Motley Fool Money - 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

If you're a small business owner, you already know what it takes to keep everything moving. You're juggling customers, invoices, and about 100 decisions every day. Thankfully, taxes don't have to be one more thing on that list. With Intuit TurboTax, you can get your business taxes done for you with a full service expert. TurboTax matches you with your dedicated tax expert. Who knows your industry understands your business write-offs and gives you the personalized advice your business deserves. upload your documents right in the app, hand everything off, and still feel like you're in the loop the whole way through. You can even get real-time updates on your expert's progress right in the

app, which makes it so much easier to stay on track. And you can get unlimited expert help at no extra cost, even on nights and weekends during tax season. Visit turbotax.com to get matched with an expert today, only available with TurboTax full service experts. With the Motley Full 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. And 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 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 that the science also shows that 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 they often do harm and i think one reason these carrot and stick motivators persist um i think it's a couple of reasons um number one it's how we've always done things so that there's the inertia explanation another reason is that um 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 yes you got it right you know you

respond. And so you look about that in organizations. If I say to an organ, if I'm ahead of an if I'm ahead of a team and I say, all right, team, 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. 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 in 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? You mean from a 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 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.