Good question I think.  What motivates me probably isn’t the same thing that motivates you. If you posed that question to a group of executives, what answers do you think you’d get?  My guess is a mix of frank, down-to-earth answers and textbook, jargon-laden ones.  If you asked your friends, what would they say?  Would you get any serious answers at all?  I was curious so I conducted the following highly sophisticated and wicked scientific bit of research.  On my Facebook wall, I posted the question “what motivates you in your work life?”… Here are some of the comments I received from friends:

Surprise… a few weren’t serious.  Maybe I should say a few were.  And as the list illustrates, people are looking forward to their time away from work.  Notably absent?  Money.  I would have expected at least one joke about money being the only motivator.  When I was in university (what we Canadians call college), someone gave me a key chain that said “Money isn’t everything… but it’s way ahead of whatever’s in second place.” (I went to school during the late 80s… Wall Street (i.e. the movie) attitudes were pervasive in business schools).  Were they trying to tell me I had no heart… no soul?  Anyway, I was a little surprised not to even see the word money appear in any of my friends’ responses to my question.

Earlier this year, I picked up a book called “Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us” by Daniel Pink. I’ve cracked it open but not yet had the time to read it (I’m still reading this and this… by the way, this is worth reading too).  A little while back, our CEO sent me the following video, related to Dan Pink’s “Drive” …

Pretty interesting.  Although a lot of us intuitively get it, I guess I was a little surprised (not to mention a lot impressed) that autonomy, mastery and purpose far outpaced money as a motivator.  I’m sure you, like I, have come across managers who think it’s all about money.  And that would explain how the so-called conventional wisdom is not at all aligned with what’s really going on.  So, is money completely unimportant?  Personally, I don’t think so.

I think underlying all of this is the question of fairness… At our core, we all want to be treated fairly.  When it comes to our work lives, part of that fairness is pay.  Now, for most people, I think money does become secondary as long as the “fairness principle” I’ve noted is satisfied.

“So what?” you ask.  I’ll quote my 2nd year HRM professor… “We can’t motivate someone else to do anything… all we can do is create an environment that facilitates someone in motivating themselves.”  Money is one piece of the environment that a manager creates for his or her team… as are autonomy, mastery and purpose… and a lot of other things.

If you want your people to be motivated… you need to do a lot of things right… before they even begin to motivate themselves. Not easy… but entirely necessary, if you care at all about long term success.

Update: 8/10/2010: 11:43pm ADT… A new FB friend just commented on my question: “Am i the only greedy one in the bunch – it’s the paycheck baby!”… There’s always one…

A couple months ago, I posted “Who comes first – employees or clients?” I was throwing a question out there but my central belief is that organizations should look at employees as their most important component.  If you take care of your people, they will take care of your clients.  My original post came on the heels of an exercise (and ensuing discussions) that we were undertaking in my company to define our core values.  First, let me update that story… We successfully created 6 core values… chief among them?  “Employees First.”  Now, anyone will tell you that the words only mean something if the senior leadership of the organization actually walk the walk.  I agree.  But we have taken an important first step by calling it out for the entire company to see and buy into.  That’s good stuff.

Shortly after this process concluded, I came across a new book that is right on the money.  As the photo above beautifully illustrates, the book is called Employees First Customers Second (EFCS for short).  In it, author Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies, one of India’s largest professional services firms, describes the program he implemented at HCL (‘acronymed’ EFCS) and how it transformed the organization in a way that strengthened its foundation for growth.  He refers to the value zone… where employees meet and interact with customers to create value… as being the most important ‘zone’ for a company.  And he uses this as the basis for needing an Employees First mindset because value is created by them, in the trenches, on the front lines, at customer sites… not by executives and managers sitting, often times, far far away.  The best way to create value for your customers is to enable your employees.  It all rings true… at least from my experience.

I’m only halfway through but I have to admit I felt some level of vindication when I first came across this book.  It was nice to know that my thinking about “employees first” was shared (and with a global CEO and author at that).  And since I’m an organizational change guy, EFCS is already giving me all kinds of great ideas… especially for creating a culture of change – something all organizations are absolutely starving for.

Employees First Customers Second… Is it revolutionary?  I’m not sure.  Could it create a revolution in the way managers think?  Yep, it sure could… and I hope it does.

I read an interesting post a little while ago… “Change Management – a means to an end.” The author was making the point that organizational change practitioners should stop trying to convince their clients that ‘change management’ is necessary because change management is a means to an end… results!

I couldn’t agree more.

Management consultants have the opportunity to play a very effective role as trusted advisor to their clients.  However, a lot of clients are just looking for someone to implement what they’ve already decided.  And too often, the consultants comply (I encourage you to read my July 2009 post “We don’t hire consultants for advice“).  Consultants should resist blindly saying “yes” to a client’s order and focus on ensuring that value is created through whatever project or engagement is in play.  I don’t know about you but I’m not interested in being an order-taker.  There’s one of those on every street corner.  And if you follow the order and fail… guess what? You still failed.  And let’s not kid ourselves… the client didn’t fail, you did.

We should initiate all our early client discussions with their aspirations and goals as the context and push for a deep understanding of the benefits (results) they’re seeking.  Everything should flow from that… strategies, tactics, actions, deliverables, tasks…

Unfortunately, I think we’re often speaking a different language when we talk about change management methodologies… it’s academia, theory.  If we aren’t doing that, well, we’re probably viewed that way.  And I think it’s a more acute problem for organizational change practitioners.  We’re viewed as soft HR types.  In many cases, that’s probably a fair characterization.  But in many others, it’s not.  I describe myself as an accidental change practitioner.  I have a decidedly analytical bent to me (because of my early training as a strategy and process consultant).  But I also have a deeply rooted HR side to me; a real belief in the need to inspire people, to create an environment in which they’re motivated to do great things (even when that involves big change).  It’s these complementary perspectives that (I think) make me an effective consultant because I am always searching to fuse analysis with inspiration… analytics with messages… reality with vision.

Too often, our clients don’t really understand what ‘change management’ is… even though you’ll get about 200,000,000 search results for it on Google.  And at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what ‘change management’ is.  It’s not important.  What is important is that you help your clients find the right path to success.  And although we may know that the path to success must be paved by “people”, success will only be marked by the achievement of results… the realization of benefits.  As an entrepreneurial finance prof used to say “It’s in the numbers!” (actually he said “numbahs” but that’s a story for another day).  And that, my friends and colleagues, is the only thing that should matter… for you and your clients.

Creating a sense of urgency is a necessity if you are to implement successful change in your business. Why? Well, for starters, a sense of urgency from a C-level sponsor creates the initial boost needed to give birth to a new initiative. That boost can help ensure the project kicks off on the right foot (strong sponsorship and commitment, proper funding, and the right resources dedicated to the project). It can also provide a kick in the pants where needed.

But most of all, in my experience, a sense of urgency creates energy. It creates an atmosphere that motivates people. It brings excitement. It creates something to connect to and gather around. A sense of urgency also inspires us to do something, to do it better, to do it smarter, to do it now!

Great — so how do you create a sense of urgency? I like to use business cases or cost-benefit analyses. Business leaders like, no scratch that, they need to understand the analytical rationale for agreeing to pursue something new — a new product, a new market, a new system, a new process… A business case helps you to articulate what’s happening in your business, what needs to change, how it ought to be changed, the benefits of doing it, and the costs to get there (giving you some semblance of an ROI). Granted, high-level estimates often leave much to be desired but a business case can get people excited… create belief in the story and form the basis for a sense of urgency to do something about it.

John Kotter, author of Leading Change and a pre-eminent authority on organizational transformation, believes (and I happen to agree) creating a sense of urgency is critical to successful change. The video below is a 2008 interview with Kotter in which he gives his insights on urgency and how to create it… Take a look.

It was a Friday in July of 2006; it was about 1pm on a hot and humid day in greater Boston.  I was just finishing my 12th consecutive month of weekly travel (and feeling a little irritable).  I was the change leader for a very large CRM implementation.  Bill was the Program Director, Bob was the Business Lead and Tony was the Partner from our integration partner.  “You can’t play Jenga with a house of cards,” remarked Bob… (reminder below)

The back story… We were in month 16 of an 18-month odyssey to bring a new CRM system to 5000 professionals located in every corner of the world.  In many ways, the project was a success story.  We had strong sponsorship.  We had (mostly) adequate funding.  We had (moderately) a solid team.  We had excellent engagement and commitment from stakeholders, especially from our field organization (probably the best I’ve ever been involved with).  System development, on the other hand, had been bumpy; forever behind schedule.

On the Friday morning before we’re scheduled to kick-off end-user training in London and Munich… we’re notified that our training environment (shoddily built by the way) has crashed.  They’re confident they can get it back online in time for training on Monday.  What do you do?  (note: this was not the first environment issue this project had experienced).

The discussion we’re having is (A) what to do about next week and (B) what to do… period… about training.  Our training program was developed on a model of direct practice in the system.

“You can’t play Jenga with a house of cards.”

The system and its instability was the house of cards…

I was extremely “bearish” on this system.  Had been for some time.  There was always something problematic with it… And we’d gotten a big black eye during our train-the-trainer program when we reluctantly used the development environment to conduct hands-on training. I had the pleasure of being in a classroom full of senior folks in Paris when our system crapped out.  Sorry doesn’t really cut it.

As the leader of the change team, the front line to the users, my team and I were feeling the wrath of anxious users who’d been burned by IT projects before.

So what did we do?…We cancelled the next week’s training… another mis-step would have erased what little confidence our users had in the system.  As I said, they’d been burned before by past projects.  That would have been a disaster for the $30M program.

Early the next week, after 72-hours of work by our tech team, we made what would turn out to be the best under pressure decision we made on the project.  While our tech guys were saying “everything should now be fine,” we weren’t convinced.  We scrapped the entire 5-week training program and set out on a plan “B”.  In short — 2 words: do over.

We replaced an instructor-led, classroom-based model with a completely web-based program.  In the span of a few days, we developed a “good enough” product to bring to the masses.  And build a new support model to provide coaching and assistance — user-led training isn’t as rich in content so we expected more support would be needed by our users.

It was a tremendous collaborative effort between business people, subject matter experts, IT folks, our trainers, extended project team, power users and our core team.  And, to paraphrase my now “former” brother-in-law… “it all worked out.” (it didn’t for him… hence the “former“).

Reasons for success:  (1) we gathered as much information as we could in the short time we had, (2) we were rational about what “could” be done – we did not try to be heroic (like many project teams do when faced with a critical issue), (3) we were honest with our stakeholders about what happened and how we would fix it (and we apologized to them for the inconvenience our issues had caused them and their teams), (4) we worked day and night to make it right, and (5) we thanked and rewarded the team of people who made it happen.  I had a lot of thank yous to our process leads, their teams, our consultants, and my team…

As with anything related to change – you have to put people first.  If you do that, and always do it, a lot of good things fall into place.  And while you still have a lot of work to do, you’ve got people working together toward the goal.