Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [69]
The next day he returned to the head-hunter and gave him his boss’s name. He asked the head-hunter to look for another job—not for himself this time but for his boss. The head-hunter agreed and, before long, found something. The boss received a phone call offering him another job, not realizing, of course, that the offer was the result of the teamwork of his subordinate and the head-hunter. As it happened, the boss was tiring of his current job and in short order accepted the new position.
The icing on the cake was that, as a result of the boss’s accepting the new job, his old job became vacant. Our high-level executive applied for it and ended up with his boss’s job.12
We don’t necessarily suggest that you try this gambit yourself. We’ve heard personally—so far—of two such successful attempts in companies, but we presume that at some point bosses will start to suspect something fishy about the unsolicited job offers, especially after it inspired an episode of The Office. Even so, the story shows how a creative insight, redefining an otherwise insoluble problem, can lead to a great solution.
Our liberating leaders had this type of creative insight while facing the motivation problem, which they initially believed had no solution. So they redefined it into a different one: “How does one build an environment where people self-motivate?”
This redefinition allowed them to immediately set aside all the traditional corporate solutions, which are not aimed at self-motivation but rather at controlling the motivation externally through tangible rewards, such as bonuses, promotions, perks, awards, distinctions, and “president’s clubs,” and through the threat of punishments. Our liberating leaders first dismantled many of these “carrots and sticks” incentive systems, then found a host of solutions through the newly redefined problem. Each solution was specific to their people, companies, and industries, but all helped to build corporate environments conducive to letting people motivate themselves to take part in the liberation campaign.
We don’t know how all of our liberating leaders came to the creative insight of redefining the “how to motivate people” problem into “how to build an environment where people self-motivate.” We do know, though, that some—such as Bill Gore, Robert Townsend, and Jean-François Zobrist—were familiar with the work of Douglas McGregor, whose one key focus was on motivating people—not only to join corporate transformation efforts but also, to act in the best interests of the company. McGregor wrote: “The answer to the question managers often ask …—How do you motivate people?—is: You don’t. Man is by nature motivated…. His behavior is influenced by relationships between his characteristics as an organic system and the environment … Creating these relationships is a matter of releasing energy in certain ways rather than others. We do not motivate him because he is motivated. When he is not, he is dead.”13
McGregor also contrasted the traditional “manufacturing” approach with what he called an “agricultural” approach: “The individual will grow into what he is capable of becoming, provided we can create the proper conditions for that growth.”14 Robert Townsend translated these ideas into his own agricultural approach to encouraging self-motivation: “Provide the climate and proper nourishment and let the people grow themselves. They’ll amaze you.”15 In other words, if the environment is properly nourishing, people will motivate themselves to take part in the transformation efforts or perform their regular activities. The question is, What is this properly nourishing environment?
THE RIGHT NUTRIMENTS
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not