Last week I finished reading Daniel Pink’s DRiVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.
Understanding motivation seems to be an under explored aspect of leadership studies and action. Given how much discussion there is in leadership and ministry ventures about empowerment, it surprises me there is not more intentionality to ground more leadership development and empowerment of workers and new leaders with healthy awareness as to what will lead to long term change and impact.
Pink provides a brief survey or overview of the history of how people have understand motivation – from survival, to external reward motivations, and finally to intrinsic motivation. I disagree with the evolutionary assumptions behind how Pink frames this – as if the journey towards intrinsic motivation is part of humanity’s destiny in evolving towards self-actualization. I happen to think a lot of the research actually instead supports a holistic theology of creation.
That’s one of the things I enjoyed thinking about when reading this book – how the research tends to affirm that men and women were created for intrinsic motivation when there is enough stability and freedom that allows for it. Intrinsic motivation is an expression of identity and I believe it is meant to be an expression of worship to our Creator. So a theology of creation makes the research in DRiVE even more interesting and exciting to me, not less.
What’s fascinating about DRiVE is that there are some jobs where external rewards are helpful – what Pink describes as algorithmic work. But if external rewards are linked to generating motivation in heuristic work – work that requires creativity among other things, external rewards end up generating a host of negative results and implications.
The core areas Pink explores as key to fostering intrinsic motivation are Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. Essentially he argues that people need freedom over their work and schedule and methods to some degree in order to truly be passion driven in what they do. Mastery is a product of struggle and sacrifice. Purpose is a deep connection to a greater cause, something greater than us. In short, these three areas must be fostered and developed if we are to empower others through intrinsic motivation.
A helpful section in this book relates to parenting – how we often try to generate intrinsic motivations in our kids through methods that actually work against that. That section might alone be worth reading for those in the parenting stage. I have been thinking a lot about how to be intentional in targeting and developing intrinsic motivation in both my family and in teaching and organizationally.
Chances are there are at least one or two areas in your life and leadership that a closer look at human behavior and motivation would help in. It definitely has been helpful for me in my own self-leadership and my leadership of others.
