Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Science of Motivation with Dan Pink

Episode Date: March 10, 2020

Does the carrot-and-stick method actually work? For certain tasks, yes. But as best-selling author Dan Pink explains, managers who use this as the sole way of motivating their team are making a mistake. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With The Motley Fool Money Extra, I'm Chris Hill. Dan Pink is the best-selling author of several books, including Drive, the surprising truth about what motivates us. If you haven't checked out any of Dan's work, well, you should. He does a lot of things as a writer, but one of them is to look at generally accepted concepts and see if they hold up to examination. Take, for example, the time-tested theory of business management, the carrot-and-stick method. What the science shows is that these carrot-and-stick motivators, or what you can think of as the if-then motivators,

if, Chris, you do this, then I'll give you that, are effective for relatively simple tasks, for solving simple puzzles, for carrying out a set of rules, for doing things that aren't all that interesting. The problem is, as the science also shows, if a task requires even a small amount of creativity, conceptual thinking, those kinds of contingent motivators don't work. They often backfire. They often do harm. And I think one reason these characteristic motivators persist, I think it's a couple of reasons. Number one, it's how we've always done things. So there's the inertia explanation. Another reason is that they produce results in the short term.

I mean, if I say to you, Chris, I'll give you a thousand bucks for doing something. I got your attention. Yes. Yeah. Right. Whatever it is, the answer is yes. You got it. Right. You know, you, you respond. And so you look about that in organizations. If I say to an organ, if I'm a head of an organ, if I'm a head of a team and I say, all right, team, we, we need to be more innovative. So what I'm going to do to foster innovation, whoever comes up with a cool breakthrough idea, I'm going to give $5,000. You're going to get activity. People will respond to that. They, the science is pretty clear that they're not going to do anything that great, but they're going to work. And you're going to feel

as a manager, like, whoa, what an inspiring leader I am to foster that degree of activity and response. So that's another reason. And the other reason is that they're easy. It's much easier to... You mean from a management standpoint? Management point, sure. It's much easier for me to say, here's $5,000 to whoever comes up with a great idea than it is for me to say, really tap true motivation, which has to do with a sense of autonomy, which has to do with a sense of getting better at something, which has to do with a purpose, that's much harder work for managers. If you're a manager, consider this an opportunity to look at the carrots and sticks that you're currently using and asking yourself,

are these actually working? I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.