Progress is the real source of motivation

15 September 2016 / article

How can I use the results of my activities to get ahead? Unless we answer this simple question, we’re missing out on the real source of motivation: personal progress.

It’s always surprising to realize the depth of our taylorist conditioning – and I’ve been fighting mine most of my professional life.

OK, I’m now clear on the fact that having experts design better work processes for others to execute is a good way to get off the ground quickly, but a poor way to sustain innovation and motivation.

But the other leg of taylorism is pay-for-performance. Taylorism pioneers such as Ford paid their workers up to ten times the market rate, which is good, for a bad reason – workers couldn’t stand the mind-numbingly dull hard work and simply left (wonder why so many Chinese workers never come back after the Chinese New Year? Look at the jobs you give them).

I’ve suddenly realized that all the models I use, from systems thinking to lean, assume that immediate rewards and feedback are the main source of motivation. When examining this assumption closely, this is plain nonsense.

People do extraordinary things when they already know what they intend to do with the gains they seek. You work hard for your bonus when you intend to purchase a bigger house. You train hard every day at your favorite sport when you want to compete in that higher level competition.

Progress is the real source of motivation, not immediate rewards.

Actually, this comes as no surprise as we’ve known for a long time in psychology that we’re all very bad at evaluating absolutes, and very good at evaluating differences – with others and with our former selves. We also know that the happiness impact of cash gains is very short-lived. Since Hertzberg, we know that money is a demotivated (it can obsess you when you don’t have enough to maintain your lifestyle), but not much of a motivator (unless you need the money to achieve something specific).

Where do we go from where we intend to get to? Most systems and programs are designed to drip feed rewards to keep people at it – treating humans like lab rats. I mean, come on!

Working on the gemba where each department knows what they want to do with the results of their kaizen efforts to further improve their situation, it’s easy to see the striking overall performance gap with those that do kaizen because they’ve been told to. The former works, the latter doesn’t.

Think more deeply. When embarking in any new activity, ask yourself: what do I intend to achieve with the gains, should I obtain them?

Leading author, speaker and researcher, I work on both the "hard" (improve quality, reduce lead-time, eliminate waste) and "soft" (engage people in problem-solving and improvement to develop them to the fullest of their abilities) dimensions of Lean transformation.

I started studying improvement initiatives twenty years ago as part of my PhD. research on Mental Models. I was persuaded by Toyota engineers that to understand lean you had to practice it firsthand and I have been working with supervisors, site managers and now CEOs to leverage their lean efforts into market share, people engagement and bottom line results. You don't know what you don't know and the most surprising thing I've learned as a cognitive sociologist is the value of: see with your feet and think with your hands!

I co-founded the Projet Lean Entreprise and the Institut Lean France. I have written several books and articles about the links between knowledge and management (Managing With Systems Thinking, The Effective Organization, Les Modèles Mentaux), and more recently, co-authored three business novels published by the Lean Enterprise Institute, one about lean turnaround, The Gold Mine, one about lean transformation, The Lean Manager, and a novel about Lean practice, Lead with Respect as well as a Lean manual in French, Le Management Lean.