Corporate view of motivation
The modern era of HR is predominantly
dominated by a Maslowian view of motivation: The individual is driven by a
motivation to ffulfill increasingly higher needs depending on the completion of a
lower level of motivation. Although still useful, the Maslow Hierarchy, used in
an organisational setting, creates a division between the employee and the
company. The company has to deliver a lot of elements to the employee or risk
the employee leaving. This creates thinking where every dollar that is given to
the employee is seen to come out of the shareholders pockets - a zero sum game.
This has become evident in the pre Financial Crisis age where companies
relentlessly have reduced headcount to meet cost targets, completely ignoring
that the same employees had a positive impact on revenue. If the logic of
employees only affecting cost was true, corporations should have no people at
all.
Purpose driven motivation
A more useful model for human motivation is what is known as
the 3rd Viennese school of psychology based on Viktor Frankls work
on Logotheraphy. In opposition to the
first two – Freud’s view of human motivation as search for pleasure and Adler’s
search for power, Frankl work points towards humans being motivated by a search
for meaning. Rather than seeing people’s motivation as a result of external
stimuli he believes that motivation comes from within and is based on your
subjective view of what meaning is. Despite meaning being subjective and
situation bound, Frankl suggests that meaning is often associated with doing
good for others, with love and with the freedom to choose your attitude in any
given situation – even in hopeless situations.
A survivor of the Holocaust, Frankl got plenty of experience
of humans in hopeless situations and found that the people surviving rarely
where the physically strongest but more often somebody that had a strong
purpose and a reason to survive. He captured it in the phrase:
It is not what you expect of life that is important; it is what life
expects of you.
Frankl’s motivational model is becoming increasingly more
relevant as corporations are starting to understand that employee engagement is
crucial to the creation of sustainable competitive advantage. The traditional
employee satisfaction surveys show the same and predictable results independent
of it is conducted in successful companies or the opposite. Employee engagement
is strongly impacted by purpose – both the purpose of the individual’s
contribution to the corporate purpose and to the corporate purpose itself. And a
good purpose isn't about making money!
Corporate purpose is important
The financial crisis killed the real and initial purpose of
many corporations – a purpose often focused on bringing value to one or more of
the company’s stakeholders. Instead a relentless shareholder focus took over in
a way that would have made Milton Friedman proud. Making bosses and owners wealthier
is not a noble purpose that engages employees and unlocks productivity. Jack
Welsh ex Ceo of GE calls shareholder focus the dumbest concept he has ever
heard of and Kip Tindell of Container Store says that shareholder focus alienates
all other stakeholder groups including employees and customers.
A new and engaging way of creating value
Leading companies have found that creating strategies that
serves the needs of many stakeholder groups simultaneously in what Tom Gardner,
CEO of Moetly Fool calls super-alignment creates a strong purpose that engages stakeholders
to support the company in a way that creates competitive advantage. The beauty
of stakeholder alignment is that it also increases the value for the
shareholders – a company loved by its customers and employees will not fail completely.
Talking against shareholder value is often seen as an attack
on capitalism and the free market and a defense of totalitarian systems. Reality
is that no company became great because they wanted to make money – they became
great because they created value for others. Somewhere down the line it was
forgotten that capitalism is a social experiment focused on value creation for
others and not ugly exploitation of often powerless stakeholder groups to
satisfy the greed of a few.
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