Photo by J R Guillaumin

How would you like to work 15-20 hours unpaid overtime a week?

What about doing it for weeks on end because of unrealistic schedules?

How about a 65% chance of damaging your health from the stress of overtime?

And what if someone told you these were just occupational hazards, to be expected if you choose a career in the creative industries?

Earlier this year, Develop magazine conducted Quality of Life survey of 350 employees in the games industry. The results were published in the May 2009 edition of Develop, which you can download here.

The stats make pretty damning reading:

• 98% of respondents are not paid for the overtime they work
• 85% have to work ‘crunch’ – periods of intensive overtime before deadlines
• 60% have to work over 10 hours overtime a week during crunch — some as many as 25 to 30 hours per week
• 60% feel that they work too much
• 65% say that working crunch has impacted their health

As well as the statistics, the magazine published some very telling quotations from the anonymous respondents.

I am currently looking to leave the games industry, where I have worked as a programmer for seven years. The excessive overtime and minimal recognition is damaging my health, my sanity and my marriage.

Both myself and my friends have been forced to work a ridiculous amount of overtime, causing depression and bad physical health from lack of exercise and poor diet.

It’s no secret that prolonged workplace stress can lead to employee burnout, accompanied by symptoms of anxiety, depression, addictive behaviour, relationship problems and illness. Not to mention days off, sick leave, resignations, low morale and lost productivity.

Yet several of the survey respondents suggested that ‘crunch’ is normal and inevitable, not just in computer gaming, but in any creative industry:

Crunch seems to just be accepted as ‘the norm in creative industries’ — this attitude will only prolong the myth that it aids productivity, when in fact all it does is crucify morale.

Until we have fundamental changes throughout the industry … the only way to make quality games is to crunch. I don’t like it, but fundamentally I’m in the entertainment business, and a bit of pain is the norm in these.

Everyone is always aware why crunch is needed. No one wants to do it by choice, but in a milestone-oriented environment this is inevitable. It’s no different to film and TV, where creativity is integral to the product and boundaries are pushed. Especially now when we have a recession and so many small teams are on the brink of collapse.

The computer games industry does have a particularly bad reputation for overworking people (see: EA Spouse). It even has a special word for it — ‘crunch’ — which sounds as bad as it must feel. But it’s far from the only creative industry in which people are expected to work absurdly long hours to meet deadlines, often for little or no overtime pay or other compensation.

What’s going on here? Are crunch and burnout inevitable in the creative industries — or can anything be done to avoid them?

Should Creative Companies Do More to Protect Employees from Burnout?

Many of the respondents to the Develop survey were highly critical of studio management.

Specific accusations included poor planning and scheduling and unrealistic expectations:

• 65% disagreed that “projects are well-scheduled”
• 80% agreed that “crunch is caused by unreasonable or unrealistic expectations”
• 75% disagreed that “the crunch culture of games development is necessary to produce good games”

I would suggest another two management factors that contribute to burnout:

Poor people management skills. As we saw in my e-book on Motivating Creative People, it’s frighteningly easy to demotivate people through clumsy people management skills. Conversely, it’s possible to maintain morale under pressure (within reason) if managers are empathetic and supportive of their teams.

A cavalier attitude to competition. In some industries, where talent is plentiful and competition for jobs is fierce, managers sometimes adopt the attitude ‘Consider yourself lucky to be working here – there are plenty of people willing to fill your shoes if you don’t like it’. Which may be true on the face of it – but it’s also a brilliant strategy for demotivating people and making the least of their talent.

Reading through the Develop survey, it would be easy to paint the managers of games studios as the villains. But it’s only fair to remember that they are often under enormous pressure from publishers, especially regarding scheduling and deadlines.

And the survey results weren’t all negative. Respondents were fairly evenly split on whether they are “adequately compensated” for their work, and whether their companies have “a good attitude to Human Resources and keeping [their] staff happy”.

There were also signs of lessons learned by some games studio managers:

I am a manager and partly responsible for a hideous release and crunch period. I have personally made it my mission to do it better, and have spent the last two months studying different project management methodologies, practices and frameworks non-stop. My first child is due in five weeks: I have to do this better, I have no choice.

Are Creative Workers Partially Responsible for Burnout?

Two of the quoted respondents felt employees should take some of the responsibility for their predicament:

It’s a talented employee’s responsibility to leave an over-crunched studio. Let the good studios get the good employees, and let the poorly managed studios be staffed with the untalented.

The rank and file employees are also partially accountable on the crunch culture, because we agreed on the task and schedules and did not deliver it on time. It’s not only management’s fault that crunch happens.

While I’m not sure how much choice employees really have when they ‘agree’ to an unrealistic schedule, it’s worth considering how far employees contribute to their own burnout — and what they can do about it.

A few months ago I published an article on Lateral Action called Burnout: the Dark Side of Creativity, in which I looked at the elements of the creative process and the creative personality that make artists and other creative professionals particularly susceptible to burnout:

• Obsession — As we saw in The Joy of Work, creative professionals love what they do. Which is great, as long as we don’t overdo it and become obsessive, working more hours but becoming less productive.
• Perfectionism — Of course you need to be a perfectionist to do great work. But there’s a difference between high standards and nit-picky dissatisfaction and frustration. Do you know where to draw the line?
• Hypersensitivity — We put so much of ourselves into our work that any feedback can feel like personal criticism. Unless we learn to ‘let go’ and look at things more objectively, this can get very stressful for everyone involved.
• Control freakery — As with perfectionism, you probably won’t achieve much creatively without being a bit of a control freak. But you can’t control everything, particularly in a team situation – trying to do so will only make your life more difficult.
• The weight of expectation — High standards breed high expectations. No problem with that – as long as you remember that (a) you are only human, and (b) risk and failure are inevitable in any creative endeavour. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with expectation, maybe it’s time to go easy on yourself.

I’m not suggesting workers only have themselves to blame for burnout. But if you’re a creative worker feeling under pressure, have an honest look through the list and ask yourself whether any of them apply to you.

If so, maybe it’s time to ease up a bit and find some time for rest and relaxation. And talk to someone you trust about your situation. Workplace stress and burnout are sadly common experiences, and there are plenty of options for getting help if you need it – often the biggest step is acknowledging that you need it.

What’s the Cost of Burnout to Creative Companies?

Crunch is designed to boost productivity and meet deadlines – but ironically it can have the opposite effect:

this attitude will only prolong the myth that [crunch] aids productivity, when in fact all it does is crucify morale.

As we saw in the Motivation E-book, crucifying morale = crucifying creativity and productivity.

Some people argue that ‘deadline magic’ can have a galvanising effect on a creative team, giving them an adrenaline rush of energy and raising performance. There’s some truth in this argument, when applied to short bursts of energy, such as a musical concert, theatre play, sales pitch or other performance situation. This is because our ‘fight our flight’ stress response has evolved to help us reach peak performance instantly, to deal with immediate threats such as the proverbial sabre-toothed tiger.

But the ‘fight or flight’ response did not evolve to help us deal with extended periods of stress, such as spending weeks working unpaid overtime for a demanding and unappreciative boss. In this situation, stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol start to damage the brain, blood vessels and other parts of the body, eventually causing a range of mental, emotional and physical symptoms.

For example:

Stress and crunch have caused me to take several months off work in order to recover. There was no help from the company in question. I’ll never let it happen again, and I won’t let any person that working under me go through it, either. Utterly unproductive.

The human cost of a story like this is bad enough. But if you’re tempted to play the hard-nosed businessperson, stop and think about the cost – in time, money, productivity and morale – to a company of having an employee signed off for several months with stress and/or illness. And make sure you factor in the effect on the entire team, not just this individual.

What Are the Alternatives to Crunch and Burnout?

So can anything be done to eliminate crunch and burnout in creative companies, or should we just grit our teeth and get on with it?

Here are some of the options that emerged from the Develop survey, plus one suggestion of my own.

Fair Rewards for Overtime

Develop Editor Michael French highlighted two very different approaches to the problem of crunch:

Epic Games (which rewards staff generously for crunch, by all accounts) and Relentless (which claims to have never worked overtime) might appear to be on opposite ends of the spectrum given that one is pro and the other anti crunch.

Michael Capps, President of Epic Games, caused outrage in some quarters when he said the company expects people to work 60 hour weeks. But Develop Develop Deputy Editor Ed Fear points out in Capp’s defence that “while Epic does expect staff to work longer hours, it makes that expectation clear from the outset and rewards its staff with bonuses that exceed their base salary”.

Banning Overtime

Long-time Wishful Thinking readers may recall my interview with David Amor, Executive Director of Relentless Software, in which he described his company’s radical approach to management: employees have to clock in at 9 and work until 5, but are not allowed to work overtime! The Relentless website even proudly displays a counter showing the number of days/hours/minutes/seconds the company has been working without crunch.

Earlier this week I contacted David to tell him I was writing about burnout, and asked him to answer the question “Are crunch and burnout necessary evils in computer games development, or are there alternatives?’. Here’s his response:

I think that a lot of creative projects are hard to schedule and it’s easy for things to overrun, but that fact is often used as an excuse for poor scheduling and lack of planning. Worse than this are schedules that actually plan for weekend work; that suggests that the project scope could never be achieved within the budget.

Crunch and burnout are both avoidable with enough planning and contingency, but there’s a degree of tolerance and expectancy within the industry that seems to make them par for the course.

(David Amor, Executive Director, Relentless Software)

Tighter Regulation

In the Develop survey, 75% of respondents felt that “trade body organisations have a duty to monitor and restrict over-working of employees”. One of the respondents suggested that “we need an actual union for developers, not just something for companies to join”.

Better People Management Skills

With my background in stress management and managing creative performance, I naturally see a link between people management skills (often neglected in creative companies) and stress and performance levels. When the pressure’s on, a really good manager can act as a ‘buffer’ against external demands, maintaining rapport and morale, and supporting team members during the period of stress.

If you or your fellow managers are looking for some tips on how to get the best out of people in difficult circumstances, feel free to download my e-books How to Motivate Creative People (Including Yourself) and Creative Management for Creative Teams. Both are licensed for free noncommercial distribution, so you’re welcome to forward them to anyone who may find them useful.

What Do You Think?

Should we accept overwork and burnout as occupational hazards of working in a creative business?

Should creative industries companies be doing more to protect employees from burnout?

Is intensive overtime necessary to meet deadlines — or does it impair productivity?

Photo by Lincolnian –(AWAY)–

Collaboration is the new productivity.
Leo Babauta

The recession is challenging all of us to achieve more with less.

Whether you’re a manager facing a hiring freeze (or even redundancies) or a freelancer burning the candle at both ends, chances are your resources are shrinking and the demands on your resourcefulness are growing.

So following on from my piece about How to Motivate People during a Recession, this article will offer some suggestions for boosting your productivity without adding extra team members or spending any money.

The first thing you can do — right now, for free — is to download a copy of my e-book Time Management for Creative People. It’s licensed for free noncommercial distribution, so you are welcome to pass it on to your colleagues and contacts. It contains plenty of tried and tested advice to help you and your team improve your working habits and deliver more value each day.

But getting individuals to change their work habits isn’t always enough. While teaching time management in organisations, I’ve noticed that many of the barriers to productivity are created by the company culture:

But people are constantly interrupting me, it’s impossible to concentrate in the office.

But I have to be at my desk all day every day, even though I know I can get more done at home.

But we’re expected to be constantly checking e-mail — if I switch it off, I might miss something urgent.

But everyone has to attend the meeting, whether it’s relevant to their work or not.

In some cases there are good reasons for these rules — but often they are the result of habit and unquestioned assumptions. And they can cause huge productivity losses, as well as massive frustration in people who are chomping at the bit to get on with their work.

So here are four conversations for you to have with your co-workers, to help you find more effective ways of working together. If you can get agreement on any one of them, I guarantee you will save far more time than it takes you to have the conversation.

1. Agree Priorities

This one is about sorting the wheat from the chaff. When things are going well, it doesn’t matter so much if you have competing priorities, or if people are wasting some time on inessentials. But when times are tough, you need to make sure everyone understands the real priorities, and is 100% focused on making them happen.

Changing circumstances may call for a change of strategy, or you may need to hold the same course but redouble your efforts. Either way, it’s better to talk and make the strategy explicit than assume that everyone has the same assumptions about it. It may take some tough negotiation, but things will be much tougher if you avoid the negotiations.

2. Looking Busy vs Being Productive

One of the biggest drains on productivity is people having to put in ‘face time’ at their desk or in meetings when they could be more profitably engaged elsewhere. To an extent, this is an inevitable part of teamwork — we need to keep others in the loop about what we’re doing, and collaboration demands communication. But beyond a certain point, ‘looking busy’ becomes a substitute for being effective.

So people come into the office five days a week and achieve less than they could by spending a couple of days of uninterrupted work at home or in the library. Or they sit chained to their desk trying to think clearly amid the office bustle, when a stroll in the sunshine or trip to a cafe with a notebook would vastly improve the quality of their thinking. In places like this, saving face means losing time and opportunities.

An extreme solution is the Results Only Work Environment (ROWE), created by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson and first used at the Fortune 500 company Best Buy. In a ROWE, employees are paid purely by results, not by the hours they work. They are free to work whenever, wherever and however they like, as long as they deliver on agreed performance criteria.

With ROWE:

• There is no need for schedules
• Nobody focuses on “how many hours did you work?”
• Nobody feels overworked, stressed out or guilty
• Work is not a place you go, it’s something you do
• People at all levels stop wasting the company’s time and money
• Teamwork, morale, and engagement soar
• There’s no judgment on how people spend their time

ROWE is all about results. No results, no job. It’s that simple.

CulturRX website

You may not want to go this far, but the chances are your team could benefit from a discussion about the difference between looking busy and being productive. Does everyone need to be in the office every day? Is it OK to be away from your desk? Do we need the whole team at this meeting? Sometimes, a little flexibility can generate a lot of productivity.

More on ROWE in this interview by Tim Ferriss.

3. “May I Interrupt You?”

When one person interrupts another’s work, it costs the company money. The New York Times reported on some unsettling research into the effect of interruptions at work:

In a recent study, a group of Microsoft workers took, on average, 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks, like writing reports or computer code, after responding to incoming e-mail or instant messages. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites.

“I was surprised by how easily people were distracted and how long it took them to get back to the task,” said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft research scientist

It’s hard to quantify the cost of such interruptions, but the NYT article included the following estimate:

The productivity lost by overtaxed multitaskers cannot be measured precisely, but it is probably a lot. Jonathan B. Spira, chief analyst at Basex, a business-research firm, estimates the cost of interruptions to the American economy at nearly $650 billion a year.

That total is an update of research published 18 months ago, based on surveys and interviews with professionals and office workers, which concluded that 28 percent of their time was spent on what they deemed interruptions and recovery time before they returned to their main tasks.

Of course, interruptions can also create value — provided the interruption is about a genuinely more important issue. So it’s everybody’s responsibility to make sure that the company’s overall ‘balance of trade’ for interruptions is not in deficit.

Before interrupting a co-worker, encourage everyone to ask themselves: ‘Is this important AND urgent enough to justify interrupting?’

You can make huge productivity gains if you agree on a system for making requests that are important but not urgent. E.g. instead of interrupting someone at their desk, drop your request into a specially designated ‘request inbox’ (real or virtual), including the time when you need a response by. This benefits everyone — the more consistently the ‘interruptees’ response to requests dropped into their inbox, the more confident the ‘interrupters’ become in using the inbox, and the less tempted they will be to interrupt.

4. E-mail Rules of Engagement

If left unchecked, e-mail can slash your team’s productivity. Recognising this, some companies have a rule that if an internal e-mail conversation generates more than five replies, someone has to pick up the phone. At others, they have ‘e-mail free Fridays’. Some only allow their people to check e-mail at specified times.

Maybe none of these systems will work for your company — but the worst system of all is to have no system. Most e-mail problems are the result of never having thought about how to use it effectively, let alone discussed it within a team.

Spend half an hour as a group identifying (a) your biggest gripes about e-mail, and (b) what you can do as a team to resolve them. Here are some suggestions to get you started:

• If you need a response today, don’t rely on e-mail. Pick up the phone or go and see them. This means no one is under pressure to check internal e-mail more than once a day (client-facing employees are an obvious exception) and can devote their time to more productive activities.
• Batch process e-mails. It’s far quicker to answer 30 e-mails at one sitting than it is to keep stopping and answering them one at a time throughout the day.
• Use e-mail for correspondence, not conversation. Correspondents don’t send letters every five minutes. Correspondents take care over what they write, and keep their reader in mind. Correspondents don’t expect an instant response.
• Take the conversation elsewhere, such as a conference call, Instant Messenger or private team forum. Or better still, sit down in a room together. You’ll have a more productive conversation, you won’t be clogging up your inboxes, and you’ll all feel better.

For more e-mail tips, check out my Delicious e-mail bookmark.

Yes, we should be having these conversations recession or no recession. In boom times, we can get away with having plenty of slack in the system, so it’s easy to neglect these issues in favour of the more ‘urgent’ concerns of the day. But right now, there are few things more urgent than making the most of the resources we have.

What Other Conversations Should We Be Having?

Which of these conversations are the biggest priority for you?

What other conversations are needed to boost productivity?

Any other tips for boosting team productivity?

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…?

I’ve just been interviewed by author and entrepreneur Rajesh Setty, about my e-book How to Motivate Creative People (Including Yourself).

Rajesh is a very thoughtful and creative guy who has not only achieved success himself, but works hard to help others achieve their goals. He asked me some great questions about the e-book and my reasons for writing it — as I say in the interview, he made me look at my own motivations afresh!

The interview appears on Rajesh’s blog Life beyond Code, which is a great read for creative and entrepreneurial people — highly recommended!

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

Now that we’ve reviewed four basic types of motivation, it’s time to put them together and have a look at the big picture. Have a look at the diagram above, which is composed of two axes: intrinsic-extrinsic; personal-interpersonal.

Motivation is usually complex, so that any given task or project involves several different types of motivation. You may love your work for its own sake (intrinsic), but that doesn’t mean you will be put out if your monthly pay cheque doesn’t arrive (extrinsic). You may have a strong natural curiosity or need for self expression (personal), but that doesn’t mean the presence of encouragement and all competition from colleagues won’t prompt you to redouble your efforts (interpersonal). And you’ve probably already noticed that different types of motivation can shade into one another. For example, recognition has appeared twice, under extrinsic and interpersonal motivations, since it’s a form of reward that involves the opinion of other people.

For any given person, task, project or organisation, it’s possible to assess types of motivation as well as their relative importance, for each of the four quadrants.

For example, one person may have high levels of personal intrinsic motivation, valuing challenge meeting and learning in their work. They may also be strongly motivated by interpersonal intrinsic factors, such as a sense of contributing to the field. Personal extrinsic may be relatively unimportant — as long as they have enough to pay the bills, it’s not a big issue. But interpersonal extrinsic is relatively high, since they value their professional reputation and the status it brings them.

In the rest of this post I’ll look at each of these quadrants in more detail.

Personal satisfaction (personal intrinsic)

In this quadrant people are motivated by satisfaction in the work itself, as well as the alignment of the work with their own core values. Here we find the poet entranced with the magic of words and authentic self-expression. We also find the engineer who loves learning and adding to her store of knowledge she grapples with a difficult challenge.

Pros This is probably the quadrant that has the most influence on the quality of work — without personal motivation or intrinsic satisfaction in the task, people are unlikely to achieve outstanding results.

Cons Because of the intensely personal nature of this kind of motivation, there is a danger that the results will have little relevance to others. The self absorbed poet who doesn’t trouble to read others’ work is unlikely to produce great poetry. And in a business context, it’s essential that people don’t work on pet projects to their own criteria, losing sight of organisational goals.

Social interaction (interpersonal intrinsic)

In this quadrant people are influenced by each other. ‘Social interaction’ can refer to the simple attraction of being with other people, as in “it’s nice to get out of the house for a bit of social interaction”. It also refers to the give and take social exchange, including altruistic motives, pleasure from others’ company, and the attraction of wielding power and influence. Here we find the mavens who love to connect others and social entrepreneurs who want to use their skills for the benefit of the community.

Pros Creators who regularly interact with their peers, customers and/or audience are much more likely to produce something relevant and socially valued than the proverbial artist in the garret or ivory tower thinker.

Cons Generosity and influence are both double-edged swords: the former carries a risk of neglecting your own interests and gifts, the latter can lead to harming others.

Personal rewards (personal extrinsic)

This quadrant is about ‘What’s in it for me?’. It’s about making sure you don’t come away from a project empty-handed. It’s also about insuring yourself against negative consequences. This is where we have frank talks about salaries and remuneration. It’s also where agents and lawyers stepping to argue vigourously for individual interests.

Pros Strike a deal that satisfies all parties and it will enhance mutual respect and commitment. It also helps everyone avoid a world of stress and wrangling that can have devastating effects on performance.

Cons Personal rewards are necessary-but-not-sufficient to produce outstanding creative work. So if your motivational strategy consists of throwing money at the problem, you’re in trouble. And if you’re a creative, you’re unlikely to produce anything remarkable if you’re only in it for the money. Both leaders and team members neglect the other three quadrants at their peril.

Public recognition (interpersonal extrinsic)

In this quadrant people are concerned about their public image. They are motivated to boost or protect their reputation. This is the realm of awards, prizes, blockbusters and letters after your name. It’s where the critics sharpen their pencils and the crowd loads up with confetti or rotten fruit.

Pros Many creatives are far more motivated by public recognition than by money. So even if you have a tight budget, there are plenty of ways to get people fired up by offering recognition for their achievements.

Cons If you spend too long chasing the ratings then you risk losing touch with your own creative passion (personal intrinsic) and delivering real value (interpersonal intrinsic). The irony is, discerning audiences can spot a fake, and will lose respect for you if you try to anticipate and pander to their every wish.

A Matrix of Creative Motivations

We can sharpen up the picture by looking at the various motivations purely in relation to creative work:

Note that the only quadrant with a purely negative connotation for artists is personal reward (’selling out’). Yet it’s often the one that managers and leaders focus on the most when trying to motivate people.

If you’re a leader, manager, creative director or otherwise involved in facilitating creative work, and you take one thing from this series I’d ask you to focus at least as much energy on each of the other three quadrants as on the bottom left one. They are where you have the biggest chance of success — and where everyone is likely to taste the greatest satisfaction.

Is Your Current Enterprise Sustainable?

For any project, career organisation to succeed, it needs to cover all four quadrants. The balance between them can be wildly different, but if any of the four motivations is completely absent, it will be hard to sustain the necessary commitment when things get tough.

Hence the mid-life crisis when someone realises they can’t spend the rest of their life doing a job that conflicts with their personal values. (Think Richard E. Grant in How to Get Ahead in Advertising.) Or the cash crisis in a business driven by creative enthusiasm that neglects financial safeguards. (Think Factory Records.) Or the crisis of confidence in an artist who fails to receive the recognition he craves. (Think Van Gogh.)

Which quadrants are most/least important to you personally?

Which quadrants are most/least important to your organisation?

Are you sure you can carry on doing what you’re doing?

With thanks to Chris Bilton and Ruth Leary of the MA in Creative and Media Enterprises at the University of Warwick, for a discussion that was very helpful in formulating this model.

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 My Buffalo

The basic thing in my mind was that for all our success The Beatles were always a great little band. Nothing more, nothing less.
Paul McCartney

Creativity happens between people not, just between the ears. Whatever drives us as individuals, something magical and unpredictable happens when talented creative people get together. They spark off each other — and sparks come from friction.

Few people can have known the highs and lows of creative collaboration so intimately as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. They achieved fame as a unit, sporting identical suits and haircuts, and performing, in McCartney’s words, as “a great little band”. For a few years, their friendship and the euphoria of success were enough to paper over individual differences. But as time and fame took their toll, tensions mounted and tempers flared. The inevitable breakup was evidently a relief in some respects, is the individual members were free to pursue their own interests — but the consensus is that they never reach the same heights in their solo careers as they did in the years when they were known as The Beatles.

‘Peer pressure’ is normally a pejorative term, but I’m using the phrase ‘peer pressures’ here to signify the many different ways — positive and negative — that we influence each other. From this perspective, individual motivations are less important than interactions within a group, which I’m calling interpersonal motivations. I first came across this way of looking at human beings 10 years ago when I was working as part of a systemic family therapy team. As a psychotherapist I had been used to working with individuals and thinking in terms of their personal motivations for doing what they did. But the family therapists encourage me to look at the whole system of interactions between a couple or within a family, to ’stay on the surface’ and notice how people are constantly influencing and responding to each other.

A more recent example of this way of looking at human beings is Mark Earls’ provocative book Herd:

Most of our behaviour is … the result of the influence of other people because we are a super social species. A herd animal, if you like.

More than most, artists and other creative types love to think of ourselves as unique individuals — but here are a few examples of peer pressures that affect our behaviour when engaged in creative work:

Copying

The first song John Lennon played on the guitar was Fats Domino’s ‘Ain’t That a Shame’. Little Richard was Paul McCartney’s hero. The Beatles started out as a skiffle group. Like all artists, they learned through imitation. Even at the height of their fame, they were still eager to learn from other musicians and traditions, including Western orchestral and traditional Indian music.

Mark Earls describes copying as a fundamental building block of human behaviour, a simple act that can result in complex and beautiful results. Like the Mexican wave, which is not planned or orchestrated, but simply results from standing up and waving your arms on cue from the people next to you. If you’re still not convinced that creatives are a bunch of copycats, ask yourself why so many of us are found in cafes wearing black T-shirts, typing on MacBooks and/or scribbling in Moleskine notebooks. When I visited the new Saatchi Gallery recently it was no surprise to see a higher than average incidence of beretss wake and goatees among the visitors.

Rebellion

Rebels need someone to rebel against. Earls points out that even when we swim against the tide and do the opposite of what others expect/want, we are still doing it because of other people. When The Beatles started out, rock ‘n’ roll was still seen in some quarters as a threat to society. From the outset they aligned themselves with rock ‘n’ roll rebels, and after the initial wave of Beatlemania they were increasingly happy to play the role of contrarians, with outspoken comments about drugs, religion and war. But they couldn’t have been so outrageous without people to outrage — and they were borne along by a wave of mass social change.

Competition

Necessity may be the mother of invention but sibling rivalry plays its part. Elvis, The Rolling Stones and The Beach boys were just some of the highest-profile competitors to The Beatles. And that’s before you consider the competition within the group, particularly the rivalry between Lennon and McCartney, as they spurred each other on to greater feats of songwriting and performance. The relationship famously turned nasty, but before that happened the creative tension between the two resulted in masterpieces that they could never have produced in isolation.

In ancient Greece laurel wreaths were awarded to victors of poetry competitions as well as athletic games. These days, the spirit of creative competition is alive and well in countless charts, prizes, awards ceremonies and squabbles over top billing at events. Advertising creatives are regularly castigated for being more interested in winning awards than selling clients’ products. And if you think that ‘pure’ artists are motivated by nobler impulses, then you should check out Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘An Afterwards’, where he condemns ambitious poets (including himself) to the ninth circle of hell, frozen together in the ice, gnawing through the backs of each other’s skulls in “a rabid egotistical daisy chain” as punishment for professional backbiting during their time on earth.

Collaboration

Competition can be intense without being cutthroat. And it doesn’t exclude collaboration. Most creative partnerships are founded on mutual respect and friendship, and a realisation that we can usually create something better together than we can manage on our own. It’s easy to isolate Lennon and McCartney as towering geniuses, and Ringo Starr has been the butt of a few cruel jokes about his relative musical abilities, but The Beatles wouldn’t have been The Beatles without George and Ringo. And the fact is that the supposed geniuses did their best work as part of a group.

I’ve written before that one of the best things about pursuing a creative career is the chance to work with other cool creative dudes. Whether you’re a jazz musician or a theoretical scientists, you can recognise the same excitement at putting an idea out there with colleagues and seeing it come back bigger, better and bolder. Talent attracts talent — we all want to work with the best in our business.

Identity

Beatles, Beats, Deadheads, Mods, Rockers, Romantics, New Romantics, Imagists, Surrealists, Modernists, Post-Modernists, the Rat Pack, the Brat Pack, Britpop, Young British Artists, bloggers, Wikipedians, the Twitterati. All of these names are badges of identity, of creative people associated with cultural movements and trends. Seth Godin would describe them as members of a tribe:

A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.
Seth Godin, Tribes

Just like everyone else, creators want to belong — even if it’s only to the tribe of outsiders. Look at the legions of Smiths fans. Become the leader of a tribe worth joining and you won’t have to worry about ‘motivating people’.

Commitment

Commitments breed commitment. When you make a promise to another person, you have an investment in keeping it, otherwise you’ll lose face. It’s not the most ennobling form of motivation, but can be very effective. If you know that you’re liable to procrastinate, making a promise to someone else to deliver a piece of work by a certain date is a great way of setting a ‘motivational trap’ for yourself. Anthony Trollope did this very effectively when he paid his aged manservant awaken at 5.30 every morning with the coffee, so that he could start writing his novels before breakfast. Trollope evidently didn’t trust himself to get up every morning — but what was the master going to do in front of his servant? Ask for “five more minutes” in bed? Say it was “too cold” to get up? I don’t think so. Trollope new himself well enough to know that he valued his public image more than his personal comfort.

Encouragement

Creative work isn’t easy. Apart from the ‘perspiration’ side of things, it’s risky. Your brilliant idea might look pretty silly in the cold light of day. Your bold new design might be far too old for the client. People might laugh at your sculpture is all throw tomatoes at your symphony. If you’re part of a team then you have people around you to bounce ideas off. You give each other feedback and encouragement. You egg each other on.

I remember watching an interview with Paul McCartney talking about the process of writing ‘A Day in the Life’ with John Lennon. He said there was a moment when John first sang the line “I’d like to turn you on”, when the two of them looked at each other — evidently this was an outrageous thing to sing in 1967 — as if to say “are we sure we want to do this?”, before agreeing to keep it in.

Support

If you’re doing anything remotely interesting or worthwhile, there will be days when you wonder why you bother. You’ll be misunderstood, blocked, let down or just ignored. These are the days when it makes a world of difference if there’s someone there to remind you how good you are, how important the work is, why it matters to keep going. Or simply to reassure you that it’s perfectly normal to feel as frustrated/angry/disappointed/bewildered as you do.

“On tour that year, it was crazy. Not within the band. In the band we were normal, and the rest of the world was crazy.”
George Harrison

Contribution

It’s easy to be cynical about the idea of contribution. As we’ve seen, competition is rife in most creative fields and many creators have a well earned reputation for egomania. But part of the pleasure of collaboration comes from feeling that we have made a contribution to the team and help to make the whole bigger than the sum of its parts. Of course we all like to be personally credited or rewarded, but that doesn’t take away from the deep satisfaction that comes from contributing to and connecting with something larger than yourself.

It takes you back again to the times when we were this band, the Beatles band.

In that period, there was a lot of emotional turmoil going on, but, when you listen to the music, the music always surpassed any bullshit we were going through.
Ringo Starr in 2003, talking about the release of Let It Be… Naked

Recognition

At the outset The Beatles took their share of flak for writing throwaway pop songs, but they matured into one of the most critically acclaimed bands of all time. Looking back, it seems inconceivable that they would have played it safe by churning out variations on ‘Love Me Do’ ad infinitum — but they had plenty of contemporaries (now forgotten) pursuing exactly that strategy.

No genuine artist panders to the critics, but most of them want to be recognised and respected by the people who matter to them — usually their fellow creators, sometimes respected critics or gatekeepers. People like John Peel, whose names are bywords for discerning judgement.

The comedy in Ricky Gervais and Steven Merchant’s TV series Extras hinges on Andy Millman’s excruciating embarrassment at achieving wealth and fame at the expense of his artistic integrity. After years of struggle, Andy’s comedy programme is watched by millions and he’s got more money than he can sensibly spend, but he’s tortured by damning reviews and the jibes of fellow actors. Meeting his hero David Bowie turns into a nightmare when the Thin White Duke serenades him as a “Little fat man who sold his soul”. Starving artist or self-loathing sell-out? For many creators it would be a genuinely difficult choice.

Facilitating Interpersonal Motivation

I’ve said before that you can’t motivate anybody — only facilitate and amplify their existing motivation. This is particularly true of interpersonal motivations — you can order people about all you like, but the kind of interactions I’ve described don’t occur on command, but emerge spontaneously within a group. You can inspire and facilitate but you can’t impose.

In Tribes Seth Godin says that the two things that turn a group of people into a tribe are:

• A shared interest
• A way to communicate

And that therefore the most important two things a leader can do are:

• transforming the shared interests into a passionate goal and desire for change;
• providing tools to allow members to tighten their communications;

Here are a few ideas for doing this.

Turn common interests into common goals

Chances are your team have a lot of interests in common. Your job is to make the link between these interests and the organisation’s goals crystal clear. This is relatively easy in an organisation that has a clear sense of purpose, beyond just making money — the chances are that sense of purpose attracted people to work there in the first place. As we’ve seen, creative performance depends on intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivations — ‘increasing shareholder value’ won’t cut it with creative types. But even if an inspirational purpose has not been explicitly spelt out, it may be possible for you to work with your team to discover or even create this sense of purpose.

You’re probably familiar with ‘tell and sell’ approach to goalsetting, which can work very well, especially when applied creatively. But don’t forget the value of asking questions and listening — it’s can be much more powerful to ask someone about their own interests and passions, and point out how these relate to team goals, then to give an impassioned speech based on your reasons for committing to the goal.

Tell a story

Stories are a great way to persuade without preaching. Independent minded creatives resist being told what to do — but we all love a good story. Stories that resonate with a tribe are often about ‘us and them’, revolution or changing the world. The Beatles told the story — in their songs, the concepts their interviews and their lifestyles — that resonated with the story of the 60s. A story about optimism, revolution and self-discovery. In the recent US election, Barack Obama told a story about change to an audience ready to hear it.

Creatives can be a tough crowd to please. For a story to appeal to them it needs to have:

• Authenticity — it needs to resonate with their felt experience, not sound like something concocted to manipulate them.
• Originality — they have built-in cliche detectors.
• Passion — you need to feel it in your gut. They can tell if you don’t.
• Space for improvisation — remember it’s a story, not a script.

Environment

What kind of environments are available to the team? How well do they facilitate the free flow of ideas and people? Are they chained to their desks or allowed to roam where they like to get the job done? How well does the physical setup facilitate casual discussions and chance encounters? Can people and groups find privacy when they need it?

Promote diversity

Creativity thrives on diversity, on novel combinations and intersections. This includes ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class and age — not for politically correct reasons but because they represent a range of experience and perspectives that are fertile ground for creativity. It also includes diversity of professions, personalities, education and interests, for the same reason.

How diverse as your team? It’s not necessarily a creative disaster if they’re all middle-class middle-aged white males who went to Harvard Business School and play golf at weekends — but they may well benefit from interactions and dialogue with people who are none of these things. When choosing new team members, ask yourself “What will they add to the creative diversity of this team?”.

Think about the team beyond the team

In the old days, the office walls drew a firm line between your team or company and the rest of the world. These days the walls are becoming transparent, even permeable. Blogs and other forms of social media are opening up the conversation with the wider world. Banning Facebook is one response. Another is to take the opportunity to engage with your customers, colleagues, competitors — and people who have nothing (obvious) in common with you and your team’s work. Get your voices out there and listen to the response.

Have a look at my list of top 10 Social Networks For Creative People and ask yourself whether you and your team could benefit from a presence on some of them. To see what leading bloggers are saying in a wide range of subjects, visit Alltop.com and browse through the different subject categories.

Provide communication tools

Seth Godin suggests providing tools “to allow members to tighten their communications” — but sometimes you don’t need to do the providing, just notice what they’re already using and give permission or resources to amplify its. Or you could offer an invite suggestions for bringing in new communication tools. Blogs and wikis are obvious examples, but it doesn’t need to be elaborate. A Facebook group, Delicious or Twitter account, or good old-fashioned e-mail or whiteboards could give you all you need.

Use feedback loops

Some sales teams promote competition by displaying public sales totals for every team member. Some creative departments have a monthly feedback session where everyone has to present their work for critique by their peers. Seth MacFarlane puts together Family Guy scripts with a team of writers around a table covered in “soft drink cans, candy wrappers, half finished bags of beef jerky”. Executive Producer David Goodman highlights the critical feedback loop:

if the writers in that room don’t laugh — it’s not going on … That’s a tough room. If we laugh, it’s probably funny.
Fast Company feature, November 2008

The kind of feedback loop you use will depend on your goals, criteria for success and team culture. Whether you go for explicit and formal (public sales totals) or implicit and informal (laughter) is not as important as knowing what you’re looking for — and what the team responds to.

Mediate

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of creative friction, but if things get personally vindictive and conflicts threaten team goals then you’ll need to intervene. Principles for effective mediation include: 1. Point out how the conflict is having a damaging effect on each party’s personal goals; 2. Find out what each party wants from the other — in terms of specific, concrete actions; 3. Shift the conversation away from accusations and justifications about the past and towards requests and commitments for the future.

How Do Interpersonal Motivations Affect You?

Which forms of interpersonal motivation have affected you the most?

How much influence can a manager realistically have over interpersonal motivations?

Any other tips for facilitating interpersonal 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

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?