Showing posts with label Motivation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Motivation. Show all posts
Friday, January 18, 2013
Motivation...
Eric Thomas is a former professional football player turned motivational speaker. He certainly got my attention!
Monday, October 31, 2011
Motivation...
Via my colleague Aleck L.:
The video is new to me, though the studies it's reporting on are not. One of the big mysteries of managing engineers (or other knowledge workers, I'm sure) is how to motivate them to do what you want them to do.
Much of what this video articulates matches my own experiences – but there are motivations controllable by managements (some of them involving money) that my experience tells me actually do work. All of these involve two elements not explored by these studies: recognition (that is, letting peers – inside or outside the company – know what good thing you've accomplished) and spot cash (that is, cash bonuses awarded not according to some rules or formulae, but rather at the moment some good behavior needs to be rewarded). I've also seen the power of negative motivation. I once used a stuffed monkey with a dunce's cap as a motivational tool. Whenver someone did something dumb, they got the monkey – and it sat on their desk until the next person did something dumb. That damned monkey was one of the best tools I ever found for getting engineers to behave the way I wanted them to, and it was negative reinforcement. I'm pretty sure it only worked because the culture we had at that job was right for it, though...
The video is new to me, though the studies it's reporting on are not. One of the big mysteries of managing engineers (or other knowledge workers, I'm sure) is how to motivate them to do what you want them to do.
Much of what this video articulates matches my own experiences – but there are motivations controllable by managements (some of them involving money) that my experience tells me actually do work. All of these involve two elements not explored by these studies: recognition (that is, letting peers – inside or outside the company – know what good thing you've accomplished) and spot cash (that is, cash bonuses awarded not according to some rules or formulae, but rather at the moment some good behavior needs to be rewarded). I've also seen the power of negative motivation. I once used a stuffed monkey with a dunce's cap as a motivational tool. Whenver someone did something dumb, they got the monkey – and it sat on their desk until the next person did something dumb. That damned monkey was one of the best tools I ever found for getting engineers to behave the way I wanted them to, and it was negative reinforcement. I'm pretty sure it only worked because the culture we had at that job was right for it, though...
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