One of the big premises of Pink’s book is that lots of biz owners believe something about employees that research shows is flat wrong. And based on that flawed belief, biz owners use means of motivating employees that don't work very well any more.
This flawed assumption is that people need rewards and punishments – carrots and sticks – in order to do anything.
That absent carrots and sticks, workers would be content to . . . well . . . not work.That employees will do the bare minimum required to pick up their paychecks and go home.
As a result, many businesses manage their employees with a set of carrots (bonuses, salary increases etc.) and sticks (no bonuses, bad reviews, possibly loss of job).
Pink cites a lot of interesting research that shows why this is a bad assumption – that we are not lazy, passive slouches by nature, but instead, normally curious, interested and self-directed. Granted, some folks have had these cool traits drummed out of them. But for the most part, humans can be motivated to do good work by things other than carrots and sticks.
The tricky thing is, research shows that rewards and punishments can actually have really nasty side effects. Things like dampened motivation. Reduced creativity. Myopic thinking. Even cheating. (See p. 35).
There is a lot to all of this of course, and you've gotta check it out yourself for more details, but here’s the juice for today.
Even before I got to the inevitable section in the book where Pink talks about law firms to exemplify his theory (at 98-101), my brain was twirling with ways in which BigLaw uses . . . you guessed it . . . carrots and sticks to motivate both lawyers and staff.
Here's the caveat. In my experience, big law firms do not necessarily view their employees as hapless lazy folk who need a firm hand to get things done. My experience has been quite contrary to that – there has been an expectation that employees desire to do good work, and that everyone will do their best and get the job done right.
BUT talk about carrots and sticks! Can you spell minimum billable hours?
Quality is assumed - taken for granted even - and if your work isn't up to par, you may be shown the door, but quantity is the real name of the game.
In many offices, the minimum is impossible to meet without some serious overtime, even for paralegals, and heaven help you if you’re an associate and want to have a life. In many cases, timekeepers not meeting their minimum requirement are not getting a bonus Period. End. Of. Story. No matter how exemplary their work may be in every other respect. The carrot is more money, and the stick is less money (and no partner track) at best. At worst, it’s unemployment.
Such an environment could cause a paralegal to care more about racking up hours than about doing great work for the client. It could cause a paralegal to take less pride in the excellence of her work product, because the only thing that puts money in the bank is billables. It could even motivate someone to (gasp!) pad her hours.
And yet, wonder of wonders, that's not what I experienced! My colleagues and I wanted to do good work. We wanted to serve the client. We wanted to do our best to help win the case. We also wanted to be ethical and honest.
Now don’t get me wrong. My purpose here is not to trash BigLaw – my years in BigLaw served me well, and I'm not picking any bones with my past employers.
Nor is it to trash the billable hour – lots of other people are doing that these days and I’ll leave it to them.
My purpose is to tip my hat to my colleagues in BigLaw who do good work, and care about excellence, despite the fact that the environment in which they work could stifle those traits.
Oh yeah . . . Where in the heck does Bugs Bunny fit into all this?
Well, think about it.
Bugs Bunny never works for carrots. In fact, Bugs Bunny doesn't work at all. Because what Bugs does he would never classify as work. (About which, more in the next post in this series!)
Bugs just does what he's best at!
Which happens to be stealing carrots, eating carrots, and annoying the heck out of Elmer Fudd . . , well, I guess that is another story after all, isn't it?
2 comments:
These posts are great! And really good food for thought. It seems like when you view the situation from this point of view, the way employers use carrots and sticks seems so···medieval. Im curious to know if the author considers the current economic climate as an inevitable catalyst for changing this thinking.
Pink doesn't address the economic downturn very directly, but so far, the way I see his theories impacted by it is outsourcing. He says that increasingly, routine formulaic work is being offshored - and I think that's being accelerated by the economy. And it's the remaining less routine more creative jobs for which the carrot and stick management style really doesn't work.
Interesting stuff! Thanks for the comment!
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