The answer is not another video of Steve Jobs
Motivational quotes. Videos of Steve Jobs saying absolutely anything. Clips of a baby elephant being rescued from a river. You do not have to scroll for long on LinkedIn, a networking site ostensibly for people at work, to find “inspirational” content. There may be people who need only to read “We cannot become what we want by remaining what we are” written in a nice font to feel amped up on a Monday morning. But there will be just as many who want to snigger or vomit. For bosses interested in how to motivate the people around them, there are better options than searching for quotes by Paulo Coelho.
At some level, advice on how to inspire employees is silly. It’s usually either blindingly obvious – be good at your job, be passionate about the work, make the people on your teams feel valued – or jarringly inauthentic. But much more practical insights can be found in a forthcoming book called “Inspire”, by Adam Galinsky, an academic at Columbia Business School.
Take, for example, the importance of vivid imagery as a way of bringing an organisation’s purpose to life. Lots of firms use a succession of tediously abstract words to convey their goal: “change”, “innovate”, “connect” and so on. The result is less a mission than a mood board. Mr. Galinsky cites an experiment by Andrew Carton of the University of Pennsylvania and his co-authors that showed the effect of more concrete language. In it, teams were asked to design toys and given a vision statement to guide their behaviour. Teams who were handed a statement with more visual language – to create toys that “…make wide-eyed kids laugh and proud parents smile” – produced more engaging toys than teams who were given something more generic.
Mr. Galinsky also points to the power of counterfactual thinking to inspire a sense of meaning. In research he conducted with Laura Kray of the University of California, Berkeley and other co-authors, participants were asked to reflect on important events in their lives, such as their choice of college. Some were also asked to think about how things would have turned out if this event had not taken place. This group attributed greater meaning to the event in question, whether because they concluded fate had played a part in it or because it forced them to think through its consequences more explicitly. This type of counterfactual thinking can also be used to strengthen employees’ ties to firms: prompting people to imagine a world in which their company does not exist seems to increase a sense of attachment.
Perhaps the most striking idea in Mr. Galinsky’s book is that, instead of bosses motivating people from above, individuals can do it for themselves. One example is a piece of research he conducted with Julian Pfrombeck from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and other co-authors. In this study some Swiss citizens who had newly registered with a government employment agency were asked to undertake a 10- to 15-minute exercise in which they reflected on values that mattered to them. They were three times more likely to find a job than those who did not do the exercise.
A forthcoming paper, by Nava Ashraf and Oriana Bandiera of the London School of Economics and Virginia Minni and Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago, finds that this kind of intervention can have dramatic effects in a business setting. A subset of almost 3,000 employees at a consumer-goods firm were randomly assigned to take part in a workshop that helped participants to reflect on pivotal moments in their lives, to articulate what mattered to them and to think about how their current jobs matched their own sense of purpose.
The academics found that taking part in this exercise substantially increased the probability of exits from the firm, particularly among lower performers; increased internal job transfers; and improved the performance of those who stayed in their jobs. A heightened sense of what is meaningful to individuals provides the best explanation for these outcomes. Those whose jobs do not inspire them decide to leave or move; those who find that their purpose and their job are in sync put in more effort. Once they accounted for the productivity of employees who replaced the leavers, the overall impact of this experiment on the firm’s performance was positive.
Managers play a huge role in motivating their people. But inspiration can be bottom-up as well as top-down. Don’t just tell your team what Jobs said. Ask why their jobs matter to them.
