Driven: Part 3, Or, What do YOU call work?

If it’s work then it can’t be play, and if it’s play then it can’t be work.

Or can it?

Think about this. Imagine a little kid who loves to draw. During play time at preschool, she draws because that’s what she loves to do. Then imagine she’s told that as a reward for drawing during play time, she’ll get a pretty blue ribbon. And for a while at school, she gets the ribbon every time she draws. And then one day there’s no ribbon.

What do you suppose happens?

Well, Daniel Pink* describes a study done some years ago (at 37-38) with a group of kids who liked to draw. Some were promised a reward for drawing and others were not. The kids who didn’t get ribbons continued to draw during play time because they liked to. But the kids who were promised ribbons for drawing quit drawing when the ribbons stopped coming.

Why?

The reward had turned play into work.

Or think about this. Remember Tom Sawyer and whitewashing the fence? Tom tricked other kids into whitewashing his fence for him, because he made the chore seem exciting.

He turned work into play.

Or think about this. Wikipedia. An online encyclopedia completely written by volunteers. Or open source software, such as FireFox. A free web browser developed primarily by unpaid programmers. Is what they do work? Is it play? What’s the difference?

What qualifies a task as "work"? Is it as simple as getting paid? Or does it have more to do with how we feel about it? What makes a task fun, and what makes it drudgery? Do we define work as unpleasant, and unpleasant tasks as work?

Once we realize that the boundaries between work and play are artificial, we can take matters in hand and begin the difficult task of making life more livable.

~Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety

Pink says that contingent rewards – if you do this, then you’ll get that – can result in a loss of interest in the project because the interest shifts solely to the reward. And that can be counterproductive.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? It strikes me as having huge implications for me as a self-employed (self-motivated) freelance paralegal. And the implications may be even greater given that I primarily work remotely such that my attorney clients can’t see me working.

About which, more in the next post in the series!

*This post is the 3rd in my series of musings on Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, from which the examples discussed in this post derive. Daniel H. Pink. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009.

Driven: Part 2, Or, The Bugs Bunny Secret to Workplace Bliss

Onward with my musings about Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. What with the little explosions that keep going off in my head, it feels like the 4th of July around here!

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?

Driven: Part 1, Or, Embracing My Inner Nerd

Do you know what one of my amazing nephews bought me for Christmas? Daniel H. Pink’s mind-blowing book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. (The other amazing nephew bought me another wonderful book, but that’s fodder for a different future post.) I didn’t read it right way, and now that I’ve started I find it hard to put down, and it’s causing my synapses to fire overtime.

So this is the start of a little series of posts recording my reflections as I read this book, because I believe it has such important implications for the path I’ve been on throughout my career, the reasons behind some of the choices I’ve made, my current virtual paralegal business venture, and on the nature of entrepreneurship itself – which as you know I think about quite a bit here on this blog.

As one might guess from the title, the purpose of the book is to discuss human motivation, how the theories of motivation and the tactics used to motivate in the business world have changed over time, with implications for employers, employees, and just about everyone else. 

Pink postulates two general categories of people as defined by what drives them: extrinsic motivation, which he calls Type X, and intrinsic motivation, which he calls Type I. So assuming the same baseline standard of living, a Type X person is more motivated toward achievement by outer rewards such as money or honors or recognition or perks, while a Type I person is more motivated to achieve by something more internal, “the freedom, challenge, and purpose of the undertaking itself.” (at 78.) And lots of implications arise from these two different motivations.

Well, the first explosion that went off in my head that I want to talk about is this:

I now realize that I have pretty much always been a Type I person.

When I was a young kid, I was content to read for hours. All that reading didn’t gain me popularity, influence or lots of friends (I think mostly it gained me a rep as a weirdo), but it was satisfying to me. 

There was a period during high school, when I would spend hours studying and researching stuff. Stuff that hadn’t been assigned by teachers. And that didn’t have any purpose in particular except that I was curious, and driven to figure it all out. 

(“GEEZE what a colossal nerd!!”  Well yeah, pretty much I was. Am. Whatever. My brother playfully refers to this trait of mine as OCD (is it playful??) and I take exception to this, but this longstanding little joke between my brother and me is a whole ‘nother story, so I’ll just move on.)

My first “real” job after college was for a non-profit organization at which I worked long hours, and had very little money. I did it because at the time, I cared about the work and the cause, and believed we were helping. I found the group effort very satisfying.

Later, my career path took a more conventional turn (such as law firms), but I still never did the angling some of my colleagues did to command the highest salary out there. As long as I felt valued by my supervisors and co-workers, and believed I could take pride in doing work of excellent quality, I tended to stick around, with or without hefty pay raises.

And I begin to see how this fact – the fact that I am so strongly motivated by the satisfaction of performing well, of making my own decisions and of providing work of value – has led me here. To start my own business. To continue the struggle to build a client base in a bad economy. To create a lot of informational and educational materials for which I’m not compensated financially – at least not at the moment (although there are certainly lots of other – well, intrinsic compensations).

It’s fascinating. My head is spinning. I hadn’t looked at myself and my career trajectory in quite this way before.

What about you? How do you think you’re motivated?

Care and Feeding of Your Whuffie

A)  Kid’s toy?  B) Foreign curse word?  C) Porn name?  What in heaven’s name, you ask, is whuffie?  Well according to Tara Hunt,

Whuffie is the residual outcome – the currency – of your reputation.  You lose or gain it based on positive or negative actions, your contributions to the community, and what people think of you.  The measurement of your whuffie is weighted according to your interactions with communities and individuals. (at 4)

Originally coined by Cory Doctory in his sci-fi novel, “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,” (free download – very generous, very cool), who envisions “whuffie” as the currency that replaces money and better reflects the “personal capital” money once represented, whuffie is gained – or lost – by the helpfulness of your deeds - or lack thereof.  Quoting Hunt again,

In the gift economy, the more you give away, the more whuffie you gain, which is completely opposite from currency in the market economy, where when you give away money, it’s pretty much gone.  (at 5)

Hunt uses this metaphor to discuss building a business through building relationships with customers and the communities they are part of via digital, social networks (Facebook, Twitter and blogging are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the various tools discussed by Hunt for building these relationships).

Hunt focuses primarily on businesses selling products on line, and her book is packed with interesting stuff.  However, reading the book has stimulated thought for me in a somewhat different direction.  After all, we’ve talked about my reticence at embracing social media tools.  Instead, I find myself thinking long and hard about ways I can connect and build relationships in my physical, local, “real” community.  After all, while my adorable town of Sonoma and surrounding environs are certainly not the only - or even primary - markets for my fledgling virtual and freelance paralegal business, they are the likely arenas for that part-time job I’m hunting for and the wine/food business I plan to start soon.  The people I bump into in my travels about the Sonoma valley could well be the ones with whom I will interact in those businesses some day.

So I’ve been making more of an effort to meet folks locally.  Mind you, I’m pretty good at that already – after only seven months here, I’ve made a number of friends due to my penchant for striking up conversations with folks I meet in restaurants, bars and tasting rooms.  Recently though, I’ve taken to wandering into the shops and businesses on and near the Plaza, less to shop than to talk.  I’ve been chatting with the business owners.  Meeting fellow shoppers and guests.  I want to know who they are, how they came to Sonoma, what they enjoy doing, what businesses they are in, what they hope for the future.  I want to find out what we have in common, whether I have information to share, whether there is a way I can help.

And if, in so doing, I manage to increase my “whuffie” within my local community, well, so much the better!

Got your own “whuffie” story?  Feel free to share it in the comments.  And meanwhile, if you see me wandering around the Plaza in Sonoma, be sure to stop me and say hi.

The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business, by Tara Hunt.  New York: Crown Business (2009)