Mapping Motivation

Unlocking the Key to Employee Energy and Engagement

James Sale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781134805440
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Ever wondered what motivation is, and why organizations do not and cannot - until now - measure it? James Sale tackles the question of what motivation is, why we need it and what happens when we don't have it. He defines and measures motivation from an individual, team and, most critically, organizational or workplace point of view and he introduces the reader to the core concepts of how it relates to fundamental issues such as performance and productivity, and its role in a number of key management functions: team building, performance appraisal, leadership development, engagement and change management. Motivation is a core aspect of all people development initiatives and programmes - if we wish them to succeed. Based on over ten years of research into motivation and performance, James created Motivational Maps, the first and only accurate diagnostic tool that describes, measures, monitors and maximizes motivation and performance through an easy, simple to use, online questionnaire that takes only 10 minutes to complete, and which readers have access to. Mapping Motivation, therefore, is the definitive book on motivation, its language and metrics, written by its creator are full of knowledge, insight and practical tips; this will appeal to leaders, managers, HR specialists, trainers, coaches, consultants and visionaries around the world, who wish to engage with people development and productivity in a new, dynamic way.

Chapter 1

What is Motivation?

Like most people, you probably feel that you know something about motivation. In exactly the same way people feel – because they can speak and write – they know something about language, or because they have been to school they know something about education. We see people who are motivated maybe on a daily basis, or we see newspapers or hear pundits in the media talking of sports heroes or heroines who are motivated. Thus motivation is all around us. According to Maehr and Meyer, ‘Motivation is a word that is part of the popular culture as few other psychological concepts are.’¹ Having frequent experience of something can mean in our own mind that we are familiar with it, that we know it. We know ‘something’ about motivation, don’t we, but what exactly?

ACTIVITY 1

Write one sentence in which you describe what you think motivation is. After you have done it, compare your view with the suggestions below. What do you learn from this?

Motivation is the motive – the internal reason – we have which prompts us to act in certain ways and directions. In a deep sense motivation is not a thought, since that would be purely intellectual. When we are motivated, whatever we are thinking is always hitched to an extra element that appears or feels electrical. Of course we cannot ‘see’ electricity; it is invisible; but we detect it from its powerful effects.

But if motivation is like electricity, it can flow both ways: its power and intensity can wax and wane; and although its effects are felt, it is itself, as we said, invisible. So the best parallel of all – and the one most frequently used in motivational literature – is with energy; the flow of energy within us. And this fits with the word’s etymology – from the Anglo-Norman term ‘motif’, which is often translated as ‘drive’. So, drive and energy are two powerful synonyms for motivation. But we need to remember that energy is energy; or, put another way, as Hilgard and Marquis put it:

The motivation of behavior comes about through the existence of conditions (drive-establishing operations) which release energy originating in the organism’s metabolic processes. This energy, in and of itself, is directionless and may serve any of a variety of motivational objectives.²

Thus motivation as energy per se is directionless – although of course what we will be interested in and what this book is about is energy at work and the nine directions in which it wishes to flow. But for now consider the importance of having energy at all: what happens to us, our teams, our organisations, our world, without energy?

The answer is: not a lot! Indeed, energy, and so motivation, can truly be said to correlate with the quality of our lives – not just at work, but also in our private and personal environments. One may have many disadvantages in life – a low IQ, a poor family background, a bad education, and so on – but having high, even very high, levels of energy is a massive compensation if only because (and it is not the only reason) having high levels of energy feels good. Indeed, it feels so good that all psychologically healthy people desire it. They are motivated to be motivated. In this way it becomes an immunity booster, a stress buster, almost an optimism barometer whatever else is going on. Truly, one has the energy to cope with difficulties, problems, and situations – and often to thrive in the midst of them.

ACTIVITY 2

What are the benefits of having high levels of energy, besides its feeling good?³ Make a list and when you have done it, prioritise: what are the top three reasons why high energy – and so high motivation – is beneficial?

It should be clear, then, that everyone needs motivation, but whether they want it is another question. This may sound paradoxical, but it is true. On an even bigger level it might be argued that it is self-evident that everyone needs life – but strangely not everyone wants it. Yet, for all that (returning to the topic of energy and motivation), everywhere we look we see the need. People need motivation, and this issue becomes paramount when we consider employees within organisations.

If, for example, we turn to any classroom – and see the teacher who may have set out with the best intentions in the world to deliver a quality education to students. Now, bogged down by bureaucracy, guidelines, inspections, and procedures, lessons are delivered without relevance or enthusiasm. Energy – motivation – is ebbing away.

Or consider the students themselves: where a target-driven education bears little relationship to their reality, or to the deep springs of learning within each one of us. They too lack motivation, or at best merely have some desire for qualifications to enable their advancement to the next stage of the process. They achieve qualifications, but are they motivated to learn – especially to go on to that much-vaunted political credo: life-long learning?

There has been a lot of discussion on the new ‘Generation Y’ (those born from 1982 to 2001)⁴ who are our future and who we need to be motivated. Some of their characteristics are alleged to be:

bored by routine

lifestyle centred

technically fluent

connected … 24/7

self-confident

success driven

anti-commitment

goal oriented

opinionated.

Clearly, education has to change if it is going to engage this generation. How do we sustain motivation with this group, given their characteristics?

Also, think about a Monday morning – classic heart attack time, or what might be termed the Optimal Work Aversion Moment. So many people are demotivated at the thought of having to go to work after the weekend that it generates more heart attacks than at any other time of the week. Indeed, German researchers found that the risk of a heart attack is 33 per cent higher on Monday than on any other day. Work itself is a word almost synonymous with the word onerous. Who wants to work? And this is despite the researcher Donald Hebb’s findings that ‘the human liking for work is not a rare phenomenon, but general.’⁵ But how does that square with what we encounter on a near daily basis: namely, fewer people seem to like work and increasingly regard it as a chore; yet they need it and, sadly, most need to work.

Again, what we are talking about here is the quality of our lives. Independent of whether we have high IQs or low ones, whether we are tall or short, or even whether we are rich or poor, perhaps the biggest single determinant of the quality of our lives is how motivated we are at any given moment, and over prolonged periods of time.

ACTIVITY 3

Ask yourself the question: over the last six months how motivated have you been at work, in your personal life, in your relationships? Be specific. Score each arena out of 10 (10 being fully motivated/energised and 1 being completed demotivated/ de-energised). And how would you rate your overall motivation out of 10? Are you satisfied with the answer?

Why is motivation so correlated with the quality of our lives? Because, as we said before, motivation is virtually synonymous with the word energy – our motivation determines our energy level, generates our energy. And when we are fully motivated, we tend to be bursting with energy. When we are bursting with energy, then life feels good – stress has less power to touch us, and all our other problems are contextualised into manageable proportions. And one final extra point for now: ‘feeling good’ may sound somewhat ‘hippy’ and insubstantial, as if it were some luxury we could all do well without. But it turns out to be essential in many ways, the most important of which is our self-esteem, for our self-esteem fundamentally is about how much we like ourselves: the more you like yourself, the higher your levels of self-esteem. Clearly, the more you feel good about yourself, the more likely you are to like yourself. The importance of this will be clear in Chapter 2 when we discuss this in more detail, but for now all we need say is that high levels of self-esteem are essential to all areas of success in your life.

Thus it is that we need to pay attention to motivation – especially our motivation, and by extension to our motivators.

ACTIVITY 5

Ask yourself these three questions. First, how many hours per week do you spend on being physically fit? Second, how much time do you spend each week on promoting your health (for example, cooking your own meal, choosing healthy ingredients, as opposed to eating fast foods; or ensuring you get 7–8 hours’ sleep each night, and so on)? Finally, how much time per week do you spend consciously motivating yourself? As you think about these questions, you might want to consider whether the time spent motivating yourself is enough, and in what it consists?

Here is a curious thing: many people spend time working their muscles and concentrating on physical fitness. Why? Because they understand that if they do not exercise their muscles they will wither. They will become, as people, impaired. This is fine physically, but what about psychologically? Two questions, then, arise: how do we know what our motivators are, and how do we stimulate our motivators?

One interesting thing about motivators is that they are closely allied to our values.⁶ When we realise, or make manifest in our lives or the world, our values we become extremely happy or satisfied. So too with motivators – these are deep needs within us, and so deliberately feeding them in ourselves, or even attempting to feed them in someone else, is not ‘manipulation’ (how could it be?); rather, it is giving us or another person exactly what we want. And what we want is often more than what we need, or apart from what we need. Further, because motivation is intimately connected to our self-esteem, then it is also part of our performance matrix. And, finally, motivation is also part of our future, and our ability to realise that future. No motivation means no energy; and no energy means, at best, a deeply unsatisfying life.

ACTIVITY 5

Make a list of three things that motivate you at work. Try to keep the three things at a ‘high generic level’. For example, going for a pizza every Friday with the team might be what motivates you, but that is extremely specific. At a high generic level this might be ‘friendship’ or ‘belonging’ or ‘being sociable’. Or, if you wrote down that the excellent pension arrangements in your current job motivate you, what is the underlying motivator from that specific example? In this case it might be ‘long-term security’.

Put them in rank order of priority. How do you know that your own rank order is correct, or even that you have identified your three top motivators?

Ask two or three people you know well and whom you trust to identify what they think are your top three motivators. Compare their answers with yours. From this establish what your top three most likely motivators ARE.

What then are the invisible motivators within us that drive and energise us to take action and adopt certain behaviours to pursue particular goals and desires? Each of us has the same nine motivators, present at all times; but the interesting thing is that they are in a different combination and order for each individual. For more information on why this is so, and the basis for this, see Chapter 3.

Figure 1.1 Nine motivators in 3×3 grid formation

There are nine motivators of work, and they are in a hierarchical order. Look at Figure 1.1. First, you will notice that they are in three groups of three; in other words, there are three main types of motivator – and in the case of work we might call them ‘satisfactions’ that we are looking for. The Relationship motivators we often think of as ‘green’ motivators; the ‘Achievement’ type motivators are ‘red’ and ‘Growth’ type motivators are ‘blue’; and there is a lot more information about these three types and their important, indeed amazing, characteristics and properties, specifically as applicable to the work environment, in Chapter 6.

Second, however, notice that along with names for the three types of motivator we have given names to the nine motivators themselves. These are our names, and they are the best we could find that we felt were descriptive and yet brief enough to be useful. But here’s the important point: it is this shared language that makes this such a powerful model. Using it, we can exactly describe – and so make ‘visible’ – the ‘invisible’ qualities of motivation. Remember what we said: we can’t see electricity but we can certainly see or feel its effects. It is because there has been no real language to descr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 What is Motivation?
• 2 The Roots of Motivation
• 3 The Nine Motivators and Their Properties
• 4 Mapping Your Motivation
• 5 Motivation and Performance
• 6 Motivation and Teams
• 7 Motivation and Appraisal
• 8 Leadership, Motivation, and Engagement
• 9 Motivation in Practice: Two Case Studies
• Conclusions
• Resources Section
• Index