Healthcare leaders understand that the ability to drive an organization toward its goals lies in the ability of each level of management to motivate the level below it — to empower others to perform certain behaviors or meet certain benchmarks.
But how does a manager motivate?
Most research suggests that the answer lies in figuring out what external and intrinsic motivators are impactful for your employees.
But what motivators are impactful?
Answering that question is also complicated.
Management guru Daniel Pink, for example, has argued that external motivators aren't useful in driving employee performance. However, anyone who has offered a financial incentive to employees for meeting a certain benchmark and then sees improved performance on that benchmark would question that assertion. While we don't want to pay employees to perform (we want them to do it without dangling money or awards), many of us have seen it work.
Is providing external motivators bad? Does it take away from the more powerful instrisic motivators we so desire in our employees?
According to employee engagement expert Bill Sims, Jr., providing external and internal motivators aren't mutually exclusive. In an interview with me earlier this year, he discussed the idea:
"Pink believes that it will somehow rob you of your internal satisfaction for doing the job. If we applied his logic across the board, students should never be awarded college scholarships (because that will rob them of their desire to study). Brain surgeons should make no more than dental technicians, since they are robbed of their internal joy by being compensated for performance. The Pink logic doesn't really hold up here. The studies he quotes, many of them the work of Edward Deci, have been examined by other psychologists who have found that external positive reinforcement does increase performance, and it does so without any degradation of internal drive or motivation."
One might surmise then that managers can best motivate by tapping into both external and internal motivators.
How do we tap into intrinsic motivators? External ones are easy — give incentive money, create employee rewards, offer praise. Tapping into internal motivators is less cut and dried.
However, Heidi Grant Halvorson, PhD, associate director for the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School, suggests one element of intrinsic motivation is a concept called "relatedness." In a column for Harvard Business Review, she writes:
"The feeling of working together has indeed been shown to predict greater motivation, particularly intrinsic motivation, that magical elixir of interest, enjoyment, and engagement that brings with it the very best performance."
How does a manager create relatedness?
By allowing employees to work together in a team.
However, what if the employees can't really work in a team?
Good news, it doesn't really matter.
Writes Halvorson:
"So what we need is a way to give employees the feeling of working as a team, even when they technically aren't. And thanks to new research by Priyanka Carr and Greg Walton of Stanford University, we now know one powerful way to do this: simply saying the word 'together.'"
That's right. Simply using the world "together" when directing employees can create the feeling of a team.
In the study, the Stanford researchers asked participants to solve a puzzle. One group was told they were working on it "together" with another participant, even though they were in separate rooms. The others weren't cued with the magic word.
Guess what? The one word made a big difference. Explains Halvorson:
"The effects of this small manipulation were profound: participants in the psychologically together category worked 48% longer, solved more problems correctly, and had better recall for what they had seen. They also said that they felt less tired and depleted by the task. They also reported finding the puzzle more interesting when working together, and persisted longer because of this intrinsic motivation (rather than out of a sense of obligation to the team, which would be an extrinsic motivation)."
The single word taps into the intrinsic motivator of relatedness, and using it creates more motivated employees.
In the end, is it really true that managers can tap into both intrinsic and external motivators by just increasing the use of a few words?
Research would say so. "Together" taps into relatedness, which is an intrinsic motivator; "Great work" (or "Well done," if you prefer) provides positive reinforcement, which is an external motivator.
Well, that was easy.