Motivation 3.0

"Ben Hey-Hey says: 'The reward is commensurate with the effort.'"
Ethics of the Fathers 2:23

Remember the days when you were little and went to the dentist? All the anxiety of the visit would melt away when you got to put your hand into the big prize box or the large treasure chest shaped like a plastic tooth. In one scoop you got to take out a spider ring or a pirate eye patch or some other worthless treasure that never really made up for the fact that you just had a cavity filled. From our earliest days, we've gotten used to rewards, even for simply sitting in a dentist's chair.

Rewards are often the only way we believe we can motivate people to do things they might otherwise not want to do. If I pay you enough then you'll do the most menial, boring job or withstand the pain of a dental drill. But Ethics of the Fathers suggest that intrinsic motivation might just be enough. The reward is profoundly connected to the effort.
Ben Hey-Hey, an ancient Talmudic sage with a terrific name, in only a few short words, tried to shift the emphasis away from prizes to self-awareness. Maimonides used this expression in his laws of Torah study (3:6) to suggest that the reward for learning is the gift of more learning. Intellectually, we grow and are shaped by what we work hard to understand. He connects this expression with another from Ethics of the Fathers - that we are not obligated to finish the task but are not free from it either. In other words, we do get an "A" for effort when we immerse ourselves in the acquisition of knowledge even though we will never have complete mastery.
Ben Hey-Hey also challenges us to rethink how we motivate not only ourselves but others. Anyone in the people business, from managers to stay-at-home moms, thinks about the best way to motivate the people around us to do what must be done, from completing a project to finishing a chore. We live in an incentivized society where from Wall Street bonuses to gold stickers, we're told that working hard has its extrinsic rewards. We're so used to getting materially rewarded that when we don't get that kind of acknowledgment, we might feel slighted or insulted. "If they really liked my work, they would have given me a raise by now." "What's the point of doing a good job in reading if the teacher doesn't give out prizes?"
Deep down, all of us know that the best reward is praise from people who matter to us and the self-satisfaction of knowing that we were able to get something done, that we stretched ourselves to our limits. Today, we know a lot more about the nature of motivation and, according to author Daniel Pink, we are moving out of the era of extrinsic rewards to internal satisfaction. Pink, in his new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us writes cogently about how extrinsic rewards can backfire.
The carrot-and-stick pattern of motivation, what Pink calls motivation 2.0, is giving way to the recognition that people have a stronger drive for purpose and meaning than they do for rewards, what Pink calls motivation 3.0. Bonuses and other rewards work well for short-term gains but can become an obstruction to long-term satisfaction. If you do something for the money or the sticker, then you forfeit the real reason people want to work at something - as a display of autonomy, mastery and purpose.
Pink uses research in psychology that shows that reward-based motivation can narrow focus, promote unethical behavior to achieve certain ends, can decrease cooperation and can decrease intrinsic motivation. The big prize that you thought was getting people to get the job done can actually be getting in the way of real satisfaction.
Ben Hey-Hey understood long before today's research that what produces reward is effort. When we work hard in the gym or the research library or the classroom we realize that the activity itself - doing our best - is the real motivator. Everything else is just a distraction and maybe even a deterrent to giving us what we really need from our actions: a sense of purpose.

Shabbat Shalom

By Erica Brown  |  September 2, 2010; 10:27 AM ET Save & Share:                 
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