Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [71]
Deci and Ryan looked for these three needs/nutriments in people across a variety of cultures. They found them everywhere, even though they are interpreted differently in different places. In the West, for example, the need for autonomy is satisfied individually, in opposition to others, while in the East Asian tradition it is satisfied within harmonious relations with others. These findings led Deci and Ryan to argue that the three needs are innate and universal.
Overall, in their numerous laboratory and field studies, these researchers have discovered that the properly nourishing environment—with practices aimed at satisfying people’s three universal needs—leads to self-motivation. When people are treated with consideration, when they are provided with support for growth and self-direction, they self-motivate and take initiatives, leading to increased performance and enhanced personal well-being.21 When, on the contrary, the environment is controlling and deprives people of their universal needs satisfaction, then motivation becomes externally controlled and people do only what they are rewarded or punished for. This does not lead to increases in people’s well-being, and creates only short-term performance benefits, if any.
Deci and Ryan’s extensive empirical work led them to a conclusion similar to McGregor’s: Human motivation does not need to be controlled; people are self-motivated to act in search of mastery and well-being when provided the “nourishing” environment. McGregor redefined the “How does one motivate people?” problem into “How does one build an environment where people self-motivate?” Deci and Ryan advanced this redefinition further still: “What is in the environment that prevents people from getting the right nutriments and what has to be rebuilt in it so they get them?”
Liberating leaders make a similar redefinition. Methodically, they listen to employees to understand what in the work environment is depriving them from satisfying their needs of being treated as intrinsically equal, growing, and self-directing. Then, they start to transform this depriving environment into a nourishing one, which we’ll explore in further detail in the next chapter. But now, back to Thomas Jefferson.
WHAT WENT WRONG—BEFORE IT WENT RIGHT
It’s 1824. Jefferson is satisfied with how the university project—which, recall, he considers essential for the United States as a self-governed country—is advancing. He has compiled an outstanding library and devised the departments and courses, which include ancient and modern languages, philosophy, mathematics, law, and medicine—Jefferson hired the first full-time medical professor in the United States—but no theology, of course. The Jefferson-designed campus, which then Harvard professor George Ticknor called “a mass of buildings more beautiful than anything architectural in New England, and more appropriate to a university than are to be found, perhaps in the world,”22 has been essentially finished, thanks to a $180,000 loan and a $50,000 appropriation Jefferson obtained from Virginia. And though the rotunda is still in the process of being completed, he entertains there a visiting revolutionary hero, the Marquis de Lafayette, at a lavish dinner. As the university was rushing toward its opening day, all the pieces seemed to be put in place except one—the professors.
To the dismay of John Adams, who teased him for his lack of patriotism, Jefferson wanted only European professors for his university. But the big European names refused to come to what at that time looked like an academic desert. Concerned that his envoy’s “return without any professors will completely quash every hope of the institution,”23 Jefferson had to settle for five younger professors. The bigger compromise, however, was these professors’ lack of regard for the university