Think Fast Talk Smart: Communication Techniques - 219. Six Motivations, One Workplace: Who Are You at Work?

Episode Date: July 29, 2025

When communicating with their employees, most firms have no idea who they’re talking to.Good communication is about knowing your audience. But if your organization is only focused on knowing your customers, James Root says you're forgetting a whole other cohort: your employees.Root is a senior partner at Bain & Company, Chair of Bain Futures, and author of The Archetype Effect, in which he reveals a simple but overlooked truth: people want different things from their jobs. Despite this, most companies’ approach to employee motivation and reward is one-size-fits-all. “Every aspect of the standard organization model is built around this idea of the average worker,” he says. The problem? No average worker exists. “What people want from work is highly varied,” he says, and while many organizations spend millions to learn what drives their customers, “The mystery is why haven't we applied that same thinking to our workers?"In this episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, Root and host Matt Abrahams explore how firms can transform organizational success by understanding their internal audience. Whether you're trying to attract new talent or encourage better performance from the team you already have, Root's research shows why it’s about knowing your audience — recognizing that different people are motivated by fundamentally different things at work.Episode Reference Links:James RootJames’ Book: The Archetype EffectThe Archetype QuizEp.176 From Stereotypes to Synergy: Communicating Across GenerationsEp.104 How to Change: Building Better Habits and Behaviors (And Getting Out of Your Own Way) Connect:Premium Signup >>>> Think Fast Talk Smart PremiumEmail Questions & Feedback >>> [e-mail] Transcripts >>> Think Fast Talk Smart WebsiteNewsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>> FasterSmarter.ioThink Fast Talk Smart >>> LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTubeMatt Abrahams >>> LinkedInChapters:(00:00) - Introduction (02:32) - The Evolving Nature of Work (05:32) - Leading Multigenerational Teams (09:01) - The Six Archetypes Explained (14:06) - The Archetypes Evolution (20:24) - The Final Three Question (23:42) - Conclusion ********Thank you to our sponsors.  These partnerships support the ongoing production of the podcast, allowing us to bring it to you at no cost.Strawberry.me. Get 50% off your first coaching session today at Strawberry.me/smartJoin our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community and become the communicator you want to be. 

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Visit strawberry.comme slash smart to get matched up with your coach today. That's strawberry. dot me slash smart and get 50% off your first coaching session. It's the most affordable time ever to see if coaching is right for you. When it comes to work and our relationships to work and with our work, we often fail to focus on our personal motivations. My name is Matt Abrams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I'm very excited to speak with James Root. James is a senior partner at Bain & Company and Chair of Bain Futures. James is a fellow at Hughes Hall College, Cambridge, and an adjunct professor at the Hong Kong

University of Science and Technology. His latest book is The Arctotype Effect. Welcome, James. I am really excited for our conversation. Delighted to be here. Thank you, Matt. Thank you. Shall we get started? Yeah, let's do it. Excellent. Among the many things that you study, you spend a lot of time thinking about the future of work. What insights can you share about what work looks like in the future? Yes, that's the question on everybody's minds. I think work is going to continue to be messy for a while. It is already.

Gig work, remote work, self-managing teams, cross-functional teams, an aging workforce, skill gaps, and then this ever-expanding universe of AI. It's stressful for many workers, I think, continuing with people who manage talent. It's hard for them. And part of the problem is that we spend so much effort thinking about skills and tasks and jobs, but almost no time thinking about motivations.

As soon as we stop to understand motivations, what pops up is, unfortunately, how poorly suited our talent systems really are to both recognize and then adapt to what turns out to be a very rich diversity in motivations. People have a work. Those assumptions go back 50 years, longer even, and they're built for some kind of average worker. They sort of assume everybody is moving through the system, trying to be better as a worker or better as a manager, trying to rise up to the organization, more spans, more layers, closer to the leadership team. Personal motivations don't matter at all. Every aspect of the standard organization model that we've grown up with is built around this idea, awards, supporting structures, decision rights, performance reviews. The reality today,

I think, is very different, both from an organization point of view and from an individual's point of view. There are plenty of roles now where personal progress and success and results are not defined by taking in just another step up the ladder. That's all from the point of view of the organization. From the individual's point of view, we've done this wonderful thing. We've said, let's empower people, ask them to tell us who they really are at work and what they really want. And guess what? When we did that, it turns out it was a myth all along that everybody wants to just climb up the next step on the greasy corporal pole. Some still like the idea, the corporate ladder. Great. Others do not. What people want from work is highly varied. There is no such thing as an average

worker anymore. And so that would be okay if these talent systems have kept up, but they haven't. I'm afraid that they're light years behind. It's been routine for decades. Our sales teams, marketing teams, customer teams, product teams just become more and more specialized and develop more and more individualized solutions and products, offerings based upon segmentation. And that kind of de-averaging of what customers like has obviously gone crazy in the last 20 years now that we live in a lot of social and search and location tracking and online payments and so forth.

So, you know, Google and Instagram and Shaoongshu and white dance and Navar and Kikau and line, et cetera. They know an incredible amount of outsized, of course. But the mystery is, why haven't we applied that same thinking to our workers? Why do the firms who are selling us products or increasingly selling our profile to advertisers knows so much more about our motivations than the firms we actually work for.

The point you just made there about why are we not looking at the motivations of employees, I think is a really profound point. Clearly, work is changing. And one of those changes, as you alluded to, is that workers in terms of their age and generations are increasing in the workplace. It's possible now to have four different generations all working together. What are your thoughts, on how leaders can facilitate productive work and communication when you have people born from different generations having to interact with each other? We did some work.

It said, I think about 150 million jobs are going to move to people who are over 55 years old by the end of this decade. It's an extraordinary number. We all know why populations are aging, what lives are lengthening, fewer people entering the workforce, fertility and people spending longer in education and so forth. So no choice. organizations have no choice.

They're going to have to deal with this. One piece of good news, I remember there was a very persuasive piece of OECD research from 2020, I think it was, said these multigen workforces are more productive and have better retention rates. So I think we need to update that. Somebody needs to do some more work on that, but that was at least encouraging back then. So I think it's very important. I'm glad you raised this topic because I also think there's a lot of confusion about older workers and about Gen Z. I want to tackle both of them briefly. And start with the older workers.

On the one hand, what do we know about older workers? What we know is that what they want as they age can change. It's not the same as other age groups. Around 55-ish, the importance of good compensation, which from most cohorts, genders, countries, is the number one job criterion. Starts to fade. Other things rise up.

Interesting work becomes very important. Autonomy becomes important. And by the time you get to 60, actually, interesting work has become the number one most important thing for these workers. So the desire for autonomy shows up as a way of controlling hours. People want to do stair steps down from full employment to full retirement. But again, most firms just are not offering that kind of solution. There's also confusion about Gen Z. I get this question all the time. What are we going to do about Gen Z? It's so difficult. It's so different

from everybody else. It's so hard. And I think that framing is very misleading. Gen Z are not all one thing. Yes, there are some overlays, no doubt, as there are for millennials, as there are for Gen X. There are some Gen Z who want to change the world, some Gen Z who want to just have some stretching milestones set and then achieve them. Some Gen Z who want to just have lots of variety, change jobs all the time. Some Gen Z who, the job is just a job. It's an means to an end of something that happens outside work. So it would be a terrible mistake to assume that we have to be tempted to say that Gen Z is all alike. So the path to come to your multi-geny question, the part or high-functioning multi-generation workforce is, it's challenging, but it's to create

jobs that are adapted for the different age groups, some physical changes, differences and capabilities and so forth, but that don't just assume that each of those age groups wants exactly the same thing because they don't. Neither the older workers all want the same thing, nor the millennials all want the same thing, nor the Gen Z all want the same thing. So success for me is design roles suited for workers at each life stage that still recognize the intrinsic motivations of each individual rather than just assume more packaged into one cohort. I'm sensing a theme among your responses, which is a really understanding and appreciating motivation of workers in general, but then looking generationally and understanding how

that actually helps us to think about the programs we need to design and the ways we need to need to assess success in those roles. So I like thinking about motivation in communication is critical. What motivates the audience? What motivates your workers? What motivates you? And I really appreciate how you are highlighting the value that has for some of the challenges that we are facing in the workplace. I want to switch now to the book you wrote. I first came across the idea of archetypes when I studied Carl Jung back in college. Your new book is called The Archetype Effect. Can you tell us what you mean by archetype and what are the six types that you have identified? I felt strongly that we needed something that recognized the importance of motivations

because they often get lost in the shuffle when we're talking about tasks and jobs and skills, all of which are critical. Tasks and jobs and skills are critical. But motivations in my view are also critical. We needed something simple, some language that we could use with our firms to talk about current jobs, future choices and career paths. So it had to be data driven. We went out. We talked to almost 50,000 people in the world, 19 countries, men, women, high income, low income, highly educated, not very educated, urban rural, all types of jobs. It was an absolute privilege to listen to them,

tell us about what motivates them. And we had all this data. And at one point, it was quite concerning. It would be hard to find patterns because people are very personal about this, individual and their own influences. But yeah, the patents appeared and resolved themselves into six archetypes. So let me quickly bang through for six. And hopefully people listening can go and take a little quiz that's on the website and find out what they are. The first we call the giver, and this is in simple terms, it's the person who finds motivational work by helping others to so work is service for them. They're not particularly motivated by money, very empathetic typically, so strong team spirit, very much care about relationships at work. But their mojo is, I want to help

other people shine. The operator, by the way, this is the biggest cohort. This is 24% of the world's worth of population. The operators are not looking for meaning, self-worth or purpose at work. Work as a means to an end. They're not particularly motivated by status. They don't want to stand out at work in particular, not risk-takers at all. They want to do a good job, but they like stability and predictability.

And at the same time, very team-oriented. So often the backbone of your teams. Artisans, which are about 17% of the working population, they want to do work that fascinates them and inspires them. And they want to keep practicing. I always think about sushi chefs when I think about hardizant. They can't get it out of my head. So this idea that I'm going to go and just keep trying to get better every day,

very high quality standards, pursuing mastery, basically. And they enjoy their expertise being of value, but they don't want to, don't send me any forms from HR to fill in because I just don't want to do that stuff. They're not particularly focused on the camaraderie aspects of work that's important to some of these other architecture. types. So leave me alone to get on with what I do best, and I'll be very valuable to you. Explorers, they just value freedom to do new things all the time, and they will make incredible

trade-offs. The trade-off money, the trade-off status and titles for the chance to continue to try new things in life. And they're very pragmatic approach to their own development. They only skill up as far as I think they're going to need the current job, and work is not a provider of a sense of identity for them. The last two, the strivers want to make something of themselves at work. They want to be motivated by success. They value status. They value the milestones and the recognitions. Sometimes the compensation that goes with those recognitions, not risk takers,

they forward plan, they get a lot done. And they're often willing to tolerate less variety so long as it's in the service of their longer-term goals. And then the last and smallest cohort, we call them the pioneers, only 10% of the workforce. They're on a mission to change the world in some way. And they form these very strong views about how things should. should be and try to bend the will of the organization and the people around them against that vision.

Sort of a move, fast break things idea. Perhaps the way I would simplify that. But these archetypes, unlike some of the other systems, they're not a test. They're an assistant. The idea is kind of a shorthand guide to help you understand more about who you are at work, why you hate your job, why you love your job, why you thrive, why you don't thrive, and to get a deeper insight into sources of fulfillment. And they also can turn a traditional kind of career dialogue, which is top down, the firm tells you.

These are the skills we think you should develop next into a two-way discussion. It says, I've got these skills, but I'm motivated about this. I'd like to change. I'd like to do this. I'd like to try that. You can change the dialogue between a employer and employee in ways that I hope are very healthy. I really appreciate you articulating the six archetypes as you've identified them. I see utility here in many ways. From an organization's point of view, as you said, it can help

you build career plans for people and help have a conversation that is enriching rather than dogmatic. It also causes an organization and leaders in that organization to think about what kind of blend and mix do I want. I don't want just all of one category. So diversity of approaches certainly matters. And then from an individual's point of view, it's very powerful to think about, and reflect on what motivates me and what brings me fulfillment. And having categories can help put us on a path to see what it is that's really important to us. And I assume it can help us understand how and why we might gravitate towards certain people versus others. When I reflect on the definitions you gave, at certain phases of my life, I feel like I was one archetype. And as I have

matured and experienced things. I've changed. Is this something we can exert agency over? Is this like a personality trait? What have you found in terms of our sense of agency in all of this? Yes, such a good question. So I have found some people just are who they are at work their entire career. And that's fine. Good for them. Bravo. The motivation does not change even deep into their late 50s into their 60s. Others, and I would probably say more, have an evolution. And the typical journey, I'm not saying it's happened to you or to me, but the typical journey that the data reveals is that pioneers and strivers when young become artisans and give us as they age.

And if you go back and think about the definitions that I gave, I won't redo them. It's intuitive. Artisans, perhaps I want to be left alone a little bit more to do things I'm very interested in and give us. I want to get back. I want a mentor. I want to coach. I want to be able to pay it back as I get deeper into my career.

But I want to answer your question head on because while those two things are happening, I don't think we should actively try to change our archetype. I think it can happen to us because of circumstance or conditions or current roles or just our own personalities and characters evolving. But I think become aware of what you are now and become aware of what the critical talent around you is. And when that happens, usually two things emerge. The two questions that emerge are, why do I feel what I feel about aspects of my work?

And why do I feel, to your point, why do I feel what I feel about certain other people at work? And what I have come to believe, just from thinking about this a lot and talking to many firms, is that most firms have unconsciously built their talent systems around one archetype. And it may reach back to the founders, it may reach back to some seminal moment in the firm's history, or it may just be that those sort of norm assumptions that I referenced at the beginning of our conversation, that everyone's just trying to plot up the ladder, in other words, everyone's a striver, are what embody the talent systems that we built.

And think about your own organization, which is the archetype that talent management is favoring. Who's getting promoted? Who are the people that we're putting in front of the organization to say, be like her, be like him, subconsciously? And then go, okay, now what about all the people who are not that archetype? How does it feel for them?

I find this, when I get into this conversation, various firms, it's a little bit of a jaw-dropping moment of people because they haven't considered that they've done the very best they can to design the system and fairness and equality and all the rest of it, but they hadn't thought about that person just doesn't care about

the things that we're rewarding that much. That giver wants to be recognized and rewarded for being a culture carrier and helping other people thrive, not being in the limelight themselves, but we don't recognize that person for doing that. So, I think, don't try to change, but change can happen, and

it's well committed if it arrives. I am struck by this notion of there are pathways that archetypes tend to follow over time. And that's interesting. As you advocated, we might not want to actively try to change ours, just see how things unfold and what feels right. But it's interesting to me that there are different paths that tend to occur. And it seems to me that as we are looking for mentorship and growth in our careers, that if we are to understand that, hey, somebody who starts out as a striver perhaps earlier in their career, knowing that I might land somewhere else in a different archetype, searching it out mentors, tools, advice, and guidance that can lead me there might be very beneficial. So I think that not only does this help us as an individual, but it

might be interesting for organizations to think about leveraging what you've learned about archetypes in terms of how they help people go through their careers. I couldn't agree more with what you just said. We'll be right back to finish our conversation. But first, a quick word from one of our sponsors. Their support allows us to bring you this show free of charge. If you've ever felt like you're trying to do everything yourself, especially when the stakes are high, you're not alone. One of the biggest shifts I see in effective leaders growing their organizations comes from focusing on the right things. But that's hard to do when you're stretched thin. You need to be able to delegate some tasks to competent professionals. That's where Upwork can really help. Upwork is a one-stop platform to find,

hire and pay expert freelancers across areas like marketing, development, data and analytics, and more. It gives you fast access to specialized talent so you can move quickly, fill key gaps, and scale your work without taking on full-time overhead. You can browse profiles, review past work, and get support scoping your project so you can hire with confidence. It's a simple way to focus your time where it matters most. Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's UPWRK.com. Upwork.com. And now, back to our conversation. Before we end, I'd like to ask you three questions. One I create just for you, and the other two are similar to everyone I've interviewed across the show.

Are you up for this? Definitely. One of the things I found really interesting about your background is that you've lived and worked in numerous countries. What advice do you have for people working in cultures other than their own that will help them be more effective in their work? A few things. Find a mentor or a coach as soon as you can, after you land, or actually even before,

and spend a lot of time with them, read everything you can about the culture you're coming to. For at least the first year in the new country, do not say, when we did this in my old country, it was like this because nobody cares. It's humbling, working in other cultures. So it shows you there are dozens of ways to lead teams and run meetings and define success. So just be quiet and listen for a while. You've got to adapt how you ask for input as well, because there are some flat cultures. The power distance is a certain number. And open dialogue works, but there are others where it does not work in all hierarchical structures. So don't confuse

silence with agreement. This notion of looking outside yourself for some help and guidance makes a lot of sense, being observant, appreciating that it is different and it's going to be different, and that's okay. Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why? Christopher Hitchens. He was a British American author, journalist where it books about culture and politics and religion and literature died horribly young more than a decade ago. If you want to sample, type in Christopher Hitchens, University of Toronto Free Speech 2006 into YouTube. He had the ability in written work, particularly in spoken, just to kind of marshal quotations and arguments with facts

and searing intellectual honesty into this warm blanket of perfect English. I will absolutely look into that and appreciate anybody who can be that eloquent and also that informative. Final question for you. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe? audience analysis got to do that first. Who are you talking to? What are they already know, etc, etc. Second is you must have something interesting to say. Say it precisely, said briefly, with one or two arrestingly memorable words or phrases that you'd like the audience to remember when they get home at night. Third, I think be entertaining. Don't tell jokes. But relatable stories, analogies,

metaphors, things are just beyond sharing the facts and the opinions. That feels important. I'm going to grab one more. I know you said three. If you have to use slides, make them very few, mostly pictures. Amen to that last point. I usually penalize people for adding a fourth, but that is so important that I'm going to not only echo it, I'm going to reward it. So know your audience. Make sure you're providing value that's memorable. And then also engage your audience to help. Well, James, you have been very engaging yourself. You've given us an insight into ourselves. and into how potential organizations can help us all be more successful at work. And you've helped us better understand what the future of work might look like.

Thank you for your time and thank you for your insights. Thank you so much, Matt. Very much enjoyed the conversation with you. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about intergenerational work, please listen to episode 167 with Bob McCam. And to better understand motivation, check out episode. 104 with Katie Milkman. This episode was produced by

Catherine Reed, Ryan Campos and me, Matt Ibrahims. Our music is from Floyd Wonder, with special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram.

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