Here is a short story that very well illustrates why I love Solution-Focus Coaching and its magic in bringing out clients’ expertise.

My Coaching Client is the Administration Manager for a small but fast-growing company, and we are having a Coaching session over Skype.

Topic of the session: he wants his co-workers to be “more motivated“.

I know that the concept of “motivation” is a tricky one.

Personally I am very skeptical about the whole construct.

And recently published works by Daniel Pink and by Dan Ariely show how the notion of “motivating someone” is little more than a myth.

However, operating under Solution-Focused assumptions, I am not supposed to share these recent insights from psychology with my Client. Even though the role of the “know-it-all” nerd fits me perfectly well, I have to bite my tongue.

As it often happens during tough moments in Coaching, I look at the card pictured above, that sits prominently on my desk. It reads:  “Slow Down, Calm Down, Don’t’ Worry, Don’t Hurry, Trust the Process.”

So I did just that: I relaxed, got my hands off the steering wheel and let the Solution-Focused process unfold, one question at a time.

“Suppose your co-workers are more motivated. What would you notice? What would they be doing differently? What would you be doing differently? What else? Have there been times recently when your employees behaved in the desired manner?…”

The client answers eagerly the first questions – however, as we go into more details of how things would be different, I can sense his frustration. A sort of tension simmering.

At some point he stops and says: “I am wondering… maybe I got it all wrong.”

Me: “what do you mean?”

Client: “well… I do not think I need to motivate them. They are already motivated! It’s just that they like to work in a different way -  each with his or her own area of responsibility rather than as a team! And to be working in this company as a team would mean a huge cultural change, given our history. This has got more to do with my expectation of how the company could grow in the future than with actual motivation or work performance!”

What an insight! Without me suggesting anything, the client got to the same conclusion as that of current cutting-edge research: you cannot “motivate” employees. You can only create the right conditions for them to be engaged in their work.

I looked once again at that card – and I smiled to myself.

Tags: biting your tongue, case study, Clients are the Experts, Dan Ariely, Dan Pink, Insight, motivation, Questions, research, Solution-Focused assumptions, Solution-Focused coaching, Solution-Focused Protocols, Trusting the Process

Since I am taking a short vacation, I will not be posting again in 2 weeks (my usual interval between posts) but in 4 weeks. To compensate for it, here is an extra-long post. Enjoy!

I am going to contrast and compare two different books: Dan Ariely’s latest, The Upside of Irrationality; and Daniel Pink’s  Drive.

Both books are terrific. They read very well. They are very engaging. The authors make an extra effort to illustrate their concepts in the simplest and most understandable way. They both use metaphors that are clear and effective in their power to explain. Not only these two books are a pleasure to read – they are also very informative.

Ariely’s book is sort of a sequel to his hugely successful Predictably Irrational: the Hidden Forces that Shape our Behavior. However in The Upside of Irrationality Dan Ariely’s takes a more compassionate stance towards the bias that make us irrational decision makers, a.k.a. humans. In keeping with this softer perspective, the book shines with many personal stories that are going to touch the reader. And it is no accident that the focus of this book is not “the consumers’” behavior but how people behave at work and in their own personal life. So we have 5 chapters about “how we defy logic at work”, and another 5 about “how we defy logic at home”.

Dan Pink’ s Drive feeds on the work of Ariely and many others on the science of motivation. Pink is a master in making the insights gained by recent research  understandable and readily usable by managers and businessmen. Drive is a call for a general and comprehensive rethinking of the ways in which we organize what we do.  Pink’s metaphor of assumptions that societies have about human behavior as being their operating system is brilliant and enlightening in and of itself! Moreover, the second part of the book is a treasure trove of practical advice - simple strategies to implement the ideas illustrated in Drive.
Continue reading…

Tags: book review, brief coaching, coaching, Dan Ariely, Daniel Pink, Drive, epistemology, marketing, motivation, psychological bias, science, The Upside of Irrationality, training

In preparation for this event, today I was reviewing some literature about positive reinforcement and motivation. Anybody interested in psychology knows that there is a raging ongoing debate about it. Even though the battle lines are not so clearly drawn, for the sake of simplicity we can say that on the one hand we have many psychologists saying that giving rewards actually reduces intrinsic motivation – therefore it is an ill-advised attempt at increasing motivation (see Lepper et al.,1973, Curry et al., 1990, Deci et al., 1999). This position is based on a seminal study by psychologists Mark R. Lepper and David Greene from Stanford and the University of Michigan, masterfully told here. On the other hand we have economists saying that we are rational agents and therefore giving rewards is an effective way of increasing motivation.

The controversy is well alive within psychology, too – with some authors (Martin, G., Pear, G., Behavior Modification, 8th eds, p.38) saying that “Some individuals (e.g. Kohn, 1993) have gone so far as to suggest that tangible rewards should never be given  because, for example, if a parent gives a child money as a reinforcer for reading, then the child will be less likely to “read for reading’s sake”. However, a careful review of the literature on this topic and two recent experiments clearly indicate that such a view is a myth. Moreover, the notion that extrinsic reinforcers undermines intrinsic interest flies in the face of common sense”.

The good news is that soon we might have a definite answer to the question of whether rewards work in motivating people (or at least, students), thanks to programs that reward AP scores being carried out in schools in different cities, like Dallas and New York, and financed by private groups. As the Harvard University economist Ronald Freyer, who is designing and testing several reward programs, says: “we either get social science or social change, and we need both.”

The preliminary results of these school reward programs are pretty good: “about two thirds of the 59 high-poverty schools in the Sparks program – which pays seventh-graders up to $500 and fourth-graders as much as $250 for their performance on a total of 10 assessments – improved their scores since last year’s state tests by margins about the citywide average”, with gains in some school approaching 40 percentage points (source).

As the critics of these programs are quick to point out, it is too soon to draw conclusions: typically rewards work in the short term but backfire in the long term. We’ll see.

My take on the debate whether rewards are helpful or actually hurt intrinsic motivation is: it depends. I don’t think such a question is amenable to a simple yes or no answer. Contextual factors play a large part.

For example, in the original study by Lepper et al., where the question was whether giving rewards would increase children’s motivation to draw, the 51 pre-schoolers chosen were all interested in drawing. Of course this was a crucial requirement if we want to investigate intrinsic motivation – yet it is often lost in the heat of the debate about rewards. Rewards might backfire for motivating people already interested or proficient in one activity, but what about getting somebody to start doing something?

Also notice how the study has been interpreted in literature and passed on in psychological lore: rewards hurt intrinsic motivation! Actually, the study showed that an unexpected reward (surprise reward) works better than an expected reward AND no reward.

Morevoer: the reward in this instance was a tangible reward (a certificate with a gold seal and a ribbon – this was the pre-ipod era!). What about social or other kinds of rewards? And in case of social rewards, we know (see a previous posting of mine on Carol Dweck’s work) that the way praise is formulated is of critical importance.

Let’s look at the reward programs being implemented in the schools. I think other important social dynamics are at work here, like competition and peer-pressure. And we know how peers are important in shaping who we become (see J.R. Harris work). For example, giving money for academic achievement can shift in dramatic ways youth’s attitudes and, all of a sudden, make studying “cool” – and this can be a big boost to motivate kids to learn, especially for minorities that tend to conform to negative stereotypes. Get rich or die tryin’ gets a whole new meaning!!

Update: Professor Steven Reiss on The Myths of Intrinsic-Extrinsic Motivation in Psychology Today, posted on the 20th of November 2009

Tags: economist, intrinsic motivation, learning, money reward for academic achievement, motivation, rewards