Episode 3: Daniel Pink on how can we motivate employees? And is that the right question to ask?

The big question: What motivates employees and how can we better support them? 

In this episode, best-selling author Daniel Pink, joins host Rachel Romer and special guest Adam Grant to discuss:

• How fundamentals like fair pay, a culture of respect, and psychological safety are table stakes for building a motivated workforce
• The two kinds of purpose that drive people
• How much employees value the opportunity to learn, grow, and develop on the job

Listen now for fresh perspectives on the question of workforce motivation, and subscribe below to get the latest on Opportunity Divide episodes.

“We have to get past this idea that motivation is something that one person does to another, when in fact it’s something that people do for themselves. The very idea [of] ‘How do I motivate this person?’ is in some ways a flawed question.” 

Daniel Pink, New York Times best-selling author, including Drive and To Sell is Human

Meet the guests

Daniel Pink

Daniel Pink, New York Times best-selling author, including Drive and To Sell is Human

Daniel H. Pink is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including his latest, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. His other books include the New York Times bestsellers When and A Whole New Mind — as well as the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell is Human. Dan’s books have won multiple awards, have been translated into more than 40 languages, and have sold millions of copies around the world. He lives with this family in Washington, DC.

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Adam Grant

NYT Best-Selling Author of Think Again

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist and bestselling author who explores the science of motivation, generosity, original thinking, and rethinking. ​He is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 5 books that have sold millions of copies and been translated into 45 languages: Think Again, Give and Take, Originals, Option B, and Power Moves.

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Rachel Romer

Guild CEO

Rachel Romer is Guild’s CEO — a Public Benefit Corporation that provides employees of America’s largest companies access to education, skilling, and career mobility through their employers without paying for tuition or career services on their own.

LinkedIn

Podcast transcript: Daniel Pink, Rachel Romer and Adam Grant

Rachel Romer [00:00:00]:

How do business leaders motivate the workforce? Or, as we'll learn in today's episode, maybe there's a better question to ask.

Daniel Pink [00:00:08]:

We have to get past this idea that motivation is something that one person does to another, when in fact, it's something that people do for themselves. So even the very idea that how do I motivate this person? Is in some ways a flawed question.

Rachel Romer [00:00:23]:

What motivates the American workforce? And what can business leaders change to better support them? There's a huge mismatch between what science knows and what business leaders do. And for frontline workers, that mismatch creates a bigger gap between the status quo and the middle class life that they and their families dream of. This is Opportunity Divide. I'm your host, Rachel Romer, CEO of Guild, with our special guest, Adam Grant. Together, we're exploring the future of work through the lens of the frontline workforce. Daniel Pink is the author of five New York Times bestsellers. And at the core of our conversation is the research found in his book Drive the Surprising Truth About What Motivates US. Dan joined us for a fascinating conversation about how his view has evolved since writing the book on motivating the workforce. So much of what we used to believe about motivating employees is now turned upside down with huge implications. For example, pay is no longer the top driver of employee behavior, and companies are struggling to meet employees new expectations for career pathways. As we lean into this important discussion and Dan's new perspectives about leading the frontline workers that you lead every day, you might also find yourself questioning what motivates you.

Daniel Pink [00:01:47]:

When it comes to motivation. There is this kind of innate premise that the way to motivate people is to reward the behavior you want and punish the behavior you don't want. When you punish behavior, you often get less of it. But there are two problems with that. One, not all the time and not nearly as much as we think. So that creates a problem. If your underlying premise is off, if your belief about the laws of the universe are off, you're going to make all kinds of mistakes, and you're going to risk compounding those mistakes because you're not sure why you're making them. So when we talk about people motivating themselves, we have to talk about the environment in which people are working. I think we have to talk about pay. We have to talk about paying people well and paying people fairly. We have to talk about the basic treatment of people. Do we treat them with respect? Do we treat them as human beings, not as interchangeable parts? One of the things that we've seen in this so called great resignation, particularly for frontline workers, is the importance of predictability. None of the people in the C suite would want to have a job where on Tuesday you don't know how much or whether you're going to be working on Wednesday. So predictability is really important. So I think those foundational things are extraordinarily important. Likewise with psychological safety. If I'm a frontline worker and I decide to see a problem and I decide to fix it, and I get clobbered for coloring outside the lines, if I get clobbered for trying something new, I'm not going to do that again. Once we do that, we can have this conversation about how I can motivate myself.

Rachel Romer [00:03:21]:

I think what surprised so many companies is that actually, above a certain level, pay matters less.

Rachel Romer [00:03:26]:

Even at the front line, right?

Rachel Romer [00:03:28]:

Like when folks saw their wages go up to $15 an hour, everybody thought, okay, they'll stop switching jobs like they just got the wage they wanted. And we find that people are even more likely to switch jobs from $115 an hour wage job to another if the other offers purpose and pathways. But it includes those elements of autonomy and mastery. I think of predictability as an element of autonomy in your framework, is that how you would think about it?

Daniel Pink [00:03:56]:

Yeah, I think that's a good way to look at it. I think that human beings in general are exquisitely attuned to the norms of fairness, and that when you violate the norm of fairness, it's not sustainable. What you're going to get what you get with unfairness is the same thing you get with control. All right? We talk about control. We talk about autonomy. To me, a way to understand autonomy is to think about its opposite, which is control. And human beings have two responses to control they comply or they defy. So you treat people in a controlling way, you treat people in an unfair way, you're going to get compliance, you're going to get defiance. And for most workers, including frontline workers, that is not what you want. It might be hard to find a super transcendent purpose to your job, but I actually think, and this is something I got wrong in that long forgotten book, you mentioned drive, which is that I talk about purpose, but I've since changed my view to think that purpose is not one thing, but it's two things. There are actually two kinds of purpose. There's the purpose that I call like to call capital P purpose, which is that big transcendent, fighting the climate crisis, feeding the hungry, ending our dependence on fossil fuels. And then there's also what I'd like to think of as small P purpose, which is just, are you helping a customer solve their problem? Are you helping a teammate get a project out the door? Are you just making some kind of small contribution today? And so when people don't feel like their work makes a contribution, that's alienating and pathways is really important too, because many people in frontline jobs don't want to do it forever, so they want a pathway off into something else. Whether it's a better job at that operation of that company, whether it's another opportunity in their lives through more education and more training and more ability to expand their skills and find new opportunities.

Adam Grant [00:05:51]:

Dan, you've spoken to a couple of things that I'm curious to hear your reactions to. The first one is on the two types of purpose that you're talking about. This has been one of the animating themes in my research for, I guess, as long as I can remember, which is, yeah, maybe I can tell you what my organization's mission is, but can I draw a line of sight between my individual job and that collective mission? Rarely. How do you think about closing the gap?

Daniel Pink [00:06:15]:

There's really interesting research when it comes to purpose. At Harvard Business School, where they looked at a cafeteria, and in the cafeteria, what they did is they rigged up iPads so the cooks could see the customers and the customers could see the cooks. And what they were measuring, the dependent variable, was not the job satisfaction of the cooks, it was the quality of the food. So this is quintessential frontline worker performance. And so the question they were asking is "does the quality of the food change when the cooks can see the customers?" And the answer was, yeah, by about 10%. And so that's a perfect example of that. Those cooks in that cafeteria in Boston were serving lunch to middle class people in Boston. But when there was literally, in this case, Adam, to use your phrase, a line of sight, you could see the person. They improved their performance. They said, Wait a second, I'm cooking. That dude over there is going to eat my cheese omelet. I'm going to up my cheese omelet game by 10%.

Adam Grant [00:07:17]:

This connects to something that I've seen in a lot of other jobs, too, which is it's one thing to be able to say abstractly. Yes, I know there are people out there that I'm serving. It's a whole nother thing to know their names and see their faces and be able to tell their stories. And that reminds you that your work makes a difference. It also helps you feel valued, which is especially important in a frontline job where you often feel devalued.

Daniel Pink [00:07:38]:

I'll be your Hallelujah chorus on that one and just sing out in louder voice as I can. Amen. I think that's exactly right. Again, let me take this outside of anything practical and make it completely abstract. It also depends on how do we process the world? How do we think? All right, we think sometimes concretely, we think sometimes abstractly. And what you have to do as a human being, let alone as someone who is trying to lead, let alone as someone who is trying to perform both ways. You have to be able to toggle back and forth between the way, sort of the abstract way of thinking, which is bigger or more expansive, and the concrete way of speaking of thinking, which is more narrow but very specific and concrete. And both ways of thinking are valuable. But the idea that you can inspire people by spray painting your mission statement onto a wall is absurd.

Rachel Romer [00:08:31]:

I'd be curious for both of your takes on something. When we look at how much employees value the opportunity to grow and develop on the job, I sometimes question is that actually purpose in the lowercase P, in that you're learning and it is so valuable for humans to feel like they're getting a chance to learn and grow? Or is it this wholly distinct thing which is growth and that is tied to the sense that I'm going to have a better job. If you guys had to guess, which do you think is the deeper intrinsic value that's driving this huge yearning that we're hearing from the whole workforce right now, which is, I want to learn, I want to grow on the job.

Daniel Pink [00:09:08]:

I think it's actually more about growth. I think that growth is itself a fundamental need. And again, I'm not a scholar like Adam, but just the writing that I've done for a popular audience and just interviewing people, I find that comes up a lot. And in my view, it comes up probably separate from the purpose. Now, there's probably some shared DNA there. They might be siblings, but I don't think that they are identical twins.

Adam Grant [00:09:41]:

Yeah, I had a similar reaction. I was thinking about the research on fundamental motivations and values, and it seems to me that the desire to contribute to others, which is really at the heart of meaning and purpose, the sense that I matter, is a different goal. It's more other focused than kind of the intrinsic motivation to grow, to excel, to master the tasks and challenges in front of me. But I think the sweet spot for motivation exists when those two overlap, when I get to grow through the contributions that I'm making to others and when my growth actually serves or helps the people around me. And I think that's something I've seen Rachel a lot on the front lines over the last decade or so is people saying, hey, I want to be able to rise up so that I can create better experiences for the people who report to me than the abuse or the mistreatment that I suffered. I want to be able to develop my skills so that I can actually serve on a broader level. And I think that speaks to the sibling point very nicely.

Rachel Romer [00:10:43]:

One of our core beliefs at Guild is that purpose and growth are actually intertwined. At Guild, we talk about helping foster cultures of opportunity. These are companies who create environments where their employees can blossom and grow. With a workforce that's motivated to excel, we believe that growth itself can help establish purpose. We work with employers who are motivated to help their workforce advance and are making investments accordingly. And when we think about Guild's purpose, for example, we're thinking about how to unlock growth for tens of millions of people, as well as the 1500 people that we employ. As we transition the conversation, I challenge Adam and Dan to share research and insights for leaders to apply using a specific situation.

Rachel Romer [00:11:32]:

Then we'll end it.

Daniel Pink [00:11:32]:

Okay.

Rachel Romer [00:11:33]:

You are now the manager of a restaurant.

Adam Grant [00:11:36]:

Yes.

Rachel Romer [00:11:37]:

And you get to have one hot take, one management leadership principle that you're going to use to manage this restaurant and the 30 people who work there. That isn't standard best practice to you. What would each of you do differently?

Daniel Pink [00:11:50]:

I would draw on another well known paper by Adam and Francesca Gino as the simplest thing you can do. Which is I would say thank you. I would say thank you a lot. I would greet people in the morning, I would greet them by name, and I would say thank you a lot during the day. That doesn't cost me a dump. I'm not saying that's necessarily transformative, but since, Rachel, you gave us only one option to do stuff and I don't want to spend any money, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to greet people by name every time they show up, and I'm going to thank them throughout the day in specific ways for what they did.

Adam Grant [00:12:22]:

It's hard to argue with that one. Rachel, what are you going to do?

Rachel Romer [00:12:25]:

So I would take a habit of asking each person that works for me to build their personal development plan and letting them do it themselves, but say, what do you want to do? Do you want to have my job one day? Do you want to work at this company? Do you want to be a doctor? Are you hoping to go to law school? And I would commit that I would do everything within my resources and power to make that happen, and I would check in on it and I would show that I care.

Adam Grant [00:12:54]:

Okay, so you're both speaking to some element of belonging or connection. Dan brought us some little p purpose. Rachel, you've got some mastery and growth here. I want to add, I guess, to the mastery piece, which is another, I think, great experiment of Francesca's with a couple of our colleagues. They basically said, what if we reimagine the onboarding experience so that instead of just socializing you to fit into the culture, we actually give you a chance to stand out within the culture. And the way they did that with frontline workers was they said, we want to ask you to imagine that you're going to be on Sports Center tomorrow or whatever your favorite news show is, and you get to compose your own personal highlight reel of your proudest moments, your greatest accomplishments, the ones that you would want to show on TV. We want you to share that with your team so that they understand your strengths and what you're good at. And it turned out that when people got to do those personal highlight reels, their performance went up over the next six months. They were also significantly less likely to quit because they felt like they had something to add and they were seen. And I think that that relationship begins the moment somebody walks in the door.

Daniel Pink [00:14:02]:

Yeah. And I think it's important to think about like, why do we think that works so well? I think a big part of it is what Adam said is being seen. It's basically someone is seeing me. I am not interchangeable. I'm not better or worse than anybody, but I'm not identical. And I think a lot of times when we, especially with frontline workers, a lot of leaders homogenize and they say that the way to treat everybody fairly is to treat everybody identically. And that's a mistake. You want to treat everybody fairly and sometimes that means treating people differently. It's a legacy of the industrial system where you wanted to have uniformity, you wanted to have that level of industrial predictability and interchangeability. And I think that's not the case now when so much of frontline work, the reductive stuff is being automated. You actually want to liberate people to do things, use their unique strengths in their unique ways. The absurdity that you sometimes hear now of like, oh, you can work at home, but we're going to install software that measures your keystrokes. Or there was even this thing that I read recently about people coming up with mouse jigglers. Have you heard of the whole mouse jiggling thing where people have basically they put software that connects to their mouse so that it jiggles periodically to show that there's actually activity at their keyboard, whether there is or not. So I think that would be this idea that the only way people will do good work is if they're watched and monitored. Can be very, I think, pernicious counterproductive and autonomy destroying.

Rachel Romer [00:15:48]:

Yeah, I mean, we inherited principles from armies that there are infantry and there are officers. And if you look at a lot of companies that actually still exists in who they think about the frontline workforce and then who they bring in as the frontline manager and supervisor. And the companies that I've seen run best throw that to the wind and say no, our best managers and supervisors started in the front line. Chipotle is a great example. 95 ish percent of their leaders across their restaurants grew up in the business. And you look at why is that stock outperformed for decades? Why is their culture so much stronger? Why does their learning ethos they are one of the strongest learning cultures I've ever spent time with. And I think it's tied back to that.

Adam Grant [00:16:30]:

I agree with both of those sets of observations. I think if I were to add another one, it would be the idea that you can only earn a high salary through, I guess, over producing or outperforming some kind of norm. My read of the evidence is if you actually start out overpaying people, you attract more talented people, and they're not necessarily motivated by the chance to earn the pay so much as they are feeling valued by the fact that, hey, you know what? My salary is a symbol of my worth to the company, and somebody thought I was worth more. There are some great experiments by John List, for example, showing that if you give teachers an upfront bonus, they actually perform better than if you dangle the bonus at the end of the school year. And they feel like, okay, wow, this organization already thinks that my teaching is worthy of a bonus, and now I need to make sure that I live up to that, as opposed to saying I'm feeling a lot of pressure and maybe a little bit controlled and micromanaged around earning this. There's really good evidence that this can work in a frontline model. If you're not familiar with Zayn Up Tan's work on the good job strategy. She studies these very low margin, high churn retail businesses and finds that it's actually strategic to overpay your employees, to invest in their development, to promote them to management. Rachel, just like you were saying, and you end up getting outsized returns from.

Rachel Romer [00:17:56]:

That I was going to say. I think some companies are accidentally benefiting from that right now. Visa vis the cultural movement that made everyone increase wages because it was one of the few times that without government intervention or business necessity, the cultural movement actually increased wages. And that did, I think, caused a lot of that and is causing workers to now look at if that's the bare necessity, pay just feel and stable. Okay, now what do I want to create at my work? Where is my purpose? How do I want to grow? And I think there will be an economic return.

Daniel Pink [00:18:27]:

Yeah. Pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. Treat people with dignity. Pay them enough to take the issue of money off the table. Let them focus on the work.

Rachel Romer [00:18:33]:

I completely agree. And I was going to connect the fairness concept to higher ed, which is where we spend all of our time helping people. Why have close to half of the people who've tried college in the US. Dropped out? Why have a close to half of our workforce sat on the sidelines and said, I don't need skills? Or that's what people perceive. They're saying it isn't what they're actually saying, but they're not engaging. Our sense is that the concept of higher ed has gotten really sideways when it comes to fairness. People perceive that it's a rigged system. They read The New York Times about how hard it is and that you can buy your way into these schools and you have to be the star athlete and your parents had to have attended. We find that motivating people who are super capable of going back to college or completing a digital certificate. The motivating factor is really tied up in whether they think it's even a fair system.

Rachel Romer [00:19:27]:

On this show, we like to advance the conversation by actually looking at real life scenarios and real workers. So I introduced Dan and Adam to Cassandra. Cassandra dropped out of high school. That was the choice required for her family. She's a mother of two, but now she wants to go back to school with the hope of securing a more stable future. She's fundamentally unsure if she can do it, which may be due in part to the fact that she feels like the world has been up against her. Things just haven't seemed to go her way. My questions are, what would you do if you were trying to motivate someone like Cassandra and taking it up a level? How do we build environments where people feel empowered to take important steps, like going back to school, even if they.

Rachel Romer [00:20:11]:

Feel daunting or hard to school?

Daniel Pink [00:20:13]:

First of all, I think it's a really interesting question. I think that the way we answer this question tells us a lot about our view of how the world works. I would start on the system. I would not think that if I simply whisper in Cassandra's ear some inspiring advice and some tactical guidance that she can circumvent this problem. I think it's a systematic problem. I think the systematic problem we have in this country is that talent is evenly distributed and opportunity is not the reason. Cassandra has not finished her high school education or pursued further. Education is likely less about Cassandra, the individual, and more about a massive set of obstacles between Cassandra and that goal, the set of obstacles that middle class people and upper middle class people barely fathom. And so what we should be doing is getting rid of those obstacles. She should be having some kind of mentor, some kind of advisor, the kind of role that middle class parents often provide for their kids, just letting them know the unwritten rules and how it all works. I think that cost is often a barrier. So anything one can do to reduce the cost, I think that convenience you sometimes see in community colleges, that can be a big barrier. If she's working multiple jobs and taking care of two kids, you can't say, oh, your calculus classes at 1030 in the morning, take it or leave it. And so I would do everything we can to eliminate all those obstacles. So the Cassandras of the world have the same opportunities as my kids, because the Cassandras of the world are as talented as my kids.

Rachel Romer [00:21:47]:

That's what we're always saying. It's like this is a systemic issue that employers and governments and others can fix, but we need to stop acting as though the frontline workforce just isn't motivated enough.

Daniel Pink [00:21:58]:

Yeah, it's like the answer in certain circles is, okay, well, Cassandra needs to pull herself out up by the bootstraps, whatever that even means. She might not wear boots. Those boots might not have straps. She's not going to have two hands free because she has two kids to deal with. And I think I've changed my view on this, Rachel. I mean, if you had asked me this question 25, 30 years ago when I was much younger, I might have actually put more of the onus on the individual and less of the at least analysis on the situation. And now, I guess in my seasoned years here, I'm seeing that, as with many things, it's the situation often more than the person.

Adam Grant [00:22:35]:

I want to put this in a framework because I think that, yes, there are lots of ways that we need to redesign a broken system. But I think in many cases, the system that's about to let Cassandra down is actually the manager's system of rewards and punishments. And I've been thinking, as we were talking about Cassandra's story, about my favorite practical model of motivation, it's Victor Vroom's. It's called Expectancy Theory, and I think in part because it's not marketed well, it's never gotten the attention it deserves. But Vroom is one of the original organizational psychologists. He basically found that there are three questions you need to ask in order to figure out whether somebody is going to be motivated. Number one, if I try, can I succeed? Is there a link between my effort and my performance? If not, why bother? Number two, if I perform, are there definitely going to be consequences? If so, I'm going to care more than if not. And then number three, do I value those consequences? Are they important to me? And I think that I have just watched too many managers say, well, yes, if you work harder, you will get these opportunities, and those opportunities are going to come along with prestige and with a promotion and with pay. And of course, you value those things, but what they fail to do in a lot of cases is take their employees perspectives and ask, wait a minute. Because of the life experience that Cassandra has had, does she believe that there's a connection between going back to school and then becoming successful in her job at Walmart? Does she believe that if she goes and finishes that degree, walmart is going to reward that behavior? And does she value the promotion the same way that others might? If she's a single mom with two kids, this might be a difficult situation if it reduces her control over her schedule to go back to the predictability point that Dan was making earlier. And so one thing I would love to see managers do is to really analyze these questions through the eyes of their employees, to ask, okay, how do I show them that there's a connection between their effort and their performance their performance and outcomes, and then make sure that the outcomes I'm offering are actually the ones that are valued?

Rachel Romer [00:24:50]:

Yeah. The good news is that's exactly how.

Rachel Romer [00:24:53]:

It played out for her.

Rachel Romer [00:24:54]:

As you mentioned, she's at Walmart. But they helped her understand the likelihood that completing her diploma would have on helping increase her promotion rate, which it did. They also removed the requirement that she pay up front for the program, because to the second question, it would have made it not the right equation for her to make the investment. And her purpose, like the big motivating for her, was to set an example for her kids. Adam, that is such the perfect note to end it on. Thank you both so much for having this conversation.

Rachel Romer [00:25:22]:

The way Daniel discussed purpose and growth was really interesting to me. At Guild, we tend to think about purpose and growth as deeply intertwined. And we don't always distinguish between what Daniel called capital P purpose and lower P purpose. It's interesting to think about how all of these factors can come together to motivate a workforce. We rely on them. But can they rely on us? I'm Rachel Roemer. We'd love if you'd join us to continue these important conversations. To do so, click the link in the Show notes. Next time you'll hear from bestselling author and speaker Malcolm Gladwell. As we pose the question, how can you unlock the potential of those you lead? And while that's the crux of the conversation, you'll also hear a story he's never shared before.

Adam Grant [00:26:15]:

Why have you been keep this secret from me all the time? We've been friends. What do you mean? You were goodwill hunting, Malcolm? No, I was trying to make some money.