Satisfied and Motivated
Lately, I have had two recent developments on my mind. The first is a current report by the Conference Board, an independent global organization that researches and circulates management and marketplace knowledge to help businesses improve their performance and better serve society. Each year, the non-profit group commissions a survey of Americans' job satisfaction, and this year's results aren't pretty.
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Continuing a long-term trend, Americans of all ages and incomes expressed growing dissatisfaction with their work and workplaces. In fact, American workers have reached a 20-year low when it comes to their contentment at work. According to the Conference Board, we cannot blame the recession for this level of dissatisfaction. In fact, this year's results continue a decline in worker satisfaction that the board has tracked since 1987, when the board first began the survey.
I found it particularly alarming that, according to the Conference Board, people under the age of 25 find their work lives the least satisfying and report being unhappier than ever. When young people hate their jobs because they find them neither challenging nor meaningful, the impending retirement of Baby Boomers becomes a serious problem. Considering the demographic makeup of most wildland fire agencies, the declining job satisfaction of young people is a trend that leaders and would-be leaders must pay careful attention to.
The survey found that people's satisfaction with their employers declined in all four areas that the Conference Board considers motivators of employee engagement: job design, organizational health, managerial quality and extrinsic awards. The declining satisfaction with extrinsic awards really caught my attention because people's dissatisfaction with how employers reward performance brings me to the other recent development on my mind.
In his new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, best-selling author Daniel Pink challenges the system of reward and punishment that organizations and their supervisors have used to motivate people for decades. I haven't read Pink's book yet, but it is on my list. However, I've heard him interviewed several times now, read some reviews and watched his presentation at the TEDGlobal 2009 conference. TED is a small non-profit organization devoted to ideas worth spreading, and their conferences at Oxford University bring together big thinkers from the worlds of technology, entertainment and design. You can find Pink's presentation on the Web at www.ted.com.
Pink says that organizations cling to outmoded ideas about motivating people's performance that no longer work, or at least have not been adapted to the work of the modern organization. Using some pretty convincing science for support, Pink tells us that contingent rewards — the ones that say “do this and you will get that” — don't successfully motivate much of the work that people do in today's organizations. In fact, not only do those traditional contingent rewards not work anymore, they actually de-motivate many modern workers.
Why? Today's workplace often requires an unlimited need for resourceful thinking, with far fewer simple tasks followed by rote. Efforts to establish doctrine in wildland fire organizations recognized this fact. Those efforts endeavored to create principles that enable and empower agency personnel to complete their work, encourage their use of sound judgment, take advantage of their training and experience, and support their decision-making. Such a doctrinal approach appears consistent with Pink's conclusion that organizations should motivate people by tapping their inner drive for autonomy and self-mastery.
To be clear, Pink and the studies he cites for support note that contingent awards still work. However, they motivate people performing relatively simple and repetitive tasks. If a leader wants to motivate firefighters to dig from point A to point B, the promise of a tangible reward may motivate them to get the job done quickly. However, promising a carrot or threatening with a stick likely won't improve results when assigning someone to locate the best place for a helispot in challenging terrain, conduct an after-action-review, plan training or become a leader.
Pink's bottom line is that contingent rewards work to motivate people performing uncomplicated and recurring tasks. However, that type of task makes up less and less of our work, and conditional rewards do not work well for creative and conceptual tasks. People performing creative or conceptual work find motivation from their drive for autonomy and self-direction.
The Conference Board's observations about job satisfaction and Daniel Pink's ideas about motivation come together powerfully. In today's workplace, leaders must understand that without challenging, meaningful work, many people just show up to earn a paycheck — and they will come and go through a revolving door.
Effective leaders must pay serious attention to people's satisfaction, particularly if they want to attract a new generation of young workers to their organizations, keep them around and prepare them to lead their organizations. People need challenge and fulfillment from their career, and work in the nation's wildland fire service can provide both. Firefighters have long found satisfaction in the combination of hard work, risk, camaraderie and service to both people and the land. Wildland fire service leaders can use those motivations to create and maintain a satisfying workplace where people willingly work and performance soars.
Successful leaders also will attend to their own approaches to motivation. They will strive to inspire people by tapping into people's drives and motivations, and they'll recognize that the old carrot-and-stick approach doesn't work for much of what we do — or for many of the people who do it.
Mike DeGrosky is chief executive officer of the Guidance Group, a consulting organization specializing in the human and organizational aspects of the fire service. He also serves as an adjunct instructor in leadership studies at Fort Hays State University. His interests include leadership, strategy, and bringing the concepts of learning organizations and high-reliability organizing alive in fire organizations. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. focused on organizational leadership. He can be reached at info@guidancegroup.org.
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