You Can Control Behavior Change, Not Motivation
But the good news is that behavior change can lead to motivation
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You Can Control Behavior Change, Not Motivation
If you’ve ever led a team of people, you’ve looked at your assembled group and see motivation lacking. It happens. Don’t take it personally just yet.
It might be a big shift in how the company works that causes people to be demotivated. Or maybe it’s a really difficult or tedious set of tasks that are suddenly required. There are all sorts of things that could cause it. But how you respond to this is what will determine the success or failure of you and your team.
We’re going to work through a bunch of analogies in other areas to bring the point home and hopefully help illustrate it all a bit better, so stick through it all. We’re going to also sprinkle in some more psychology and blow your mind on the dangers of incentives in general. There’s something for everyone.
Let’s start with the title of this post and break it down a bit:
You Can Control Behavior Change, Not Motivation.
Let’s use the case of a completely new set of tedious tasks that your team now needs to complete. The typical way people will address this is by trying to “fire up” the team. You’ll try some motivational speaking and do your best Tony Robbins to get everyone on board. And that might work for a little bit. You might try some monetary incentives to get people to complete these tasks. And that’ll also work for a bit.
But you need your team to be bought in and motivated for the long term. What’s your best approach?
Before revealing the best approach, let’s look at won’t work and why. Simply trying to “motivate” your team and hoping that translates into behavior change will not work in the long term. You might get your team started, but as soon as you stop your regular pep talks, they likely will stop.
The simple reason for this is that people who are adherent to new routines develop an intrinsic (internal) motivation versus an extrinsic (external) motivation (your constant hassling in this example). You need people to do the actions, which over time will lead to their own motivation that doesn’t require you at all.
For anyone who’s tried to start up exercising for the first time, you can read all the motivational quotes you want, but only one thing will make you stick with exercising regularly and that’s exercising regularly. You will develop a “nudge” in the back of your head that will encourage you to get off the couch when you don’t want to. Sure, you might have someone reminding you of the importance of exercise, but that’s NOT what’s making you develop a new habit. Doing the new habit is what causes that.
Very few managers appreciate this very important nuance. In fact, we have built entire systems that fly in the face of this well established psychological fact. Let’s say that your new set of tasks involves making cold calls to potential customers.
To get people into this, you come up with a scheme to pay people for each call they complete. Great idea. I can tell you that this will likely have an impact. But I can also tell you that the second you run out of money, these same people will stop making calls. This is a very well known (or should be) phenomenon called The Overjustification Effect.
The Overjustification Effect is pretty simple. Here’s a great definition from Wikipedia.
The overjustification effect occurs when an expected external incentive such as money or prizes decreases a person's intrinsic motivation to perform a task.
In our case, by giving money to people to make these calls, you haven’t created an intrinsic motivation within your team (you’ve actually decreased it), so when the money dries up, they are mentally in the same spot before your reward program began. Moreoever, the people you gave the money to will be LESS motivated than people who you never offered money to once the money is gone. You’ve made things worse in the long term.
The famous study that first identified this concept involved rewarding students for completing puzzles. There were two groups: one received nothing and the other was rewarded for completing each puzzle. At some point, the observer left the room or explained that there was no more money. Who do you think continued to work on the puzzles? Clearly…the group that received nothing. They just wanted to work on the puzzles and found it interesting and rewarding in and of itself.
This is also why long-term drug adherence programs that pay people for taking their drugs don’t work. You can’t pay everyone enough money forever and so their motivation for sticking with their treatment never develops. As soon as you stop giving them money, they stop taking their drugs. But what can work long term is helping these people understand the benefits of their treatments and how to identify signs that they are working (which might not be apparent for some long-term treatments like statins).
So, what’s a leader to do in these situations? Let’s go back to the cold calls example. Knowing what you know now, how do you ensure your team starts making these cold calls, but also sticks with it over the long term?
We know that promising people money per call and hoping that works forever isn’t the answer. You can (and probably should) start with some sort of financial incentive, but you should also make it clear that this is a short-term program. Some leaderboard type program where you see your ranking opposite others on the team will have a similar impact. This effect might last a bit longer than the payments too (and cost much less).
But you still haven’t hooked your team into doing this long term. What exactly will work here might vary by team or even by individual on your team. It might be helping people understand how developing this cold call skill will set them up for more positions (i.e., a promotion) within your company or open up a whole new set of jobs with other companies. This motivation is similar to the drug adherence principles where showing people the impact their ongoing treatment has seems to help.
(PS: Telling them it’ll help the company probably isn’t going to do much unless you’re a mission-based charity).
The key is getting people into this new habit but without doing it in such a way that it require constant external motivations for them to stick with the habit. It’s not a simple thing, but knowing what doesn’t work and can make your job harder is a good first step.
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