Summary of the book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” by Daniel H. Pink
The Puzzling Puzzles of Harry Harlow and Edward Deci
Two young scientists conducted experiments that should have changed the world—but did not. Harry F. Harlow was a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin who, in the 1940s, established one of the world’s first laboratories for studying primate behavior. One day in 1949, Harlow and two colleagues gathered eight rhesus monkeys for a two-week experiment on learning. The researchers devised a simple mechanical puzzle like the one pictured on the next page (page 2)
They solved the puzzles frequently and quickly; two-thirds of the time they cracked the code in less than sixty seconds. Now, this was a bit odd. Nobody had taught the monkeys how to remove the pin, slide the hook, and open the cover. Nobody had rewarded them with food, affection, or even quiet applause when they succeeded.
Scientists then knew that two main drives powered behavior. The first was the biological drive. Humans and other animals ate to sate their hunger, drank to quench their thirst, and copulated to satisfy their carnal urges. But that wasn’t happening here. “Solution did not lead to food, water, or sex gratification,” Harlow reported.1
But the only other known drive also failed to explain the monkeys’ peculiar behavior. If biological motivations came from within, this second drive came from without—the rewards and punishments the environment delivered for behaving in certain ways.
To answer the question, Harlow offered a novel theory—what amounted to a third drive: “The performance of the task,” he said, “provided intrinsic reward.” The monkeys solved the puzzles simply because they found it gratifying to solve puzzles. They enjoyed it. The joy of the task was its own reward.
Perhaps this newly discovered drive—Harlow eventually called it “intrinsic motivation”—was real. But surely it was subordinate to the other two drives. If the monkeys were rewarded—with raisins!—for solving the puzzles, they’d no doubt perform even better. Yet when Harlow tested that approach, the monkeys actually made more errors and solved the puzzles less frequently. “Introduction of food in the present experiment,” Harlow wrote, “served to disrupt performance, a phenomenon not reported in the literature.”
In the summer of 1969, Edward Deci was a Carnegie Mellon University psychology graduate student in search of a dissertation topic.
“When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity,” he wrote.5 Rewards can deliver a short-term boost—just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears off—and, worse, can reduce a person’s longer-term motivation to continue the project.
Human beings, Deci said, have an “inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise their capacities, to explore, and to learn.” But this third drive was more fragile than the other two; it needed the right environment to survive. “One who is interested in developing and enhancing intrinsic motivation in children, employees, students, etc., should not concentrate on external-control systems such as monetary rewards,” he wrote in a follow-up paper.
Drive has three parts.
Part One will look at the flaws in our reward-and-punishment system and propose a new way to think about motivation.
Chapter 1 will examine how the prevailing view of motivation is becoming incompatible with many aspects of contemporary business and life.
Chapter 2 will reveal the seven reasons why carrot-and-stick extrinsic motivators often produce the opposite of what they set out to achieve.
(Following that is a short addendum, Chapter 2a, that shows the special circumstances when carrots and sticks actually can be effective.
Chapter 3 will introduce what I call “Type I” behavior, a way of thinking and an approach to business grounded in the real science of human motivation and powered by our third drive—our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
Part Two will examine the three elements of Type I behavior and show how individuals and organizations are using them to improve performance and deepen satisfaction.
Chapter 4 will explore autonomy, our desire to be self-directed.
Chapter 5 will look at mastery, our urge to make progress and get better at what we do. Chapter 6 will explore purpose, our yearning to contribute and to be part of something larger than ourselves.
Part Three, the Type I Toolkit, is a comprehensive set of resources to help you create settings in which Type I behavior can flourish.
Here you’ll find everything from dozens of exercises to awaken motivation in yourself and others, to discussion questions for your book club, to a supershort summary of Drive that will help you fake your way through a cocktail party. And while this book is mostly about business, in this section I’ll offer some thoughts about how to apply these concepts to education and to our lives outside of work.
Chapter 1 - The rise and fall of motivation 2.0
I’m going to describe two new cyclopedia. One just out, the other to be launched in a few years you have to predict which will be more successful in 2011.
In 1996 the first encyclopedia comes from Microsoft compensated manager who will oversee the project to ensure it’s completed on budget and on time
The second encyclopedia won’t come from a company. It will be created by tens of thousands of people who write and edit articles for fun.
Think forward 15 years according to my crystal ball in 2011 one of these encyclopedias will be the largest and most popular in the world and the other will be defunct. which is which?
On October 31, 2009 Microsoft pulled the plug on MSN Encarta Which has been on the market for 16 years meanwhile, Wikipedia the second model ended up becoming the largest and most popular encyclopedia in the world.
What happened? The conventional view of a human motivation has a very hard time explaining this result.
The triumph of Carrots and Sticks (15)
At the core of this new and improved operating system was a revised and more accurate assumption: Humans are more than the sum of our biological urges. That first drive still mattered—no doubt about that—but it didn’t fully account for who we are. We also had a second drive—to seek reward and avoid punishment more broadly. And it was from this insight that a new operating system—call it Motivation 2.0—arose.
The work of an American engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor. In the early 1900s, Taylor, who believed businesses were being run in an inefficient, haphazard way, developed what he called “scientific management.” His invention was a form of “software” expertly crafted to run atop the Motivation 2.0 platform. And it was widely and quickly adopted. Workers, this approach held, were like parts in a complicated machine. If they did the right work in the right way at the right time, the machine would function smoothly. And to ensure that happened, you simply rewarded the behavior you sought and punished the behavior you discouraged. People would respond rationally to these external forces—these extrinsic motivators—and both they and the system itself would flourish. We tend to think that coal and oil have powered economic development. But in some sense, the engine of commerce has been fueled equally by carrots and sticks.
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In the 1950s, Abraham Maslow, a former student of Harry Harlow’s at the University of Wisconsin, developed the field of humanistic psychology, which questioned the belief that human behavior was purely the rat like seeking of positive stimuli and avoidance of negative stimuli.
In 1960, MIT management professor Douglas McGregor imported some of Maslow’s ideas to the business world. McGregor challenged the presumption that humans are fundamentally inert—that absent external rewards and punishments, we wouldn’t do much. People have other, higher drives, he said. And these drives could benefit businesses if managers and business leaders respected them.
In the same era, and in a similar spirit, Frederick Herzberg, a psychologist-turned-management professor, proposed that two key factors determined how people fared on the job. The first were “hygiene” factors—extrinsic rewards such as pay, working conditions, and job security. Their absence created dissatisfaction, but their presence didn’t lead to job satisfaction. The second were “motivators”—things like enjoyment of the work itself, genuine achievement, and personal growth. These internal desires were what really boosted both satisfaction and performance and were where managers ought to focus their attention.
Meanwhile, W. Edwards Deming, whose work was embraced in Japan with the same ferocity with which it was ignored in the U.S., argued that the route to quality and continual improvement was intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic motivators like bonuses, incentive plans, and forced rankings.
Page 21
MIT management professor Karim Lakhani and Boston Consulting Group consultant Bob Wolf surveyed 684 open-source developers, mostly in North America and Europe, about why they participated in these projects. Lakhani and Wolf uncovered a range of motives, but they found “that enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver.”2
A large majority of programmers, the researchers discovered, reported that they frequently reached the state of optimal challenge called “flow.”
Likewise, three German economists who studied open-source projects around the world found that what drives participants is “a set of predominantly intrinsic motives”—in particular, “the fun . . . of mastering the challenge of a given software problem” and the “desire to give a gift to the programmer community.”3 Motivation 2.0 has little room for these sorts of impulses.
Meanwhile, Nobel peace prize winner. Mohammed younes has begun, creating what he calls social businesses. With the profit, maximization principle replaced by the social benefit principle.
Economic was not the study of money, it is the study of behavior.
Daniel Khaneman an American psychologist who won the Nobel prize in economics along with the Israeli Amos TVERSKY. He and others in the field of behavioral economics agreed that economics was the study of a human economic behavior. They believe that we placed too much emphasis on the economic and not enough on the human. We hang on to bad Investment longer than we should because we feel far sharper pain from losing money than we do from gaining the exact same amount. In short, we are irrational and predictably, so says economist, Dan Ariely author of predictability irrational book that offers entertaining an engagement overview of behavioral economics
The trouble for our purposes is that Motivation 2.0 assumes we’re the same robotic wealth-maximizers I was taught we were a couple of decades ago. Indeed, the very premise of extrinsic incentives is that we’ll always respond rationally to them. But even most economists don’t believe that anymore. Sometimes these motivators work. Often they don’t. And many times, they inflict collateral damage. In short, the new way economists think about what we do is hard to reconcile with Motivation 2.0.
We leave lucrative jobs to take low paying ones that provide a clear sense of purpose. We work to master the clarinet on weekends, although we have a little hole of making a dime, motivation 2 or acquiring a mate, motivation 1 from doing so.
Behavioral scientists often divide what we do on the job or learn in school into two categories: “algorithmic” and “heuristic.” An algorithmic task is one in which you follow a set of established instructions down a single pathway to one conclusion. That is, there’s an algorithm for solving it. A heuristic task is the opposite. Precisely because no algorithm exists for it, you have to experiment with possibilities and devise a novel solution. Working as a grocery checkout clerk is mostly algorithmic. You do pretty much the same thing over and over in a certain way. Creating an ad campaign is mostly heuristic. You have to come up with something new.
The implications for motivation are vast. Researchers such as Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile have found that external rewards and punishments—both carrots and sticks—can work nicely for algorithmic tasks. But they can be devastating for heuristic ones. Those sorts of challenges—solving novel problems or creating something the world didn’t know it was missing—depend heavily on Harlow’s third drive. Amabile calls it the intrinsic motivation principle of creativity, which holds, in part: “Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity.”11 In other words, the central tenets of Motivation 2.0 may actually impair performance of the heuristic, right-brain work on which modern economies depend.
Partly because work has become more creative and less routine, it has also become more enjoyable. That, too, scrambles Motivation 2.0’s assumptions. This operating system rests on the belief that work is not inherently enjoyable—which is precisely why we must coax people with external rewards and threaten them with outside punishment. One unexpected finding of the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is that people are much more likely to report having “optimal experiences” on the job than during leisure. But if work is inherently enjoyable for more and more people, then the external inducements at the heart of Motivation 2.0 become less necessary.
Worse, as Deci began discovering forty years ago, adding certain kinds of extrinsic rewards on top of inherently interesting tasks can often dampen motivation and diminish performance.
TO RECAP, Motivation 2.0 suffers from three compatibility problems. It doesn’t mesh with the way many new business models are organizing what we do—because we’re intrinsically motivated purpose maximizers, not only extrinsically motivated profit maximizers.
It doesn’t comport with the way that twenty-first-century economics thinks about what we do—because economists are finally realizing that we’re full-fledged human beings, not single-minded economic robots.
And perhaps most important, it’s hard to reconcile with much of what we actually do at work—because for growing numbers of people, work is often creative, interesting, and self-directed rather than unrelentingly routine, boring, and other-directed. Taken together, these compatibility problems warn us that something’s gone awry in our motivational operating system.
Rewards can perform a weird sort of behavioral alchemy: They can transform an interesting task into a drudge. They can turn play into work. And by diminishing intrinsic motivation, they can send performance, creativity, and even upstanding behavior toppling like dominoes. Let’s call this the Sawyer Effect. A sampling of intriguing experiments around the world reveals the four realms where this effect kicks in.
Intrinsic Motivation (35)
Behavioral scientists like Deci began discovering the Sawyer Effect nearly forty years ago, although they didn’t use that term. Instead, they referred to the counterintuitive consequences of extrinsic incentives as “the hidden costs of rewards.” That, in fact, was the title of the first book on the subject—a 1978 research volume that was edited by psychologists Mark Lepper and David Greene. One of Lepper and Greene’s early studies (which they carried out with a third colleague, Robert Nisbett) has become a classic in the field and among the most cited articles in the motivation literature. The three researchers watched a classroom of preschoolers for several days and identified the children who chose to spend their “free play” time drawing. Then they fashioned an experiment to test the effect of rewarding an activity.
Children previously in the “unexpected-award” and “no-award” groups drew just as much, and with the same relish, as they had before the experiment. But children in the first group—the ones who’d expected and then received an award—showed much less interest and spent much less time drawing.
The Sawyer Effect had taken hold. Even two weeks later, those alluring prizes—so common in classrooms and cubicles—had turned play into work. To be clear, it wasn’t necessarily the rewards themselves that dampened the children’s interest. Remember: When children didn’t expect a reward, receiving one had little impact on their intrinsic motivation. Only contingent rewards—if you do this, then you’ll get that—had the negative effect. Why? “If-then” rewards require people to forfeit some of their autonomy.
Lepper and Greene replicated these results in several subsequent experiments with children. As time went on, other researchers found similar results with adults. Over and over again, they discovered that extrinsic rewards—in particular, contingent, expected, “if-then” rewards—snuffed out the third drive.
Try to encourage a kid to learn math by paying her for each workbook page she completes—and she’ll almost certainly become more diligent in the short term and lose interest in math in the long term.
As one leading behavioral science textbook puts it, “People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person’s motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person’s intrinsic motivation toward the activity.”
High performance (38)
In part to circumvent this problem, a quartet of economists—including Dan Ariely, whom I mentioned in the last chapter—set up shop in Madurai, India, to gauge the effects of extrinsic incentives on performance. Because the cost of living in rural India is much lower than in North America, the researchers could offer large rewards without breaking their own banks.
What happened? Did the size of the reward predict the quality of the performance? Yes. But not in the way you might expect. As it turned out, the people offered the medium-sized bonus didn’t perform any better than those offered the small one. And those in the 400-rupee superincentivized group? They fared worst of all.
Let’s circle back to this conclusion for a moment. Four economists—two from MIT, one from Carnegie Mellon, and one from the University of Chicago—undertake research for the Federal Reserve System, one of the most powerful economic actors in the world. But instead of affirming a simple business principle—higher rewards lead to higher performance—they seem to refute it. And it’s not just American researchers reaching these counterintuitive conclusions.
In 2009, scholars at the London School of Economics—alma mater of eleven Nobel laureates in economics—analyzed fifty-one studies of corporate pay-for-performance plans. These economists’ conclusion: “We find that financial incentives . . . can result in a negative impact on overall performance.”
On both sides of the Atlantic, the gap between what science is learning and what business is doing is wide.
Creativity 40
For a quick test of problem-solving prowess, few exercises are more useful than the “candle problem.” Devised by psychologist Karl Duncker in the 1930s, the candle problem is used in a wide variety of experiments in behavioral science.
What happens when you give people a conceptual challenge like this and offer them rewards for speedy solutions? Sam Glucksberg, a psychologist now at Princeton University, tested this in the early 1960s by timing how quickly two groups of participants solved the candle problem.
How much faster did the incentivized group come up with a solution? On average, it took them nearly three and a half minutes longer.7 Yes, three and a half minutes longer.
Why? Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus. That’s helpful when there’s a clear path to a solution. They help us stare ahead and race faster. But “if-then” motivators are terrible for challenges like the candle problem. As this experiment shows, the rewards narrowed people’s focus and blinkered the wide view that might have allowed them to see new uses for old objects.
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Something similar seems to occur for challenges that aren’t so much about cracking an existing problem but about iterating something new. Teresa Amabile, the Harvard Business School professor and one of the world’s leading researchers on creativity, has frequently tested the effects of contingent rewards on the creative process.
“Our results were quite startling,” the researchers wrote. “The commissioned works were rated as significantly less creative than the non-commissioned works, yet they were not rated as different in technical quality. Moreover, the artists reported feeling significantly more constrained when doing commissioned works than when doing non-commissioned works.” One artist whom they interviewed describes the Sawyer Effect in action: Not always, but a lot of the time, when you are doing a piece for someone else it becomes more “work” than joy. When I work for myself there is the pure joy of creating and I can work through the night and not even know it. On a commissioned piece you have to check yourself—be careful to do what the client wants.8
Amabile and others have found that extrinsic rewards can be effective for algorithmic tasks—those that depend on following an existing formula to its logical conclusion. But for more right-brain undertakings—those that demand flexible problem-solving, inventiveness, or conceptual understanding—contingent rewards can be dangerous.
Rewarded subjects often have a harder time seeing the periphery and crafting original solutions. This, too, is one of the sturdiest findings in social science—especially as Amabile and others have refined it over the years.10
For artists, scientists, inventors, schoolchildren, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation—the drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing—is essential for high levels of creativity. But the “if-then” motivators that are the staple of most businesses often stifle, rather than stir, creative thinking.
Good Behavior (45)
But in 1970, British sociologist Richard Titmuss, who had studied blood donation in the United Kingdom, offered a bolder speculation. Paying for blood wasn’t just immoral, he said. It was also inefficient. If Britain decided to pay citizens to donate, that would actually reduce the country’s blood supply. It was an oddball notion, to be sure. Economists snickered. And Titmuss never tested the idea; it was merely a philosophical hunch.11 But a quarter-century later, two Swedish economists decided to see if Titmuss was right.
Those in the first group were told that blood donation was voluntary. These participants could give blood, but they wouldn’t receive a payment. The experimenters offered the second group a different arrangement. If these participants gave blood, they’d each receive 50 Swedish kronor (about $7). The third group received a variation on that second offer: a 50-kronor payment with an immediate option to donate the amount to a children’s cancer charity.
Of the first group, 52 percent of the women decided to go ahead and donate blood. They were altruistic citizens apparently, willing to do a good deed for their fellow Swedes even in the absence of compensation.
And the second group? Motivation 2.0 would suggest that this group might be a bit more motivated to donate. They’d shown up, which indicated intrinsic motivation. Getting a few kronor on top might give that impulse a boost. But—as you might have guessed by now—that’s not what happened. In this group, only 30 percent of the women decided to give blood. Instead of increasing the number of blood donors, offering to pay people decreased the number by nearly half.
Meanwhile, the third group—which had the option of donating the fee directly to charity—responded much the same as the first group. Fifty-three percent became blood donors. Titmuss’s hunch might have been right, after all. Adding a monetary incentive didn’t lead to more of the desired behavior. It led to less. The reason: It tainted an altruistic act and “crowded out” the intrinsic desire to do something good.13
Doing good is what blood donation is all about. It provides what the American Red Cross brochures say is “a feeling that money can’t buy.”
It’s not that all rewards at all times are bad. For instance, when the Italian government gave blood donors paid time off work, donations increased.15 The law removed an obstacle to altruism.
More of what we don’t want (47)
In the upside-down universe of the third drive, rewards can often produce less of the very things they’re trying to encourage. But that’s not the end of the story. When used improperly, extrinsic motivators can have another unintended collateral consequence: They can give us more of what we don’t want. Here, again, what business does hasn’t caught up with what science knows. And what science is revealing is that carrots and sticks can promote bad behavior, create addiction, and encourage short-term thinking at the expense of the long view.
Unethical behavior (48)
Goals work. The academic literature shows that by helping us tune out distractions, goals can get us to try harder, work longer, and achieve more. But recently a group of scholars from the Harvard Business School, Northwestern University’s questioned the efficacy of this broad prescription. “Rather than being offered as an ‘over-the-counter’ salve for boosting performance, goal setting should be prescribed selectively, presented with a warning label, and closely monitored,” they wrote.16
Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others—sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on—can sometimes have dangerous side effects.
“Substantial evidence demonstrates that in addition to motivating constructive effort, goal setting can induce unethical behavior.”
The examples are legion, the researchers note. Sears imposes a sales quota on its auto repair staff—and workers respond by overcharging customers and completing unnecessary repairs.
The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road.
Contrast that approach with behavior sparked by intrinsic motivation. When the reward is the activity itself—deepening learning, delighting customers, doing one’s best—there are no shortcuts. The only route to the destination is the high road.
Announcement fine for coming late (50)
“As you all know, the official closing time of the day care center is 4 PM every day. Since some parents have been coming late, we have decided to impose a fine on parents who came late to pick up their children” in daycare in Israel.
The theory underlying the fine, said Gneezy and Rustichini, was straightforward: “When negative consequences are imposed on a behavior, they will produce a reduction of that particular response.” In other words, thwack the parents with a fine, and they’ll stop showing up late.
But that’s not what happened. “After the introduction of the fine we observed a steady increase in the number of parents coming late,” the economists wrote. “The rate finally settled, at a level that was higher, and almost twice as large as the initial one.”
Up pops another bug in Motivation 2.0. One reason most parents showed up on time is that they had a relationship with the teachers—who, after all, were caring for their precious sons and daughters—and wanted to treat them fairly. Parents had an intrinsic desire to be scrupulous about punctuality. But the threat of a fine—like the promise of the kronor in the blood experiment—edged aside that third drive.
The fine shifted the parents’ decision from a partly moral obligation (be fair to my kids’ teachers) to a pure transaction (I can buy extra time). There wasn’t room for both. The punishment didn’t promote good behavior; it crowded it out.
Addiction (52)
If some scientists believe that “if-then” motivators and other extrinsic rewards resemble prescription drugs that carry potentially dangerous side effects, others believe they’re more like illegal drugs that foster a deeper and more pernicious dependency. According to these scholars, cash rewards and shiny trophies can provide a delicious jolt of pleasure at first, but the feeling soon dissipates—and to keep it alive, the recipient requires ever larger and more frequent doses.
Offer a reward that’s enticing enough to get the agent to act the first time, and the principal “is doomed to give it again in the second.” There’s no going back.
Pay your son to take out the trash—and you’ve pretty much guaranteed the kid will never do it again for free. What’s more, once the initial money buzz tapers off, you’ll likely have to increase the payment to continue compliance. As Suvorov explains, “Rewards are addictive in that once offered, a contingent reward makes an agent expect it whenever a similar task is faced, which in turn compels the principal to use rewards over and over again.” And before long, the existing reward may no longer suffice. It will quickly feel less like a bonus and more like the status quo—which then forces the principal to offer larger rewards to achieve the same effect.
Brian Knutson, then a neuroscientist at the National Institute (now at Stanford) on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, demonstrated as much in an experiment using (fMRI). He placed healthy volunteers into a giant scanner to watch how their brains responded during a game that involved the prospect of either winning or losing money. When participants knew they had a chance to win cash, activation occurred in the part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. That is, when the participants anticipated getting a reward (but not when they anticipated losing one), a burst of the brain chemical dopamine surged to this part of the brain.
What makes this response interesting for our purposes is that the same basic physiological process—this particular brain chemical surging to this particular part of the brain—is what happens in addiction. The mechanism of most addictive drugs is to send a fusillade of dopamine to the nucleus accumbens. The feeling delights, then dissipates, then demands another dose. In other words, if we watch how people’s brains respond, promising them monetary rewards and giving them cocaine, nicotine, or amphetamines look disturbingly similar.21
This could be one reason that paying people to stop smoking often works in the short run. It replaces one (dangerous) addiction with another (more benign) one.
Short term thinking (55)
what our earlier examples—unethical actions and addictive behavior—have in common, perhaps more than anything else, is that they’re entirely short-term. Addicts want the quick fix regardless of the eventual harm. Cheaters want the quick win—regardless of the lasting consequences.
Several researchers have found that companies that spend the most time offering guidance on quarterly earnings deliver significantly lower long-term growth rates than companies that offer guidance less frequently.
By contrast, the elements of genuine motivation that we’ll explore later, by their very nature, defy a short-term view.
Take mastery. The objective itself is inherently long-term because complete mastery, in a sense, is unattainable. Even Roger Federer, for instance, will never fully “master” the game of tennis. But introducing an “if-then” reward to help develop mastery usually backfires. That’s why school children who are paid to solve problems typically choose easier problems and therefore learn less.25
The short-term prize crowds out the long-term learning. In environments where extrinsic rewards are most salient, many people work only to the point that triggers the reward—and no further. So if students get a prize for reading three books, many won’t pick up a fourth, let alone embark on a lifetime of reading—just as executives who hit their quarterly numbers often won’t boost earnings a penny more, let alone contemplate the long-term health of their company.
Likewise, several studies show that paying people to exercise, stop smoking, or take their medicines produces terrific results at first—but the healthy behavior disappears once the incentives are removed.
CARROTS AND STICKS:
The Seven Deadly Flaws
1. They can extinguish intrinsic motivation.
2. They can diminish performance.
3. They can crush creativity.
4. They can crowd out good behavior.
5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts, and unethical behavior.
6. They can become addictive. 7. They can foster short-term thinking.
Chapter 2
The special circumstances when they do (work)
The starting point, of course, is to ensure that the baseline rewards—wages, salaries, benefits, and so on—are adequate and fair. Without a healthy baseline, motivation of any sort is difficult and often impossible. But once that’s established, there are circumstances where it’s okay to fall back on extrinsic motivators. To understand what those circumstances are, let’s return to the candle problem. In his study, Sam Glucksberg found that the participants who were offered a cash prize took longer to solve the problem than those working in a reward-free environment. The reason, you’ll recall, is that the prospect of a prize narrowed participants’ focus and limited their ability to see an inventive, nonobvious solution.
In the same experiment, Glucksberg presented a separate set of participants with a slightly different version of the problem.
The candle problem presented differently
Can you guess what happened? This time, the participants vying for the reward solved the problem faster than their counterparts.
Why? By removing the tacks and displaying the empty box, Glucksberg eliminated the functional fixedness obstacle and essentially revealed the solution. He transformed a challenging right-brain task into a routine left-brain one.
Since participants simply had to race down an obvious path, the carrot waiting for them at the finish line encouraged them to gallop faster.
Glucksberg’s experiment provides the first question you should ask when contemplating external motivators: Is the task at hand routine? That is, does accomplishing it require following a prescribed set of rules to a specified end?
Likewise, when Dan Ariely and his colleagues conducted their Madurai, India, performance study with a group of MIT students, they found that when the task called for “even rudimentary cognitive skill,” a larger reward “led to poorer performance.” But “as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance.”
What’s the best way to enlist your staff of ten, and maybe a few others, in a massive weekend poster mailing session? The task is the very definition of routine: The people participating must roll up the posters, slide them into the mailing tubes, cap those tubes, and apply a mailing label and the proper postage. Four steps—none of them notably interesting. One managerial option is coercion. If you’re the boss, you could force people to spend their Saturday and Sunday on this mind-numbing project. They might comply, but the damage to their morale and long-term commitment could be substantial. Another option is to ask for volunteers. But face it: Most people can think of far better ways to spend a weekend. So in this case, an “if-then” reward might be effective. For instance, you could promise a big office-wide party if everybody pitches in on the project. You could offer a gift certificate to everyone who participates. Or you could go further and pay people a small sum for every poster they insert, enclose, and send—in the hope that the piecework fee will boost their productivity. While such tangible, contingent rewards can often undermine intrinsic motivation and creativity, those drawbacks matter less here.
And you’ll increase your chances of success by supplementing the poster-packing rewards with three important practices:
• Offer a rationale for why the task is necessary. A job that’s not inherently interesting can become more meaningful, and therefore more engaging, if it’s part of a larger purpose. Explain why this poster is so important and why sending it out now is critical to your organization’s mission.
• Acknowledge that the task is boring. This is an act of empathy, of course.
• Allow people to complete the task their own way.
Think autonomy, not control. State the outcome you need. But instead of specifying precisely the way to reach it—how each poster must be rolled and how each mailing label must be affixed—give them freedom over how they do the job. But you may still be able to boost performance a bit—more for future tasks than for this one—through the delicate use of rewards. Just be careful. Your efforts will backfire unless the rewards you offer meet one essential requirement. And you’ll be on firmer motivational footing if you follow two additional principles.
The essential requirement:
Any extrinsic reward should be unexpected and offered only after the task is complete. Holding out a prize at the beginning of a project—and offering it as a contingency—will inevitably focus people’s attention on obtaining the reward rather than on attacking the problem. But introducing the subject of rewards after the job is done is less risky. In other words, where “if-then” rewards are a mistake, shift to “now that” rewards—as in “Now that you’ve finished the poster and it turned out so well, I’d like to celebrate by taking you out to lunch.”
As Deci and his colleagues explain, “If tangible rewards are given unexpectedly to people after they have finished a task, the rewards are less likely to be experienced as the reason for doing the task and are thus less likely to be detrimental to intrinsic motivation.”
But keep in mind one ginormous caveat: Repeated “now that” bonuses can quickly become expected “if-then” entitlements—which can ultimately crater effective performance. But you’ll do even better if you follow two more guidelines.
First, consider nontangible rewards. Praise and positive feedback are much less corrosive than cash and trophies. In fact, in Deci’s original experiments, and in his subsequent analysis of other studies, he found that “positive feedback can have an enhancing effect on intrinsic motivation.”
Second, provide useful information. Amabile has found that while controlling extrinsic motivators can clobber creativity, “informational or enabling motivators can be conducive” to it. The more the praise is about effort and strategy rather than about achieving a particular outcome—the more effective it can be.
In brief, for creative, right-brain, heuristic tasks, you’re on shaky ground offering “if-then” rewards. You’re better off using “now that” rewards. And you’re best off if your “now that” rewards provide praise, feedback, and useful information.
Chapter 3 - Type 1 and Type X
Together Deci and Ryan have fashioned what they call “self-determination theory (SDT).” Many theories of behavior pivot around a particular human tendency: We are keen responders to positive and negative reinforcement or zippy calculators of ourselves interest. SDT by contrast begins with a notion of universal human needs. It argues that we have three innate psychological needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When these needs are satisfied, we are motivated, productive, and happy.
When people use rewards to motivate, that’s when they are most demotivating. Instead, Deci and Ryan say we should focus our efforts on creating environments for our innate psychological and need to flourish. They have produced hundreds of research papers, most of which point to the same conclusion. Human beings have an innate energy drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drivers liberated, people achieve more and liberate our lives. SDT is an important part of a broad swirl of a new thinking about the human condition.
This constellation include perhaps the most prominently, the positive psychology movement and the leadership of the university of Pennsylvania Martin Seligman. One of the positive psychology, most influential figures is Mahali csiksemntamihalyi
Douglas McGregor was a management professor at MIT who earned PhD from Harvard psychology rather than in economy or engineering. He said there was an alternative view of employees, one that offered a more accurate assessment of the human condition and more effective starting point for running companies. This perspective held that taking interest in work is as natural as a play or rest and that creativity and ingenuity were widely distributed in the population and that under the proper conditions, people will accept and even seek responsibility.
Type 1 and x
Type X behavior is fueled more by external desires than intrinsic ones. It concerns itself less with an inherent satisfaction of an activity and more with the external rewards to which the activity leads. The motivation, three operating system, the upgrade that’s needed to meet the new realities of how we organize, think about, and do what we do, depends on what I call type one behavior. Type one behavior is fueled more by intrinsic desire than one concern itself less with the externally reward to which activity lead and more with the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself.
Type 1, almost always out perform type X in the long run. They are in working hard and persisting through difficulties because of their internal desire to control their lives, learn about their world, and accomplish something that induce.
One reason fair and adequate pay is so essential is that it takes people focus of money which allows them to concentrate on the work itself. My contrast for many type X, money is the table. It’s why they do what they do.
By one behavior, promote greater physical and mental well-being. According to a raft of studies from SDT researchers, people oriented toward autonomy and intrinsic motivation, have higher self-esteem, better interpersonal relationships, and greater general well-being than those who are externally motivated. Ultimately, type 1 behavior depends on three neutrons autonomy, mastery and purpose.
Chapter 4 - Autonomy
In 2004 Desi and Ryan along with Paul bar of Fordham University carried out study of workers at an American investment bank. They found a great job satisfaction among employees whose bosses offered autonomy support. Researcher at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses. The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control oriented firms and had 1/3 the turnover. What matters in particular is autonomy over four aspect of work: what people do, when they do it, how they do it, and whom they do it with. Their task, their team, their technique, and their team, the 4 Ts of Autonomy
Autonomy over the Task
Its pioneer was the American company 3M. “Hire good people and leave them alone.” It produced innovation, including post-it notes. The best known company to embrace it is Google, which has encouraged engineers to spend one day a week working on a side project. Some Google use their 20% time to fix an existing product but most use it to develop something entirely new. Typically, more than half of offering birthed during this period of pure autonomy for example Gmail and Google translate.
Time
Ever wonder why lawyers as a group are so miserable? Some social scientists have offered three explanations. One involved pessimism. Being pessimistic is almost always a recipe for low level of what psychologists call subjective well-being. According to Seligman there is one exception. Pessimists do better at law. The second reason, most other enterprises are positive-sum. By contrast, law is often zero-some game. But the third reason might offer the best explanation of all and help us understand why so few attorneys exemplify type I behavior. Lawyers, often face intense demands, but have relatively little decision latitude. At the heart of private legal practice is perhaps the most autonomy-crushing mechanism imaginable. It is the billable hour. As a result, their focus inevitably veers from the output of their work, which is solving a client problem to its input, which is piling up as many hours as possible. If the rewards come from time then time is what firms will get. These sorts of high-stakes, measurable goals can drain intrinsic motivation and even encourage ethical behavior.
Best Buy ROWE (Result-Only Work Environment) experiment began at Best Buy headquarters in Minnesota.
Hourly employees in the program work as set number of hours to comply with federal Labor regulations but they get to choose when. These employees report better relationship with family and friends, more company, loyalty, and more focus on energy. Productivity has increased by 35% and voluntary turn over was much lower than in teams that have not made the change.
Technique
According to report between 17 and 80% of home-base customer service Agents have college degrees double the percentage among people working in traditional course. Companies with customer service department report that after adapting this method they recruiting cost fall to almost 0. Prospective employees come to them.
The art of autonomy
Motivation to assume that if people had freedom, they would shirk, and that autonomy was a way to bypass accountability. Motivation 3 begins with a different assumption. Presumes that people want to be accountable and that making sure they have control over their task, their time, their technique, and their team is the most effective pathway to that destination.
Mastery
Control leads to compliance, autonomy leads to engagement. This distinction leads to the second element of dive I behavior, the desire to get better and better at something that matters.
As explaining part one, motivation 2 goal was to encourage people to do particular things in particular ways, that is to get them to comply. And for that objective, few motivators are more effective than a nice bunch of carrots and the threat of an occasional stick.
Solving complex problems requires an inquiring mind and the willingness to experiment one’s way to a fresh solution. Where motivation 2 sought compliance, motivation 3 seeks engagement. only engagement can produce mastery.
Csizkesentmihayli clipped on a page and asked his graduate students to be paged randomly several times each day. Whenever the pager sounded, he recorded what he was doing and how he was feeling. You got such a detailed picture of how people lived. He would page people eight times a day at random intervals and asked them to write in the booklet their answers to several short questions about what they were doing, who they were with, and how they would describe their state of mind. put the findings together for seven days and you had a flipbook, a mini movie, of someone’s week.
The highest most satisfying experience in people’s lives where when they were in flow. And this previously unacknowledged mental state, which seemed so inscrutable and transcendent was actually fairly easy to unpack. In flow, goals are clear. You have to reach the top of the mountain, hit the ball across the net or mold the clay just right. Feedback is immediate.
Most important in the flow, the relationship between what a person had to do and what he could do was perfect. The challenge was not too easy. Nor it was too difficult.
Number of companies realize that creating flow-friendly environment that help people move toward mastery can increase productivity and satisfaction at work.
In addition, a study of 11,000 industrial scientist and engineers, working at companies in the US found that the desire for intellectual challenge, that is, the urge to master something new and engaging was the best predictor of productivity.
Some smart Companies used to tactics that their less savvy competitors do not.
First, they provide employees with what is called Goldilock tasks, which are challenges that are not too hot and not too cold, neither overly difficult nor overly simple. One source of frustration at the workplace is that frequent mismatch between what people must do and what people can do. What they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. What they must do falls short of their capabilities, and the result is boredom.
The second tactic that organizations use to increase their flow, friendliness and their employees opportunity for mastering is to trigger the positive side of the Sawyer effect. By turning work into play. Some tasks at work don’t automatically provide surges of flow yet still need to get done so the shortest enterprises offer employees the freedom to sculpt their job and that brings a little bit of flow to otherwise mundane duties.
The Three Laws of mastery
Flow is essential to master. But the flow does not guarantee master because the two concepts operate on different horizons of time. One happens in the moment, the other unfolds over years sometimes decades.
Mastery is a mindset
Dweck psychologist professor at Stanford University has been studying motivation. His signature inside is that what people believe shapes what people achieve. According to him, people can hold two different views of their own intelligence. Those who have an entity theory believe that intelligence is just that an entity. It exists within us in a finite supply that we cannot increase. Those who subscribe to an incremental theory take a different view. They believe while intelligence may very slightly from person to person, it’s ultimately something that with efforts we can increase. Analogizing physical qualities, incremental theorists, consider intelligence as something like strength. You want to get stronger and more mascular? Start pumping iron. Entity theorists view it as something more like height. Want to get taller? You're out of luck the two self theories lead down to very different path, one that heads toward mastery and one that does not.
For instance, considered goals: Dewck says they come into Two varieties. Performance goals and learning goals. Getting an A in French class is performance goal. Being able to speak French as a learning goal. Both course are entirely normal and pretty much universal. He says, and both can fuel achievement. But only one leads to mastery. In several studies, he found that giving children a performance goal such as getting a high mark on the test was effective for relatively straightforward problems, but often inhibited children ability to apply the concept to new situation.
In one study students with learning goals scored significantly higher on creative challenges when they were asked to apply their knowledge to a new set of problems related, but not identical to what they have just studied. They also work longer and tried more solutions. He writes with the learning goals, students do not have to feel that they are already good at something in order to hang in and keep trying. After all their goal is to learn not to prove they are smart.
X behavior often holds an entity theory of intelligence, prefers performance goals to learning goals and disdains efforts as a sign of weakness. Type I behavior has an incremental theory of intelligence, prizes, learning, goals over performance goals, and effort as a way to improve at something that matters.
Mastery is pain
A group of scholars, two from West Point. Another from the University of Pennsylvania wanted to understand why some students continued on the road toward military mastery and others got off the first exit. Was it physical strength? Intellect? Leadership ability? Well rounded? None of the above. The best predictor of success, the researcher found was the prospective cadets rating on a non-cognitive non-physical treat known as grit, which is defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Experience of these army officers in training, confirmed the second law of mastery is a pain. Another psychologist and Erikson provided a new theory of what foster mastery. As he puts it many characteristics onece believe to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice for a minimum of 10 years.
Sociologist Daniel Chambliss referred to this as the mentality of excellence. He found any three-year study of Olympics swimmers that do who did the best typically spent the most time and effort on the mundane activity that readied them for races.
In another study, the west point grit researchers found that grittiness, rather than IQ or standardized test scores is the most accurate predictor of college grades.
As they explained, whereas the importance of working harder is easily apprehended, the importance of working longer without switching objectives maybe less perceptible. In every field, great maybe as essential as talent to high accomplishment.
In the end mastery often involves working and working and showing little improvement perhaps with a few moments of flow pulling you along, then making a little progress and then working and working on the new slightly higher plateau again.
Mastery is an asymptote
The mastery asymptote as a source of frustration. Why reach for something you can never fully attain? But it’s also a source of allure. Why not reach for it? The joy is in the pursue more than the realization. In the end mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.
The oxygen of the soul
Csiksemebtshalyi conducted an experiment in which he asked people to record all the things they did in their lives that were non-instrumental that is small activities they took not out of obligation or to achieve a particular objective, but because they enjoyed them then he issued the following set of instruction: He directed participant to scrub their lives of flow by asking them not to do anything that’s play or non-instrumental from the time they wake up till 9 PM. The result were almost immediate. Two days, 48 hours without flow plunged people into state similar to a serious psychiatrist disorder. After just two days of deprivation, the general deterioration and mood was so advanced that prolonging the experience would have been unadvisable. The experiment suggest that flow, the deep sense of engagement that motivation 3 calls for is not a nicety, it is in necessity. We need to survive. It’s the oxygen of the soul.
Harvard’s Theresa Amabile found that the single greatest motivator is making progress in one’s work. By creating conditions for people to make progress, shining a light on the progress, recognizing and celebrating progress, organizations can help their own cause and enrich people’s life.
Purpose
Autonomous people working towards mastery perform at very high levels. But those who do so in the service of some greater objective can achieve even more. Motivation 2 is centered on profit maximization. Motivation 3 does not reject the profits, but it places equal emphasis on purpose maximization.
According to Lara Aknin and Elizabeth Dunn sociologist at University of British Columbia and my Norton psychologist at the Harvard business school, how people spend their money maybe at least as important as how much money they earn. In particular spending money on other people such as buying flowers for your spouse rather than, use it for yourself or on a cause like donating to a religious institution rather than going for an expensive haircut can actually increase our subjective well-being.
According to the Boston Globe, they believe that companies can improve their employees emotional well-being by shifting some of their budget for charitable giving so that individual employees are given, some to donate leaving them happier even as a charities of their choice benefit. In other words, handing individual employee control over how the organization gives back to the community might do more to improve their overall satisfaction than one more if then financial incentive.
The good life
Edward Deci, Richard Ryan and Christofer Niemiec decided to ask a sample of those soon to be graduate about their life goals. Some of the university of Rochester students had what they labeled “extrinsic aspiration” for instance to become wealthy or to achieve fame, what we might call profit goals. Others had “intrinsic aspiration”, to help others improve their lives, to learn and to grow or what we might think of as purpose goals. After the students had been out in the real world for between one and two years, the researcher tracked them down to see how they were faring.
The people who had “purpose goals” and felt they were attaining them, reported higher level of satisfaction and subjective well-being than when they were in college and low levels of anxiety and depression. That’s probably no surprise. Those who said they were attaining their goals, accumulating, wealth, winning, acclimate, reported level of satisfaction, self-esteem, and positive effect no higher than when they were students. In other words, they had reached their goals, but it did not make them any happier. What more, graduate with profit goals showed increase in anxiety Depression and other negative indicators again, even though they were attaining their goals?
Suggest that attainment of a particular set of goals in this case profit goals has no impact on well-being and actually contribute to ill being. Or as Deci put it: the typical notion is that you value something, you attain it then you are better off as a function of it. But what we find is that there are certain things that if you value, and if you attain them, you are worse off as a result of it, not better off.
Failing to understand this conundrum that satisfaction depends not merely on having goals but on having the right goals can lead sensible people down self-destructed path. If people chase profit goals, reach these goals and still don’t feel any better about their lives, one responses to increase the size and the scope of the goals to seek more money or greater outside validation. And this can drive them down a road of further unhappiness thinking it’s the road to happiness.
One of the reason for anxiety and depression in the high attainers is that they are not having good relationships. They are busy making money and attending to themselves, and that means that there is less room in their lives for love and attention, and caring and empathy and the things that truly count.
A healthy society and healthy business organizations begin with purpose and consider profit a way to move toward that end or a happy by-product for its attainment.
The Tool Kit
Type I for individuals: Nine strategies for awakening your motivation
First ask a big question:
One way to orient your life toward the greater purpose is to think about your sentence. Maybe it’s he raised four kids who became happy and healthy adults or she invented device that made people life easier or he cared for every person who walked into the office, regardless of whether that person could pay. As you contemplate your purpose, begin with a big question what’s your sentence?
Take a sagmeister:
Why not snip fiver years from retirement and sprinkle them into your working years? It sounds risky to take long time off work but it gerats idease often provide his income for the next 7 years.
Move five steps closer to master:
Florida State University psychology, professor Andress Erickson calls “deliberate practice”, a lifelong period of efforts to improve performance in specific domain. Deliberate practice is not running a few miles each day or banging on the piano for 20 minutes each morning. It’s much more purposeful, focused, and yes painful.
It is about changing your performance goals and straining yourself to reach a bit higher each time. Focus ruthlessly on where you need help. While many of us work on what we are already good at, say Erickson: those who get better work on their weakness”
Create your own motivational poster
Type I for organization: 13 ways to improve your company office or group
Motivation 3 is to curve out a small island of noncommission work
Set aside an entire day for noncommissioned work called the FedEx day where Louise can work on anything they choose however they want, with whomever they like. Make sure you have the tools and resource that they need and impose just one rule: people must deliver something: new idea, a better internal process, etc the following day.
In terms of Bang for the buck, FedEx days might be the most powerful innovation practice in business today.
Take steps toward giving up control
Use non-controlling language
Next time you re about to say :must or “should” try saying “think about or consider instead. A small change in wording can help promote engagement over compliance and reduce some people urge to defy. Think about it or at least consider it, okay?
Design for the 85%
The author found that people estimate that the portion of their colleagues who are like you and me is about 85%. Trouble is most of our workforce policies are designed for the 15%. These autonomy crushing restrictions exist to threaten the shirkers and constrain the bad actors rather than assist the work Horses and liberate the good actors.
Animate with purpose. Don’t motivate with rewards. Nothing bond team like a shared mission. The more that people share a common cause whether it’s creating something insanely great, outperforming an outside competitor, or even changing the world, the more deeply satisfying and outstanding work.
Emphasize the result. If you go to your boss to make your case, don’t lead with autonomy, mastery or purpose. Lead with the result. Tell him you’ve got a way to boost profit, increase sale, or streamline processes. That might get his attention then offer up FedEx days or DIY performance reviews as a way to achieve those result. In other words play down the means and play up the ends.
The Zen of compensation:
The most important aspect of any compensation package is his fairness. And here fairness comes in two varieties, internal and external. Internal fairness means paying people commensurate with their colleagues. External fairness means paying people in line with others doing similar work in similar organizations.
Pay more than average:
paying great people a little bit more than the market demands could attract better talent, reduce turnover and boost, productivity and morale.
The origin of compensation principles, healthy, and fair based salaries, multiple long-term, hard to game metrics and congenial working environment.
Type I for parents and educator:
If you promise a preschooler, a fancy certificate for drawing a picture, that child will likely draw a picture for you, and then lose further interest in drawing. Yet in the face of this evidence, and as the world economy demands more non-routine, creative, conceptual, ability, too many schools are moving in the wrong direction, they are redoubling their emphasis on routine, right answers and standardization. And they are hauling out a wagon full of if-then rewards, a pizza for reading books, and iPods for showing up the class, cash for good test scores. We are bribing student into compliance instead of challenging them into engagement.
Try DIY (do it yourself) report cards.
Good grade become a reward for compliance, but don’t have much to do with learning. Meanwhile, student whose grades don’t measure up often see themselves as failures and give up trying to learn. The type 1 approach is different. Report cards are not a potential prize, but the way to offer students useful feedback on their progress. And type I student understand that a great way to get feedback is to evaluate their own progress. Try experimenting with DIY report card
OFFER PRAISE . . . THE RIGHT WAY: Done right, praise is an important way to give kids feedback and encouragement. But done wrong, praise can become yet another “if-then” reward that can squash creativity and stifle intrinsic motivation.
The powerful work of psychologist Carol Dweck, as well as others in the field, offers a how-to list for offering praise in a way that promotes Type I behavior:
Here’s why an allowance is good for kids: Having a little of their own money, and deciding how to save or spend it, offers a measure of autonomy and teaches them to be responsible with cash.
Here’s why household chores are good for kids: Chores show kids that families are built on mutual obligations and that family members need to help each other.
Here’s why combining allowances with chores is not good for kids: By linking money to the completion of chores, parents turn an allowance into an “if-then” reward. This sends kids a clear (and clearly wrongheaded) message: In the absence of a payment, no self-respecting child would willingly set the table, empty the garbage, or make her own bed. It converts a moral and familial obligation into just another commercial transaction—and teaches that the only reason to do a less-than-desirable task for your family is in exchange for payment. This is a case where combining two good things gives you less, not more. So keep allowance and chores separate, and you just might get that trash can emptied. Even better, your kids will begin to learn the difference between principles and payoffs.
Praise effort and strategy, not intelligence:
As Dweck’s research has shown, children who are praised for “being smart” often believe that every encounter is a test of whether they really are. So to avoid looking dumb, they resist new challenges and choose the easiest path. By contrast, kids who understand that effort and hard work lead to mastery and growth are more willing to take on new, difficult tasks.
• Make praise specific. Parents and teachers should give kids useful information about their performance. Instead of bathing them in generalities, tell them specifically what they’ve done that’s noteworthy.
• Praise in private. Praise is feedback—not an award ceremony. That’s why it’s often best to offer it one-on-one, in private.
• Offer praise only when there’s a good reason for it.
