In some ways, motivation is less complicated than one might imagine.
Involving people in decisions that impact them, recognizing the value of their contributions, giving them opportunities to assume responsibility in meaningful ways — study after study has shown the importance of factors like these.
Yet countless workplaces fail to supply such sources of motivation. Why?
Much of the reason can be found in beliefs about basic human nature, particularly beliefs suggesting that human beings are not intrinsically motivated, that they are fundamentally averse to work, that they require external impetus to do it.
Such deeply entrenched mental models produce a range of behaviors and structures that treat employees less like human beings than donkeys or other load-bearing animals.
Under the influence of such paradigms, leaders strive to advance projects by aiming employees in the proper direction and then “motivating” them with a swift kick in the rear end — a strategy that has been colorfully referred to as “KITA” (kick in the ass) management.
KITA is unequivocal. The use or threat of formal reprimands, reductions in pay, reductions of job duties or privileges, and termination produces immediate, observable action.
(Reward-centered systems such as profit sharing and merit-based pay are forms of KITA as well—the carrot rather than the stick, but KITA nonetheless.)
But while KITA management can ensure compliance, it will never create engagement, ownership or enthusiasm. It will never suffice to unleash a sense of internal drive to achieve. It can, in other words, produce movement, but not motivation.
The source of KITA’s shortcomings is simple. The farmer may have a beautiful vision of the many crops that pulling the plow from point A to point B helps to bring about. But the donkey has been given no such vision and therefore has little or no investment in striving after point B.
Taught only to avoid the discomfort behind it and pursue the goodies before it, the donkey cares nothing for the wider context or goals of its work. In fact, the donkey doesn’t even know point B exists. Its “management” has ensured that it thinks only of its own personal well being.
How many leaders today lament the unreliability of their employees, their unwillingness to take initiative and lack of motivation? And yet how many have planted the seeds of those very behaviors by inadvertently conveying to employees their job is not to think or ask questions, but merely to follow orders?
It is true that KITA can produce a certain level of results. But it is similarly true that KITA is a tool whose use undercuts its own ultimate aims.
And because of these dynamics, leaders seeking to build the best human system they can must be constantly on guard, lest we, through the agency of our own leadership actions, be inadvertently creating among employees the qualities that most frustrate us and hold back our organizations from becoming what they otherwise could be.