When I criticize the command and control culture, many ask "But how does an organization have a direction and how are people motivated to do the right thing unless someone is in charge?"
I have been reading two books recently that have helped me find some answers that I can accept to this question. They are "Punished by Rewards - The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's and Praise and other Bribes" by Alfie Kohn and "Trust, the Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity" by Francis Fukyama. (Lots more detail and reviews via the links)
Kohn makes a strong case for rewards being counterproductive as they break community, taint the activity and become an end in themselves. Fukyama makes the case for how centralization creates helplessness, social atomization and social and economic failure and how people become most fulfilled and are most motivated by recognition in the context of a purpose and a community.
In the major part of this post I will extend these ideas and make the case for how blogging will drive the internal motivation that is strongest in us - having a voice that is recognized - and how it helps us make the choices in activity that makes any activity the most attractive. Finally I will talk about how these ideas can form the basis of how we can find another process for leadership other than command and control.
Kohn makes the point that while we all talk about teams, we don't really have them. We have instead "collections of individual relationships with the boss in which each individual is vying with each other for power, prestige, recognition and personal autonomy". So long as the boss is the focal point, we have a dysfunctional family.
Worse, most work in most traditional organizations has little real interest "Idleness, indifference and irresponsibility are healthy responses to absurd work" (Hertzberg) Most of what I see in most workplaces and schools is boring meaningless work. What people really want is to make a difference. Most organizations do not tie work into an important purpose. Most have no apparent purpose at all - merely an attachment to processes! After all what is the purpose of a school today? Is is surely not enabling each child to learn - mainly it is about obedience and control of children who increasingly only want to act out or to shut down. What is the purpose of say the retail arm of a bank to move more product - hardly a noble calling or one where there is an outcome that all can get around.
So as work has got more boring, most have brought in more rewards. Kohn's central idea is that extrinsic rewards put the focus on the reward and not the substance. We work at school to get a grade on a test not to learn. We work to get the bonus rather than to serve the customer - as we push harder to get the reward we annoy the customer. After all we are not working for them but to get our bonus and they can tell.
What we do for a reward, we drop as soon as the reward is no longer relevant. Want to get your child to stop doing something - give them a reward. After awhile stop giving the reward and see what will happen. They will stop because the activity has been tainted with the reward. Pay a kid to read and they will drop it when you stop paying them.
Most rewards set us aup in competition with others. We all go on about teams but they are impossible to have when you differentiate with rewrds. Too idealistic you say well here is a story about a high performing organization that works solely on the idea of real recognition and real teams.
Years ago I had dinner with the deputy Chief of the Toronto Fire Brigade. No one would say that this was a poorly performing organization. At the time I was designing a new incentive plan for CIBC. He told me of an entirely different way. The key point in fighting a fire is that you have to be able to rely on your team mate. Everything is set up to enhance brotherhood and trust. All firemen start at the bottom - no manager can parachute in. All have to spend several years as a fireman - pay goes up as a function of the technical skills that you have attained and have proved to your buddies that you can do. After several years you can if you want go for a management stream. Not everyone makes this choice. If you so choose, you have to pass a very rigorous exam. you will need coaching and often some of your buddies who don't want to move to manager (captain) will help you. Once you have passed you have to wait for a slot to open up. All managerial staff have proved themselves to their men and to each other. There is no incentive pay - the focus is on being trustworthy which means in practice that your buddies know that you will be there in person and with the right skills when the bad times arrive. Huge amounts of time are spent hanging out with each other. The pay is never that good and most firemen have second jobs but none want out. Few professions are as well respected - compare them to say teachers!
Firemen have a well founded identity in their peers and in the public. Teachers had this, but as they became a profession who lost their path - to educate - and became a baby sitting service for parents who no longer did their job as parents who socialize children - they have become among the most unhappy group at work today.
Fukyama adds to this. He shows that societies such as Russia and France that have had highly centralized governments or organizations such as the US automakers that have had highly authoritarian management have societies that are atomized, rule bound and helpless. Also societies with weak families and weak attachment to learning do very poorly such as in the inner cities in the US. "By contrast, the societies experiencing a high degree of social trust such as Japan, Germany and the US never experienced a prolonged experience of state power " Until now maybe in the US?)
I fear that PEI has itself become so dependent on government that most people cannot imagine doing things for themselves or cooperating with others. Highly atomized societies do have some community though and it tends to be found in crime. the Russian Mafia etc. Why? Because community has to appear somehow. Is this why at York there are such powerful radical groups?
Where Fukyama and Kohn come together is in how they see motivation. They see that it is recognition that is the primary driver for motivation. "every human being seeks to have his or her dignity recognized (i.e. evaluated at its proper worth by other human being.. This kind of recognition cannot be achieved by individuals; it can only comer about in a social context".
My bottom line? A purpose driven community that has a powerful and noble goal that extends beyond the self interest of the individual that uses social software such as blogging to make the connections and to create the feedback, trust and recognition that we need from our peers is the way to go organizationally.
