Driven: Part 4, or Believing Isn't Necessarily Seeing

OMG it's been f-o-r-e-v-e-r since I posted last, where have I been?

I've been here!

Pretty, eh? 

Plus when I haven't been frolicking in the desert, I've been Crazy Busy.

Enough of that, onward with the thoughts I've been thinking while reading Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

The farther I read in this provocative book, the more I realize that it has vast implications for virtual paralegals such as me, and  for all other freelance or telecommuting workers.

I’ve seen a lot of articles suggesting that trust is a barrier to telecommuting or remote working relationships. That managers, supervisors, and business owners who hire contractors worry about the work getting done when no supervisor is present to watch it happening.

This is the exact opposite of what I experience, and I'm guessing it is the opposite of what all of my virtual colleagues experience too.

The notion that a remote working contractor, such as a virtual paralegal, won’t work when not being watched operates on the old assumptions that people don’t really want to work, and must be driven to by carrots and sticks. An assumption that doesn’t really bear out when people are interested in what they’re doing, and have a deep personal investment in what they're doing.

In fact, the very reason that many freelancers want to be self-employed and want to work remotely is that autonomy is very important to us, and it is also highly motivating. The control I wield over when and how I work is an integral part of my drive to excel.

I've commented in previous posts about the way in which carrots and sticks can warp our natural motivation to work hard. Studies show that in a work environment where workers know they are being monitored to assure they’re performing, they may actually slack if monitoring stops. The goal can shift from performing the work to appearing busy for the ever watchful boss. So I can see how managers – lawyers in my case – could become programmed to believe workers require monitoring to get them to perform.

But a self-employed person, someone owning her own business and responsible for her own income, benefits, livelihood and well-being, is really operating outside such an environment. She has strong motivation to perform and to exceed expectations that has nothing to do with being monitored.

Now I’m not suggesting that it’s impossible for a remote working professional to slack off and charge clients for not working – obviously there are unscrupulous folks around. I'm simply saying that for me, the motivation to do my best and most efficient work stems from my love of what I'm doing, from the exhilarating sense of pride I feel from owning a business that provides services to clients, and from the knowledge that it's the value I provide that keeps clients coming back, whether they can see me working or not.

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?