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 do I engage my workforce how do we engage the employees that work for us and so if we're going to think about how do we engage our workforce we need to understand and get underneath the hood of what drives human behavior in the workplace why do people do what they do when they come to work wouldn't we all like to know that well in our studies we've had a central focus on motivation we have found

that motivation is key to success so not only can we measure motivation but we have found that there are four motivations that contribute to success but we in order to understand motivation we have to understand that there are some myths around motivation so let's dive in to the science behind what drives motivation so one of the myths is motivation is just about energy motivation is the intensity that I bring to the job motivation is my ability to get up and come to work and just give 120 percent so is that the whole story well it's

part of the story the other side of the story is yeah it's about energy it's about quantity but it's also about quality so let's think about the employee who is motivated very productively they do a lot of activities at their work that causes them to bring positive outcomes and in their day so they if they are sales rep they're generating leads they're following up on those leads they're closing deals they're generating revenue for the company those are all positive motivations however some people also bring to the table negative motivations 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 it's be motivated absolutely is he a great and talented actor yeah no question about it but does he come with him does he come with counterproductive motivations as well absolutely and so can't we think of somebody that we've worked with over the years that is like the Charlie Sheen or the Lindsay Lohan's of the world that you know Charlie Sheen he's a great actor

but he's a drug addict he's a womanizer he throws tantrums on the set don't we have co-workers that we've worked with in the past that man may we think gosh they've got such great potential but look at that baggage they carry they're draining me they come with toxic behaviors and they just suck the life out of our teams I know I can see on your faces you guys are kind of recalling somebody you've got to face in your mind yeah I've worked with that person and so what we want to think about when it comes

to motivation is there is a quantity aspect but more importantly there's a quality aspect so the success in our life is determined by elevating or maximizing our productive motivations and minimizing our counterproductive motivations and we need to be extremely careful about when we when we engineer teams because we want to make sure we're putting people that are healthy together neuroscientists have proven over the last five years that we as human beings are hard-wired to connect we're hardwired to connect with others and I know you introverts in the room or going nope not me but yes

whether you're an introvert or an extrovert you are hard-wired to connect the introverts just want smaller social circles of people that they know very well the extroverts just it's like a spray in a room they walk into a room and the whole room is a bunch of friends they just haven't met yet so we might have different approaches to it but neuroscientist has said not only are we hardwired to connect our brains will not thrive at their full capacity unless we are a part of the healthy group let me say that again our brains will

never be fully realized unless we are part of the healthy group pretty pretty pretty impactful for organizations a lot of times we just kind of throw teams together and we're like we just need able bodies people abled by two people just go go work on that project but the reality is if we're not careful about how we engineer and engineer our teams 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 on that team don't we think that those

high performers are really going to take that low performer and bring them up I mean that's what we would just intuitively think but what do you think the research says about that no it drags the top performers down so when we have the Charlie Sheen's or the Lindsay Lohan type workers on our group they're toxic they create they create chaos around in their group so we need to be very careful about how we engineer our teams and the second myth is we often think that motivation is a one size fits all so I just need

to come in I need to bring my team together and I just need to inspire them right I mean don't we just want to like get em motivated let's inspire them well the secret to motivation is is that it's not a one-size-fits-all people have different motivational styles so if we look at the basics of motivation and we say okay what really is motivation motivation hasn't had a lot of clarity until the past couple years and we've really dug into what is driving that human behavior but when we look at what is motivation it's pretty simple

motivation is our drive to go seek pleasure and avoid pain so as human beings in life we are just hardwired to go seek pleasure we want to go get that degree we want to go get that job we want to go get that awesome spouse but we're also motivated to avoid pain I don't want trouble coming into my life I've got a problem solving I've got to get it out I don't want any anything impacting my success so that's our ability to effectively avoid pain so how successful we are in life is dependent on how

many productive motivations we've we have and have built over time and how effective we are minimizing our counterproductive behaviors and so when we look at the pleasure pain access our research has shown that we can not only measure motivation but we can also find we have also identified the key factors the key motivations that contribute to our success and on the pleasure side there are two there are two motivations on the pleasure side ambition and accountability so if Mary over here Mary on my team is very driven in in ambition she's just the most ambitious

person I can put her on a project and I just tell her here's what I need you to do and she runs with it she is excited she sees the world in opportunities so that's somebody who's highly driven highly motivated on the pleasure side now I've got Bob Bob over here is highly motivated on the pain side he wants to avoid pain he has this just innate ability to be intuitive and be watching and being a protector of the organization and he's looking at what is everything that could go wrong they're great at mitigating risk

for our for our companies and so they have this innate ability that I call the power of noticing the power of noticing they notice clues they notice issues that ho whoa whoa hey wait just a minute that could cause our company pain that can bring trouble that can jeopardize everything that we've built so they are highly motivated to protect what they have they don't care as much about I don't I don't have the need to bring in a lot of 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 focus and this is important because if I want to try to motivate my employees I have leaders across the country that say gosh I want to increase workplace engagement 70% of employees across the nation or disengaged how do I motivate my employees well you're asking the wrong question your employees are already motivated the question you should be asking is how do I unleash it how do I unleash their already existing motivation so if I'm communicating with Mary who's extremely motivated on the pleasure side and

she sees the world is all these wonderful opportunities I'm going to talk to her about the benefits and all the positives that I see with this if I'm talking to Bob who is highly motivated to protect and to prevent problems and to mitigate risk then if I go to him and approach him like I just did Mary and I say Bob let me tell you about the awesome reasons that we should bring this new project on its we're going to increase market share we're going to bring in new clients what's Bob going to think I

don't care now if I don't understand Bob as a leader if I walk away what am I going to think Bob just not motivated Bob's not motivated I can't get them to buy into this I don't know what the deal is I see all these wonderful things and I can't get Bob to buy in well the problem is not Bob the problem is me I don't understand how Bob is motivated and so I've got to understand how he's motivated and then I know okay Bob is motivated to avoid pain he wants to mitigate risk he

doesn't care about new stuff he just wants to avoid trouble coming so how am I going to talk to him how can I unleash that motivation I'm going to go to Bob and I'm going to say Bob we want to bring on this new project but I want to go through all of the things that could go wrong if we don't do it here's problem x y&z if we don't implement this change if we don't take this project on X Y & Z could happen we could lose market share we could lose some of our

clients now all of a sudden it's kind of like that movie inside out where the people are talking in the brain all of a sudden you've got the bells going off in his brain because he hears threat he hears pain now all of a sudden whoa what do you mean we could lose market share what do you mean that my project could be in jeopardy now all of a sudden we've tapped into his motivation and we've Unleashed it so what do we why do we care why do we care as organizations well we did a

study with sales reps we wanted to look at what are the key differences between the top performers and our low performers so we assess both the top performers and the low performers and we were curious we we assess them on 35 different traits and we wanted to know out of those 35 different traits are there any consistencies that we see with the top performers versus the low performers there was one the well there were multiple key traits but there was one that was just incredibly significant that pulled out ahead of the rest and that was

motivation and it was the motivation factor on the pain side so we often think sales rep they're so good at ambition they're driven by ambition but on the pain side we have awareness and we have agility and these top sales reps yes they had high ambition but I'm the pain side they were just incredibly effective at resolving pain and about problem solving it gives them that confident mindset is 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 it so those top sales reps had extremely high scores and that agility factor so this is really critical for organizations to know because it's not what we've been taught so why do we need to care about about motivation well number one as organizations we need to be hiring and for motivational fit we need to hire for motivational fit just because somebody can do the job doesn't mean that they will do the job on a consistent basis and a resume only shows us what they can do not what they will do so we need

to be looking in diving in deeper and figuring out what is the job call for and is this the right motivational fit researchers have studied how we as human beings select candidates for hire in an in an interview and they wanted to look at wonder what parts of the brain our decisions about hiring made what was interesting they found that and we make decisions whether or not to hire somebody in the first three to five minutes of the interview the first three to five minutes of the interview we make a decision about whether or not

we want to hire that person not only that the decision is made in the emotional 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 in the emotional centers of the brain and what is our brain asking in that first three to five minutes when I want to get car and drive cross-country with this person the answer is yes all right yeah that's it that's a good fit so then we spend the rest of the interview trying to justify why we

think that person is a good fit so again we're basing it on what we like that's fine maybe does that work well let's go to the research what is the research to say about if we like somebody in an interview is that predictive of later performance what do you guys think the correlation is between if I like somebody in an interview and if they will be a top performer later zero zero that doesn't mean that you should hate the people that you hire but we often hire because somebody they communicate like us they're like us

we like to hire our little minimis but the reality is is that really what the job requires and when we did the study with the sales reps I was curious so I went back to the organization's and I said hey can you pull the records on the on the interview I want to see the ratings you gave those candidates when you hired them and I was just curious because I thought I wonder if the ratings were any different between the top performers and the low performers there was it was incredibly consistent who do you think

got the better ratings in their interviews the low performers we liked it more and if you ask any of the top HR professionals in the country they will say that they yet absolutely we never hire based on who we like we've gotten burned by that so many times so they've really picked up on it so number one we need to hire for motivational fit we need to be testing for motivation and we we need to be digging in deeper on the interview to determine if they are the right motivational fit for the job second we

need to understand our employees we need to understand how they're motivated and we need to communicate with them in their motivational style we also need to be bringing them in on projects that match that motivational style I'm not going to put somebody who's very prevention focused and mitigates risk on a project that's going out and researching opportunities and new projects to bring in so we need to start understanding our employees and matching them to the projects and third we need to invest in our people we often as organizations will invest in our equipment our technology

and our processes we will lean and Six Sigma our organization to death but we don't apply those same principles of continuous improvement to our people the high performance cultures in the future are going to be those that invest in their people thank you guys