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What Motivates → Autonomy + Mastery + Purpose = Motivation
What are the three components of intrinsic motivation? How does each element contribute to intrinsically driven behavior?
Intrinsic motivation is made up of three components: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
- Autonomy is having a choice in what you do and being self-driven.
- Mastery is wanting to get more skilled and be recognized for competency.
- Purpose is understanding why you’re doing the work, it is often centered around helping other people.
Every single organization on the planet functions on three levels. These provide the foundation for which we can build innovation and trust. The idea of the Golden-Circle provides the optimal framework for which we can responsibly where we can say “We know who we are and what we stand for”, and others will confidentially say this as well.
WHY WE DO IT (The Purpose) | Your motivation. What do you believe? |
HOW WE DO IT (The Process) | Specific actions taken to realize your WHY |
WHAT WE DO | What do you do? |
As a manager or leader, it is ideal to set your employee’s skill set commensurate with their duties. If this skill set is not commensurate to their duties, this can lead to anxiety or boredom depending on which is greater.
Scenario | Location on Curve |
Challenges greater than skill level | Anxiety Zone |
Skill level is greater than challenges | Boredom Zone |
Challenges and skill match | Contentment Zone |
Transformative Approaches (Philosophical Approaches — Challenge your thinking and reframe your mental model; learn things that work for you)
Be Inspired, Be Curious, Create an unbossed culture
Deliberately Developmental Cultures
A growth culture where individuals aspire to improve personal and professional capabilities. Vulnerability is appreciated and is an important part of leadership. (Example: Lululemon)
- Connect the organization to its purpose and provide an inspiring work environment
- Foster a learning culture where employees can be a master
- Build leadership self-awareness and capabilities
- This culture is NOT performance-obsessed where the bottom 10% of the workforce would be culled.
- There is an unconscious assumption that going against the norm is dangerous. Prove this false by:
- Allowing for “Time-limited, manageable experiments with new behaviors”
- Taking other relevant actions that go against the status quo
- Promoting the sharing of experiment results and/or feedback continuously throughout the organization
Ted Talk: How to build a company where the best ideas win
Speaker: Ray Dalio
What if you knew what your coworkers really thought about you and what they were really like? Ray Dalio makes the business case for using radical transparency and algorithmic decision-making to create an idea meritocracy where people can speak up and say what they really think -- even calling out the boss is fair game. Learn more about how these strategies helped Dalio create one of the world's most successful hedge funds and how you might harness the power of data-driven group decision-making.
→ How to have Radical Truthfulness and Radical Transparency
1. Record | Tape and record everything so everyone can listen and be on the same page. Let people speak and say what they want. |
2. Be Honest | Everything needs to be open and honest |
3. Collect Principles | Collect principles from largely making mistakes and create algorithms based on those principles. |
4. Express yourself
and be introspective | Learn to express your opinion and separate from it. See your own opinion as one of many.
Ask “How do I know I am right?” |
5. Avoid pitfalls | Avoid being arrogant and prideful; Arrogance holding ideas/opinions in their minds that are wrong and acting on them, holding onto them and not allowing them to be stress-tested. We do it because it elevates ourselves among our own opinions. |
6. Recognize the “two-yous”. | (1) Intellectual You (Pre-frontal Cortex): Views mistakes as a learning opportunity: to reflect and learn from mistakes, (2) Emotional You (Amygdala): Views Radical Truthfulness and Transformation as a “tax”. |
Micro-Enterprises (aka Networks)
“In the past, employees waited to hear from the boss; now, they listen to the customer” —Zhang Ruimin, CEO of Haier
- “Radical Autonomy”: Give employees the choice to leave. Goal is to let everyone become CEO to help everyone fully realize their potential.
- A start-up under the umbrella under the corporate format.
- User-experience from start to finish
- Creating solutions to make customer experiences more positive.
Holacracy
“Tensions Drive Everything” —Holacratic Core Concept
Ted Talk: Holacracy: A Radical New Approach to Management
Speaker: Brian Robertson
In his engaging talk, Brian Robertson explains Holacracy, a complete system for structuring a company without a management hierarchy, yet with clear accountability, authority and agility. Brian Robertson is an experienced entrepreneur, CEO and the creator of Holacracy, a management system for governing and running organizations without a typical management hierarchy. A variety of global leaders have implemented Holacracy, including Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Twitter Co-Founder Ev Williams, and the best-selling author of Getting Things Done, David Allen. Brian previously founded a software development firm that won numerous awards for both fast business growth and innovative people practices. He is the author of the upcoming book, Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World.
Holacracy is a framework of rules that allows “order” to show up. It is a system of corporate governance whereby members of a team or business form distinct, autonomous, yet symbiotic, teams to accomplish tasks and company goals. The concept of a corporate hierarchy is discarded in favor of a flat organizational structure where all workers have an equal voice while simultaneously answering to the direction of shared authority, and likewise have the authority to take actions that make sense as long as they do not violate another’s role. In a Holacracy tensions drive everything (and in Holacracy-speak, a “tension” is a gap between the current reality and the potential you sense for one of your roles) and in this case, that tension provides an opportunity for improvement.
There are some key differences or “shifts” when comparing the difference between a traditional organization and a Holacratic one:
- Static Job Descriptions become Dynamic Roles
- Delegated Authority becomes Distributed Authority (Everyone has their own personal authority)
- Large Scale Re-orgs (that may take a significantly long time) happen significantly faster due to rapid iteration. (Think of how Wikipedia is done. Everyone contributes and corrects)
- Alignment via Politics becomes Transparent Change
- Organization shifts from:
- Profit to purpose, let profits follow purpose
- Command/Control structure to more of a Networking/microenterprise model in order to empower employees and provide autonomy.
- Centralized Planning to Bottom-up Experimentation and Discovery to allow more creativity
- Opaqueness and Privacy to Openness and Transparency to promote “Radical Transparency” and “Radical Truthfulness”
You can also think of a Holacratic structure operating much of the same way a human body does:
- There is no boss cell; however, each cell is a part of a broader system
- Every cell is autonomous, has its own functions and its own master
- Every cell has constraints, boundaries, and accountability
- Every cell must be a good citizen within its environment and cooperate with one-another
This is also how nature deals with complexities—by distributing autonomy in every level of a system and having governance over that system.
Additionally, Holacracy also appears in society:
In the video, Brian paints the scene of someone getting in a taxi, going to a hotel and renting a room. In order to go from a taxi to a hotel to a room, that person does not have to check-in with any “boss” in order to either engage with or complete, this process—It just happens; “This is order” as Brian explains.
“They do not violate another’s role” changes to “they do not violate another’s property or person” when in society
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