This week’s book review is Start with Why by Simon Sinek
This is an excellent book that every person should read. Although it is especially relevant to business leaders, it applies to each of our personal lives as well!
This week’s book review is Start with Why by Simon Sinek
This is an excellent book that every person should read. Although it is especially relevant to business leaders, it applies to each of our personal lives as well!
Everyone is familiar with dysfunctional business meetings! The meetings where the people around the table or on the conference call are partially, if not completely, disengaged. You have people on Facebook, people texting, trading stocks, surfing the web, day dreaming and even taking cell phone calls in subdued voices like the rest of the people there can’t hear or see what is going on!
It is the most bizarre thing but we have all been there! Check out this hilarious video for some great examples.
I remember attending a meeting where one of the participants literally fell asleep with their head back and their mouth wide open! It was the sort of wacky thing that you would only expect to see on an episode of The Office . . . Except it wasn’t on TV it was in my meeting!
I have been in other meetings where the meeting leader was doing their presentation and a participant’s cell phone rang and they answered it at the conference room table like they were the only one there!
Why do these things happen in meetings?
In my last few posts I have written about the concept of Motivation 3.0 and explained how it is the secret to an engaged workforce. I have defined two of the three components of Motivation 3.0; Autonomy and Mastery. Today, I will define the final component, Purpose.
Purpose
Purpose can be defined as a cause that is greater than a single individual. It is the “reason for being” . . . the French call it “Raison d’être” or reason for existence. This is much greater than a simple goal or objective. This is something that a person will stake their entire existence on. The people that understand their purpose and are aligned in the pursuit of that purpose are focused and are not easily discouraged or knocked off track.
In my last post I introduced the concept of Motivation 3.0 and explained how it is the secret to an engaged workforce. I went on to define Autonomy (one of the three main components of Motivation 3.0) and how leaders need to give their employees autonomy over their roles at work. Today, I will define the second component of Motivation 3.0, Mastery.
Mastery
Mastery is defined as an individual’s desire to get continuously better at something that matters to that individual. This desire to improve in a particular area occurs when that individual experiences an activity that motivates and captivates them. Teresa Amabile said “The desire to do something because you find it deeply satisfying and personally challenging inspires the highest levels of creativity, whether it’s in the arts, sciences or business.“
Daniel Pink defined it this way “in flow, the relationship between what a person had to do and what he could do was perfect. The challenge wasn’t too easy. Nor was it too difficult. It was a notch or two beyond his current abilities, which stretched the body and mind in a way that made the effort in itself the most delicious reward. That balance produced a degree of focus and satisfaction that easily surpassed other, more quotidian, experiences. In flow, people lived so deeply in the moment, and felt so utterly in control, that their sense of time, place and even self, melted away. They were autonomous, of course. But even more than that, they were engaged.“
In my last few posts I have written about employee engagement in the workplace (Your Employees Are Happy . . . And Other Popular Myths and The Employee Engagement Survey Says . . .). I conducted an informal survey that indicated that 47% of employees felt that they were engaged in their jobs but their leaders felt that only 24% of their employees were engaged. This is a fairly large disconnect.
So, as leaders, what can we do to increase employee engagement and, at the same time, align ourselves with our employees around engagement (besides the ideas that I listed at the end of my last blog post)?
I believe Daniel Pink has done a great job of researching this topic and he has published his ideas in the book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. I will take a more detailed look at this in today’s post and over the next couple of weeks.