Stop Trying to Motivate Your Employees | Kerry Goyette | TEDxCosmoPark

Thank you, I'm excited to be here today. One of the million-dollar questions that organizations want to know is how can I engage my workforce, how do we engage the

employees

who work for us, and so are we going to think about how we can engage? We engage our workforce We need to understand and understand what drives human behavior in the workplace Why people do what they do when they come to work Wouldn't we all like to know better in our studies we've had? With a central focus on motivation, we have discovered that motivation is key to success, so not only can we measure motivation, but we have also discovered that there are four motivations that contribute to success, but to understand motivation we must understand that there are some myths. around motivation, so let's dive into the science behind what drives motivation, so one of the myths is that motivation is all about energy.

Motivation is the intensity I bring to work. Motivation is my ability to get up, come to work and just give 120 percent. so the whole story is part of the story, the other side of the story is yes, it's about energy, it's about quantity, but it's also about quality, so let's think about the employee who is

motivate

d in a very productive way , they carry out many activities in their work that make them generate positive results and in their daily lives, if they are sales representatives, they are generating potential clients, they are following up on those potential clients, they are closing agreements, they are generating income for the company, All of those are positive motivations.

However, some people also bring negative motivations to the table and we all have a combination of each, both positive and negative, so those that are productive for us and those that are counterproductive, so let me illustrate the point, Mr. Charlie Sheen Charlie Sheen is a great example, he is absolutely

motivate

d, he is a great and talented actor, yes there is no doubt about it, but he comes with it, he comes with self-defeating motivations and therefore, can't we think of someone who can we? I've worked with them over the years, he's like the Charlie Sheen or the Lindsay Lohan of the world you know, Charlie Sheen, he's a great actor but he's a drug addict, he's a womanizer, he throws tantrums on set, don't we have co-? workers that we have worked with in the past, that man, we may think, God, they have such great potential, but look at this baggage that they carry, they are wearing me down, they come with toxic behaviors and they just suck the life out of our teams.

I know I can see in their faces that they are remembering someone they have to face in their mind. Yes, I have worked with that person and what we want to think about when it comes to motivation is that there is an amount. aspect, but most importantly there is a quality aspect, so success in our life is determined by elevating or maximizing our productive motivations and minimizing our counterproductive motivations and we must be extremely careful when we design equipment because we want to make sure that Al bring healthy people together, neuroscientists have shown over the last five years that we as human beings are programmed to connect, we are programmed to connect with others and I know you are introverts in the room or go, no, not me, but yes, if you are an introvert or extrovert you are programmed to connect introverts just want smaller social circles of people they know very well extroverts it's just like a spray in a room they walk into a room and the whole room is a There is a group of friends who haven't met yet, so we may have different approaches, but neuroscientist has said that not only are we programmed to connect, our brains will not thrive to their full capacity unless we are part of the healthy group, let me tell you. that, again, our brains will never be fully realized unless we're part of the healthy group, quite quite shocking to organizations, a lot of times we just team up and think we just need capable bodies, people trained by two people.

Come on, we're going to work on that project, but the reality is that if we're not careful with how we design and layout our equipment, we can really set the project up for failure. We like to think that if we have three high performers and we put that C. player on that team, don't we think the high performers will actually take the low performers and bring them out? I mean, that's what we would intuitively think, but what do you think the research says about that? No, it drags down the best performers. so when we have Charlie Sheen or Lindsay Lohan type workers in our group, they are toxic, they create chaos in their group, so we have to be very careful with the way we design our teams and the second myth is that often I think the motivation is unique, so I just need to enter.

I need to unite my team and I just need to inspire them well. I mean, don't we just want to motivate them? Let's inspire them well. The secret. The motivation is that it is not one size fits all. People have different motivation styles, so if we look at the basics of motivation and say, "Okay, what is motivation really?" The motivation has not been very clear until a couple of years ago. years and we've really researched what drives that human behavior, but when we look at what motivation is, it's pretty simple: Motivation is our drive to seek pleasure and avoid pain, so as human beings in life, we are programmed to seek pleasure. we want to get that degree we want to get that job we want to get that wonderful spouse but we are also motivated to avoid pain I don't want problems to come into my life I have a problem to solve I have to get it out into the light.

I don't want anything to affect my success, so that's our ability to effectively avoid pain. So how successful we are in life depends on how many productive motivations we have and have built over time and how effectively we are minimizing our counterproductive behaviors, and therefore when we look at access to pleasure and pain, our research has shown that not only can we measure motivation, but we can also find that we have also identified the key factors, the key motivations that contribute to our success and, consequently, on the pleasure side there are two there are two motivations on the pleasure side ambition and responsibility so yes Mary here Mary on my team is very ambitious she is the most ambitious person I can put on a project and I simply tell her this is what I need you to do and she follows it, she is excited, she sees the world in opportunities, so this is someone very motivated, very motivated on the pleasure side, now I have Bob Bob, here he is very motivated on the pain side. he wants to avoid pain, he has this innate ability to be intuitive and observe and be a protector of the organization and he's watching for everything that could go wrong.

They are excellent at mitigating risk for our companies, so they have this innate ability that I call the power to notice the power to notice they notice clues they notice problems that wait just a minute that could cause pain to our company that can bring problems that They can jeopardize everything we have built so they are very motivated to protect what they have they don't care that much I don't I don't have the need to generate many new opportunities but they want to protect and preserve what they have now we all have a combination of both , but we tend to have a dominant approach and this is important because if I want to try to motivate my

employees

, I have leaders across the country saying, oh my gosh, I want to increase workplace engagement of 70% of employees in the entire country or disconnect.

Do I motivate my employees well? You are asking the wrong question. Your employees are already motivated. The question you should ask

your

self is how do I untie it? How can I unleash

your

already existing motivation? So if I'm communicating with Mary, she's extremely motivated. the pleasure side and she sees the world are all these wonderful opportunities. I'm going to talk to her about the benefits and all the positives I see in this if I talk to Bob, who is very motivated to protect and prevent problems. and to mitigate the risk, so if I approach him and I approach him like I just did with Mary and I say Bob, let me tell you the incredible reasons why we should implement this new project, we are going to increase market share.

I'm going to bring in new clients, what is Bob going to think? I don't care now if I don't understand Bob as a leader. If I leave, what will I think? Bob just isn't motivated. Bob is not motivated. I can't get them. to accept this I don't know what the deal is I see all these wonderful things and I can't get Bob to accept it well the problem is not Bob the problem is me I don't understand how Bob is motivated and that's why I have to understand how he is motivated and then I know that okay, Bob is motivated to avoid pain, he wants to mitigate risk, he doesn't care about new things, he just wants to prevent problems from arising, so how am I going to talk to him?

Can I unleash that motivation? I'm going to go to Bob and tell him Bob, we want to start this new project, but I want to go over all the things that could go wrong if we don't. here is the problem x y&z if we don't implement this change if we don't take this project on , suddenly you have bells ringing in your brain because you hear a threat, you hear pain now, all of a sudden, what do you mean we could lose market share? that my project could be in danger now, suddenly, we've tapped into his motivation and unleashed it, so what do we do?

Why do we care? Why do we care as organizations? Well, we did a study with sales representatives that we wanted. Look at what the key differences are between top performers and low performers, so we evaluated both top performers and low performers and we were curious, we evaluated them on 35 different traits and we wanted to know what those 35 are. different traits. There was some consistency that we see between the top performers versus the low performers. There was one, well there were multiple key traits, but there was one that was incredibly significant that stood out ahead of the rest and that was motivation and it was the motivating factor.

On the pain side, we often think that sales reps are so good at ambition that they are driven by ambition, but on the pain side we have awareness and we have agility and these top sales reps, yes, they had a great ambition, but I'm the On the pain side, they were incredibly effective at solving pain and as far as problem solving, it gives them that confident mentality that you can throw any kind of problem at me and no problem, I'll solve it so they know that even if they don't know the answers they can go find them, which is why the best sales reps scored extremely high and that agility factor, so it's really critical for organizations to know that because it's not what we've been taught, so why should we worry about motivation, number one?

As organizations we need to hire and to achieve motivational fit, we need to hire for motivational fit. Just because someone can do the job doesn't mean they will do it consistently and a resume only shows us what they can't do. what they will do, so we need to dig deeper and figure out what the call for work is and if this is the right motivational fit. Researchers have studied how we, as humans, select candidates to hire in an interview and wanted to look at asking us what parts of the brain made our decisions about hiring what was interesting they found that and we make decisions about whether or not to hire someone in the first three to five minutes of the interview the first three to five minutes of the interview Making a decision about whether or not we want to hire that person is not only that the decision is made on an emotional level, so if we use this as a crude representation of the brain, the thumb represents the emotional centers of the brain, the decision is made on the emotional level. emotional centers of the brain and what our brain asks in those first three to five minutes when I want to get in a car and drive across the country with this person the answer is yes, okay, yes, that's it, it's a good fit, so we pass the The rest of the interview we try to justify why we think that person is a good fit, so again we base it on what we like, okay, maybe it will work well, let's get to the research, what does the research say if we like someone? ? in an interview is that predictive of subsequent performance.

What do you think is the correlation between whether I like someone in an interview and whether they will outperform later? zero zero thatIt doesn't mean you should hate the people you hire but often we hire because someone communicates like us, they're like us, we like to hire our little minimis, but the reality is that's what the job really requires and when we did the Studying with the sales reps, I was curious, so I went back. to the organization and I said: can you get the records of the interview? I want to see the ratings you gave those candidates when you hired them and I was curious because I thought you were wondering if the ratings were different among the top performers.

The low performers were incredibly consistent: who do you think got the best marks in their interviews? We underperformers liked it better, and if you ask any of the top HR professionals in the country, they'll tell you we still absolutely did. let's never hire based on who we like, that has burned us so many times, so they have really figured it out, so first of all we need to hire for motivational fit, we need to do motivation testing and we need to go deeper into the interview to determine if they are the right motivation for the job.

Second, we must understand our employees. We need to understand how they are motivated and we need to communicate with them in their motivational style. We also need to include them in projects that match that motivational style. I'm not going to put someone who is very focused on prevention and mitigating risk on a project to go out and investigate opportunities and new projects to bring on board, so we have to get started. understand our employees and relate them to projects and third, we need to invest in our people, often as organizations we will invest in our teams, our technology and our processes, we will lean in and use Six Sigma in our organization to death, but we will not We apply them in the same way. principles of continuous improvement to our people, high-performance cultures in the future will be those that invest in their people, thank you guys