Business Coaching series I’ve added a page to the sidebar on Recommended Business Coaching Books. These are the books I regularly recommend to managers looking to develop their coaching skills. Although I’ve not yet discovered a book on coaching creative teams, I’ve chosen the books that I think are most relevant to managers and directors in creative businesses.

Next week I’ll make the whole series available as a free e-book. Till then, enjoy browsing through the books.