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Caution: Motivation is not performance
Some people confuse motivation with performance or productivity. They assume that if motivation is high, people will perform at a high level and productivity will be high, too. But it’s not that simple.
It’s possible to have a highly motivated person — or entire staff — that is not very productive.
Motivation is an important component — especially in high performance operations — because in order to perform at a high level, it’s helpful to have people on board who want to excel.
But motivation is desire, and by itself desire does not guarantee achievement.
People also need adequate skills and tools to do the job. Without sufficient training and technology, highly motivated people adapt by leaving for a better opportunity or adapting to an under-achieving culture. Either option is expensive for the organization.
One irony in all of this is that people who come to an organization for a job tend to be highly-motivated. They want to do a good job if for no other reason than they want to keep their job. In fact, motivation is frequently all that a newcomer has to offer. He or she has a good attitude — and nothing else.
Once that person is on the job, a partnership is formed to assure that the employee has access to the skills and tools needed to excel. Providing the tools is easy. Providing skills is more complex because unless the employee is motivated as a learner, the organization’s skill set will not transfer well to the newcomer.
Maintaining high levels of motivation after the new hire honeymoon ends is the responsibility of everyone in the partnership. Managers can’t assume that highly-motivated newcomers will remain that way.
Regrettably, managers are prone to mistake poor performance for poor motivation when, in fact, the problem is that people do not have the skills or the tools — or both — to perform at a highly productive level. If managers misdiagnose, they can actually cause the poor motivation they wrongly suspected in the first place.
This is one of the reasons that critical listening skills are such an important facet of effective leadership and management.
Returning to our core focus — motivation — it’s important to note that as work becomes more complex, motivation tends to play a larger role in performance. On a slave galley ship it did not much matter how motivated the individual slaves were. They were tied to an oar and beaten into submitting to a common rhythm. Anything more than that would have been disruptive.
In contrast, today’s productive knowledge worker is expected to perform in a realm with much less certainty, requiring much more autonomy, making a host of decisions large and small based on a variety of data, both empirical and intuitive, on terrain that is constantly changing, requiring the support of a web of relationships with other equally complex people in equally complex circumstances.
To succeed in today’s lifescape, motivation is not sufficient. But it is necessary.
Copyright © 2007 by Owen Phelps, Ph.D., Midwest Leadership Institute. All rights reserved.
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