Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
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| Policies Between the words businesses use and the goals they seek sit the policies they implement to turn the former into the latter. Here, too, one can detect the early tremors of a different approach. For example, many companies in the last decade spent considerable time and effort crafting corporate ethics guidelines. Yet instances of unethical behavior don’t seem to have declined. Valuable though those guidelines can be, as a policy they can unintentionally move purposeful behavior out of the Type I schema and into Type X. As Harvard Business School professor Max Bazerman has explained: Say you take people who are motivated to behave nicely, then give them a fairly weak set of ethical standards to meet. Now, instead of asking them to do it because it’s the right thing to do you’ve essentially given them an alternate set of standards—do this so you can checkoff all these boxes. “The value of a life can be measured by one’s ability to affect the destiny of one less advantaged. Since death is an absolute certainty for everyone, the important variable is the quality of life one leads between the times of birth and death.” BILL STRICKLAND Founder of the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, and MacArthur “genius award winner Imagine an organization, for example, that believes in affirmative action—one that wants to make the world abetter place by creating a more diverse workforce. By reducing ethics to a checklist, suddenly affirmative action is just a bunch of requirements that the organization must meet to show that it isn’t discriminating. Now the organization isn’t focused on affirmatively pursuing diversity but rather on making sure that all the boxes are checked off to show that what it did is OK (and so it won’t get sued. Before, its workers had an intrinsic motivation to do the right thing, but now they have an extrinsic motivation to make sure that the company doesn’t get sued or fined. 10 In other words, people might meet the minimal ethical standards to avoid punishment, but the guidelines have done nothing to inject purpose into the corporate bloodstream. The better approach could be to enlist the power of autonomy in the service of purpose maximization. Two intriguing examples demonstrate what I mean. First, many psychologists and economists have found that the correlation between money and happiness is weak—that pasta certain (and quite modest) level, a larger pile of cash doesn’t bring people a higher level of satisfaction. But a few social scientists have begun adding a bit more nuance to this observation. According to Lara Aknin and Elizabeth Dunn, sociologists at the University of British Columbia, and Michael Norton, a psychologist at the Harvard Business School, how people spend their money maybe at least as important as how much money they earn. In particular, spending money on other people (buying flowers for your spouse rather than an MP player for yourself ) or on a cause (donating to a religious institution rather than going for an expensive haircut) can actually increase our subjective well-being. 11 In fact, Dunn and Norton propose turning their findings on what they call pro- social spending into corporate policy. According to The Boston Globe, they believe that companies can improve their employees emotional well-being by shifting some of their budget for charitable giving so that individual employees are given sums to donate, leaving them happier even as the charities of their choice benefit.” 12 In other words, handing individual employees control over how the organization gives back to the community might do more to improve their overall satisfaction than one more “if-then” financial incentive. Another study offers a second possible purpose-centered policy prescription. Physicians in high-profile settings like the Mayo Clinic face pressures and demands that can often lead to burnout. But field research at the prestigious medical facility found that letting doctors spend one day a week on the aspect of their job that was most meaningful to them—whether patient care, research, or community service—could reduce the physical and emotional exhaustion that accompanies their work. Doctors who participated in this trial policy had half the burnout rate of those who did not. 13 Think of it as percent time with a purpose. Download 1.9 Mb. Share with your friends:
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