My Motivations For Enterprise 2.0

Hopefully this provides a little more detail behind some ideas in an earlier post. Since I’m the boss, well, my motivations sort of become my team’s motivations, as long as I have the energy to see them through. Do I look like an authority figure?

I started my Enterprise 2.0 journey without really understanding my own underlying motivations.  I always had the nagging feeling that managing the activities of a global group of 80+ in support of over 5,000 employees was something beyond the scope of our current toolset and mindset. Honestly, I just went for it. But now that I’ve been doing this for a while I felt it worthwhile to examine exactly why I believe that email + static intranets + network file shares just don’t work anymore.

Realizing that I lacked the vocabulary to explain myself, I read some well-regarded texts on the subject.  Venkatesh Rao’s review on his ribbonfarm blog of Drive by Daniel Pink led me to check out the book from the library.  Having finished Drive, its bibliography led me to Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self Motivation. Along the way I had read Three Signs of a Miserable Job and The Power of Full Engagement.

Here’s what I learned, and learned about myself:

• There are two kinds of motivation: intrinsic (coming from within) and extrinsic (coming from without).
• Intrinsic motivation is much, much more powerful and sustaining
• Once your basic needs are met, incremental extrinsic motivators (a lot more money, threat of sanction or punishment, etc) don’t help much. I’m not sure all of my colleagues would agree with that 100% , but I read about it in a book, so it must be true.
• Autonomy, mastery, and connectedness are the main intrinsic motivators.
• Engagement is tricky; as it turns out, we spend so much time at work that we cannot afford NOT to be engaged; but don’t look at someone else to motivate you to the point where you magically become engaged. That really has to come from within.
• I’m most engaged when I’m getting stuff done without too much oversight or micromanagement, doing high quality work, and seeing how what I do and what my team does fits into the big picture.

So what does this have to do with anything?

Let’s look at the intrinsic motivators, starting with autonomy. I cannot imagine a more miserable situation than being told what to do  and how to do it.  But hey, I’m not everybody so perhaps I am in the minority here. My Myers-Briggs type is Introvert after all… 

But autonomy does not mean alone.

Andrew McAfee's definition of Enterprise 2.0 mentions “emergent social software platforms”. I think that these tools support autonomy very well. They are not rigid; they are not prescriptive. They (should) allow some freedom in how work gets done depending on the situation. I like that. I really like that. That’s what I call autonomy. I suspect that many of you will argue that email can do some of this. Maybe this is your viewpoint of email:

 

I guess an email rant is out of scope for this message.

Next, let’s talk about connectedness. I could go on and on about how the existence of silos is just bad for business. Sure, we need centers of excellence and functional experts and all that…but if everyone is not working together, connected, you’re just not going to get high performance. We have outsourced, spread out, globalized, split-up, etc…but our management techniques and toolset have not kept pace. We still thrive in hierarchical, need to know cultures supported by cloistered information and antiquated supporting tools. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen decisions get stalled or made poorly because we could not connect the dots. Enough! So not only is being connected going to raise performance; as it turns out, it also motivates people.

Sounds like a win-win-win to me.

 

Others more eloquent than me have lots to say about this. I suggest checking out this post on Paula Thornton’s interview with Jordan Frank, Responsibility to Collaborate. You can listen for my name about halfway through…

I will be back on this channel showing some real world use cases.  I also want to show off Joe’s work in managing our major projects; he is really kicking some serious butt. In the meantime, I’ll be smashing silos and collaborating and where necessary bossing people around so that they can be autonomous and connected; because in the end, they’ll thank me for it.