Leadership & Culture Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Neel, welcome.

Neel Doshi
Pete, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me too. I’m excited to talk culture. Could you kick us off with something strikingly surprising and counterintuitive that you know and have learned about culture that most don’t?

Neel Doshi
Yeah, absolutely. The core of our research has landed on this realization that, fundamentally, culture is about motivation. And to unpack motivation, you have to understand what motivates people. To unpack that question, what you realize is that actually fundamentally only six motives, reasons why people do things. Motives are the root of motivation.

The first is play, you do something because you enjoy doing it, it’s fun. The second is purpose, you do something because you believe your contribution matters, what you’re doing matters. The next is potential, you think it’s building up to something that’s important. The next is emotional pressure. Think about when maybe you guilted someone into doing something. Well, that’s an example of emotional pressure. You’re acting on someone’s identity to get them to take an action. Economic pressure, you’re trying to chase reward or avoid punishment. Or inertia, you’re just now going through motions.

What we’ve realized, and we can prove this all day long, is that when a culture maximizes play, purpose, and potential, you get outlier performance. When it does the opposite, maximizes emotional pressure, economic pressure, and inertia, you get fairly lousy performance.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Wow, check it out, there’s so much there right off the bat. Thank you, Neel.

Neel Doshi
There’s a lot there.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, boy, there’s so much to get into because it feels right. Because, naturally, when I get a set of categories, I want to try to find the counterexample, like, “Oh, what about this?” but it seems like that’s holding together pretty well. Anytime that I do something that’s kind of what’s behind it, and I’m having a hard time thinking of anything I do that doesn’t fit in there. So, very nice.

Neel Doshi
You know what’s funny, Pete, like you say that, it’s hard to find the counterexample, but at the same time you look at the average company and they don’t work this way, which I think is a very interesting paradox because when you hear this research, and you say this really resonates. It kind of has to be true. Like, it follows my intuition, it follows my life experience, but then why do we look at our teams, our companies, ourselves, and not manage this?

I’ll give you two examples which I think you’ll find interesting because I think your pursuit of the counterexample is fascinating. We spent many years helping to transform the performance model of one of the world’s biggest hedge funds. And I remember in the opening conversations, I was talking to the founder of this hedge fund who is wildly successful, he’s made more money than 99.99999% of humanity, and the rumor had it that was when he was on vacation, he’d bring an IT team with him to set up his nine-screen Bloomberg Terminal in the hotel room next to his.

And he says, “Neel, okay, I respect your work. I loved your book, but play, really? Like, do you really think that’s a driver of performance?” And so, I asked him, “Why do you bring an IT team on vacation and set up a nine-screen Bloomberg Terminal when you’ve already made more money than humanity?” And he said, “Well, it’s because it’s fun.”

And I said, “Okay, that is what made you the most successful person in your industry, and you don’t think that applies to any other human being?” And that really clicked for him.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, I’ll tell you, trading can be crazy fun, too fun at times, so I’m resonating there. So, play, yes, it’s just fun. And when you say corporations aren’t doing this, you mean they’re just sort of ignoring it entirely, or they’re only thinking, “Hey, you know, it’s a job, there’s a compensation, you need money, therefore, we’re fine here,” and that’s about the extent of it?

Neel Doshi
Yeah, I think that’s more or less it. Like, a common question and answer I often see and have, so I talk to an executive or CEO, and usually it’s because they read our book, they asked me to come talk to their team or their company, and I’ll say at this point, “Do you doubt that motivation drives performance because that feels pretty intuitive, I would imagine for most people, that we kind of know that the more motivated we are, the better we perform?”

So, that’s an easy one, like, “Yes, of course, I know that motivation drives performance.” “All right, in your company, do you manage motivation?” “No, not really.” Okay, so that’s thing number one. Thing number two is exactly what you just said, Pete, like when you think about how you manage motivation what are you doing?

And, generally, what companies have put into place are systems that create emotional pressure and economic pressure and often inertia. So, they’re not just not managing it, they’re managing it in the opposite direction of how it should be managed.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. Well, could you perhaps bring this to life a little bit in terms of a tale with a culture transformed? What were things like? What did you go do? And then what happened?

Neel Doshi
One that played out in the news not long ago was the issues that was manifesting in the retail banking industry, specifically, with Wells Fargo’s fake account scandal. Like, if you remember, this is now circa, like, 2014 or something like that, Wells Fargo hit the news for ultimately creating on the order of three to four million fake accounts. Now, that’s amazing, by the way. Just think about the volume of that, like three and a half million fake accounts.

Pete Mockaitis
There must be some motivation behind that effort.

Neel Doshi
Yeah, exactly. You got to want that. Now, the thing about this is when that situation was unpacked, the fundamental reason why was because they were using pressure to drive performance, emotional and economic. And so, as a result, you get phenomenon like check-the-box behavior and cheating.

So, a different financial institution approached us, and I’ll never forget what the CEO said, literally, these are the words he said. He said, “We know in our industry how to create mercenaries. We have no idea how to create missionaries. So, what do we do?”

And so, I said, “It’ll be easier for me to show than tell.” And he said, “We’ve got lots and lots and lots of branches. Why don’t you take a dozen of them, do whatever you want? Our analysts will measure them champion-challenger style so that we can see, did what you do actually have performance.” So, here’s what we did. First, we eliminated the pressures.

When you looked at these institutions, these branches before, they used to have this weekly high-pressure call. Like, the goal of a call was to make you feel bad about your performance. I mean, if you really observed the call as an anthropologist might, you have to conclude that is the purpose of this, to create pressure. Their systems were about pressure. The way they thought about compensation, the degree to which your comp was commission-based, for example, the degree to which your promotion was based on metrics, all of this was essentially a system designed to drive performance through pressure.

The first thing we did is we got rid of all that. We got rid of pay-for-performance, we got rid of the high-pressure conversations, and what we replaced it with was a system that was really about creating play and purpose. Now, what does that look like? Think about the times where you felt real play in your work. Like, my guess is what it felt like was you were chewing on a new problem, it was really interesting, it was filling you with curiosity, maybe you had the opportunity to learn something or experiment in some way.

These are all precursors for growth. Fundamentally, if you think about the opposite of play, it’s boredom, and so it really tells you that play is highly attached to novelty. So, what we did was we put into place a set of practices, rhythms, measurement systems that were about play and purpose. So, for example, in our future state branches, every week, every branch would lay out the problems they want to solve. These aren’t goals. These aren’t financial metrics. These are just problems they want to solve.

And the ask of every person is to come up with ideas, and as a team decide which ideas we’re going to experiment with. They just ran that rhythm every week. It was fun. Like, when you start to understand the problems that we’re trying to solve, “Well, this is really interesting, and I can come up with my own ideas? That’s really interesting. And as a team, we’re going to help improve and choose ideas to experiment? Well, that’s interesting. And I’m going to actually run experiments? Well, that’s really interesting, too.”

That is one of about five different tactics we put into place, probably the most powerful one, and immediately, you saw a bunch of changes happen. You saw everyone start to care about performance without all the pressure, because they start to view it as a game. You start to see everyone create more ideas. As they created more ideas, their sense of ownership increased. As their sense of ownership increased, that casts a halo on all of their work. All of their performance increases.

We’re measuring motivation as we go, so their motivation is increasing. Then ultimately, they were measuring performance, and what they found was productivity, customer satisfaction, and sales all increased, and that was after eliminating the pressure systems.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Neel, that’s so cool and beautiful, that notion of play, like, “Yes, that stuff is fun.” And that’s what they say, I’m thinking about in Silicon Valley, in terms of, “Well, if you want to attract the top talent, the most brilliant software engineers, the top thing is not the foosball table or the compensation. It’s like, ‘Are you giving them interesting problems they get to solve?’”

It’s, like, they’re playing. They’re using their brain like, “Huh, how would we do that?” And then they get to try some things, experiment, see if they worked, vibe with other talented, sharp people who push them so they’re learning and growing and trying new things. And then in the course of doing it, they actually care about the metrics.

And I’m also thinking about a time, I coordinated a couple youth leadership conferences, and I was really big—because I used to work at Bain—so I was big on the Net Promoter Score, like, “What is the satisfaction of our students who are attending these?” And so, I had tracked it from the previous year, and everyone was a volunteer, so with my team, my staff. I didn’t have any economic anything over them.

But we were just thinking, “Hey, how can we make just a really amazing experience? Last year was great, but can we make an experience that’s even better?” And so, we had all these ideas, “Well, we could try this. We could try that. Well, maybe let’s watch out for how we do this. Get some more outside time, mix things up, make this interact.” So, we had all these ideas, and we were playing with them.

And then I thought nobody else really would care about this Net Promoter Score metric all that much, because, like, hey, I work in Bain, and I’m a numbers dork. And so, I remember I told my buddy, Graham, a fellow volunteer, he’s like, “Our Net Promoter Score is higher than last year by like 20 points!” And he said, “YES!”

He was so jazzed! Like, other people were in the room, like, startled. Like, he has just told we won the lottery or something, and he gave me a huge bear hug, and I was like, “Oh, I didn’t expect you to care about my dorky little number nearly this much, but you did because we were playing, and then as you’re as you’re playing, you’re invested and you care about the performance and the winning, even though I didn’t say, ‘Now, Graham, if we don’t boost our Net Promoter Score then this was a failure.’”

Neel Doshi
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Or, “I’m taking you out for drinks.” There was none of that.

Neel Doshi
Exactly. You know, Pete, what you’re raising is a really important misconception I often find in our research. Well, people ask me, “So, Neel, are you saying metrics are bad?” “The scoreboard can make a game more fun. You often need the scoreboard to make the game fun. The problem is not the metrics. The problem is you weaponized the metric. You made people feel bad about it. You used it to create pressure.”

If you set up a game like you just did, you set up a game, you had a scoreboard for the game, you didn’t put any pressure against the scoreboard, but you encouraged experimentation, you encouraged thinking, problem solving, well, now the whole thing is fun, and you feel a great deal of ownership for that.

And so, in a lot of these systems, what you find is companies are using their measurements the wrong way. The irony is, like, you see goal systems in companies, and you ask, “Well, what is the purpose of a goal system? Like, why are you doing this?” And, generally, if you’re really thinking about it, it’s two things, “I’m using it to create focus and alignment, and motivation.”

But it’s the second one that often gets completely forgotten, and so, you see companies with goal systems that are actually creating a great deal of pressure, negative motivation. And what you described is a perfect example of the opposite.

Pete Mockaitis
And I want to back it up all the way to almost your first sentence, when you say, “Culture is about motivation.” That seems to really cut to the core of things, because so often with culture, we say, “Oh, is it more of a top-down or is it a bottom-up or distributed?” So, we think of all these sorts of domains by which we might categorize or put into types different sorts of culture, “Is it formal or is it informal? And then how does that show up with the dress code or the artifacts that are put…?”

So, usually, in these sorts of almost generic textbook conversations about culture, that’s sort of what we go to. But I like how you’re getting after culture is about motivation in terms of, fundamentally, “Do all of these things make folks more into doing their finest work, and making things happen? Or, are they more so stifling?” And I guess there’s a little bit to be said for different personalities and individual preferences there, but it seems like you’re really pointing out some universals that cut across whatever my personal proclivities are.

Neel Doshi
Yeah, a hundred percent. When I started this research, which is almost three decades ago now, if you ask somebody, “What’s the recipe for building a high-performing culture?” you’d have been given the answer, “Just copy GE.” And that didn’t work for them, as you see playing out these days. That “Copy this other company” is, essentially, we don’t understand the root cause, so we’re kind of guessing. We’re guessing at patterns that may or may not fit.

The root cause is, fundamentally, motivation. So, all of these attributes of an organization’s operating system, like centralized, decentralized, remote work, not remote work, like all these attributes are the symptoms at the edges. The key is we can make a lot of those attributes work. You can make an entirely remote-based company super highly motivating. You can make an in-person one super highly motivating. You can make one that leans more towards centralized, more towards decentralized.

You can get these dynamics right, but what you have to understand is that the fundamental thing you have to solve for is “Is everyone motivated the right way?” And then you realize there’s actually a lot of flexibility in how you build that machine.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve heard a bit about play. Can you unpack purpose and potential for us?

Neel Doshi
Purpose is probably, I’d argue, maybe one of the most misunderstood. So, play, the misunderstanding is ping pong tables, like, “I want to build a high-play culture, so I give ping pong tables.” No, that’s not it. It has to come from the work. Purpose has a similar problem, where a lot of people believe that purpose comes from our mission statement, like, “I have this big grandiose mission statement, we put it on the walls, we put it on the mouse pads, we put it on the screensavers, and that somehow imbues purpose.” Not really.

Like, the better way of thinking about purpose is its opposite. Like, if the opposite of play is boredom, the best opposite of purpose that I’ve found is fungibility. You feel fungible. You feel like a cog in the machine. Because even if the machine is incredibly purposeful, if you are a cog in that machine, you will not feel the purpose motive, and that’s a very important distinction that people don’t quite understand. I’ll give you an example of this.

I was working once in a performance transformation of a really cool, fast-growing tech company, And I was sitting down with the CTO, and I said to the CTO, “I’ve noticed that you’ve set up a model with the engineers where they are quite fungible.” And he says, “I did that intentionally.” He says, “You know, Silicon Valley, low retention rates, lots of attrition, I need to make sure I don’t have business continuity problems so I’ve made them all fungible.”

And I said, “By making them all fungible, you’ve increased your attrition rate because they don’t have that purpose motive. They don’t feel like they matter. They don’t feel like their work matters, their contribution matters. It’s about personal purpose.” And that’s the thing companies really miss on the purpose motive. It’s you feel like your contribution matters every day, day in, day out. If you don’t go to work that day, outcomes that you care about won’t happen.

Another example of that is think about the modern-day call center, where you’re sitting in that call center, you’re plugged into a phone system, and once your one call ends, you hear a beep in your earphone, customer immediately starts talking, and let’s say you have to take a break, you just kind of log out, no big deal. All the calls get routed to someone else.

You are a definitional cog in the machine at that point. You don’t really feel like your contribution matters. If you log out, no big deal, “No big deal. There’s no stakes to my work.” In that world, you don’t feel the purpose motive.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m hearing you. It’s interesting because, on the one hand, that really resonates. And on the other hand, there is kind of always a vast population of people who could do what we are doing. So, it’s like an individual person has talents and skills and abilities and is fun and special and unique as a miraculous creation. But also, it’s like, just as the call center employee could be swapped in for another call center employee, so too could the software engineer. So, maybe let’s get a little bit clearer on the stakes. It’s like outcomes they care about will not be advanced if they don’t show up to work.

Neel Doshi
I totally hear you. Like, on some level, aren’t we all replaceable? Yeah, totally. It doesn’t mean that a company has to make you feel that way. Like, let me give you a simple example. Toyota. Toyota does this incredibly well on the automobile assembly line. So, if you think about an automobile assembly line, how could that not be cogs in the machine? Like, you’re standing there, this chassis kind of rolls up in front of you, you maybe bolt a door on, it rolls away. How do you not feel fungible? How do you not feel like a cog in the machine?

What Toyota does, Toyota has a very deep and interesting set of beliefs, which turn out to be highly accurate. Their beliefs stem from the realization that there’s really two types of performance. One type is called tactical, the other is called adaptive. Definitional opposites. Tactical is how well you stick to your plan. Adaptive is how well you don’t stick to your plan. You can think of a tactical as convergence, adaptive is about divergence. Definitional opposites.

So, the Toyota line worker who’s just standing there just mindlessly plugging the bolt in, that’s all the tactical performance side of the job. What Toyota realizes is that there are so many possibilities for improvement on an automobile assembly line, they can’t even really compute it. That every job could be done better, every part could show up broken, every supply chain could have an issue, and what they want is they want their line workers to be as adaptive as possible, and they’ve built that into their system.

So, imagine you’re that guy, you’re bolting the door on that car, and you have an idea. It could be any idea. It could be to improve your performance in any way. You reach up above your station, and there’s this yellow cord hanging from the top called the Andon cord. You pull that cord, your line manager comes up to you and says, “What’s your idea?” You say, “Well, if my tool was shaped a little bit differently, I could do this job better, cheaper, faster, safer.” Your line manager is kind of jotting it down on a clipboard.

In your team are machinists whose SLA, their agreement to you, is to take your idea and hack together something that you can try within 24 hours. They bring it back to you, you try it. If it works better, they scale it up. If it doesn’t work better, no big deal. There’s a bit more nuance to this process. I’m kind of simplifying it a bit. But the gist of it is they are saying to every line worker, “Your ideas matter.” And by doing so, they’ve emphasized the adaptive side of their job, where your unique thoughts are important, your unique ideas are important.

And so, they’ve essentially built a system that emphasizes the part of the job that requires you to think and, actually, de-emphasizes the part of the job that doesn’t. A lot of companies get this completely wrong. Like, the biggest thing I’ve seen as a mistake is they think that Toyota’s system is a suggestion box. So, like, Pete puts an idea in a suggestion box and some group of folks in corporate think about it.

This is not at all what Toyota has done, “It’s Pete’s idea. We’re arming Pete with the tools to experiment. Pete is going to see if his idea worked or not. Pete is going to be the one that learns from it.” That is a, fundamentally, different model than most organizations could even wrap their heads around. And so, not only is that building your sense of play, it’s building your sense of purpose also.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it just sounds sort of fun. I kind of want to hop on a Toyota line right now and see what ideas come to mind.

Neel Doshi
This is what’s remarkable about what they’ve done. They’ve taken a job that most managers would have said is motivationally irredeemable. You just cannot make this job motivating. They’ve taken that job and they’ve pulled those levers as hard as anyone could possibly pull them to great success in terms of both productivity in factories and quality.

Pete Mockaitis
Now you’ve got a turn of a phrase, “the total motivation factor.” Can you define that for us? And this is actually a number that could be calculated.

Neel Doshi
So, if you start with that foundational research that proves that if an organization creates more play, more purpose, more potential, and less emotional pressure, less economic pressure, and less inertia, you’ll get to maximum performance outcomes. Now, it turns out that performance is actually shockingly hard to measure. You can measure the tactical side of performance, like, “How many cars do we make?” It’s hard to measure the adaptive side.

Because how do I measure, “Did you come up with a good idea or a bad idea? Or did you experiment? Did you not experiment? Did you see a problem? Did you not see a problem?” Like, all of the adaptive side of work is actually very, very difficult to measure.

But what we found is motivation is actually not difficult to measure. And what we recommend to most organizations is measure motivation. If you know that it’s a root of performance, measure it, and that measurement essentially measures the degree to which you feel play, purpose, and potential. Those are positive to the number. The degree to which you feel emotional pressure, economic pressure, or inertia, those are negative to the number, and that number is the total motivation factor. Relatively easy to measure, relatively easy to calculate, highly predictive of performance.

And so, much like you found with Net Promoter Score and your example with your volunteers, the act of measuring something as long as you don’t put pressure against it actually signals you value it. Oftentimes, in more organizations, what you measure is the strongest signal of what you value. And so, measure it, you’re signaling you value it, you’re signaling you want people to think and experiment against it. It starts to become a self-fulfilling prophecy of improvement at that point.

Pete Mockaitis
So, with the measuring, is it just sort of surveys? Or how is that figure actually generated?

Neel Doshi
There’s a few implements. I’ll describe to you our most cutting-edge implement. Because the challenge is, what we found is the act of measuring something affects the thing that you’re measuring. There is certainly a quantum physics aspect to human measurement.

So, for example, a very simple example, let’s say I had a survey for an organization that had a question that was, “Pete, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you hate your CEO?” Like, obviously, no one’s going to put that, but let’s say I wrote that question. Well, all of a sudden, I’m priming you to think a certain way. The question itself is priming a thought process.

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, it didn’t even occur to me to hate my CEO. Well, now that you mentioned it, a little bit.”

Neel Doshi
You know what the funny thing is, I’m kind of giving you an absurd example, but I see more subtle versions of that exist in organizations’ measurement systems. In the spirit of trying to measure negativity, they often prime negativity, which I find to be really fascinating. Like, you’re trying to build an organization where people have agency. They’re trying to affect that… agency is fundamentally an attribute of play and purpose. You can’t really have a play and purpose without agency.

So, you’re trying to create these cultures of agency, these cultures of positivity, hope, optimism, and then you have instruments that actually are priming the opposite, like instruments that are saying, “Pete, you have no agency. The only way you can affect change is to anonymously complain to our executive team.” And so, what we find is that the instrument has a way stronger effect than people think on the mindset the questions themselves are creating, which is wild when you kind of think about that.

Now, so our cutting-edge instruments on this, they’re not just about measuring motivation. The instrument itself is about creating it. The act of filling out the instrument creates motivation. So, there’s a few tricks that we have. There’s probably like a hundred tricks that we’ve kind of built into our cutting edge of measurement, but I’ll give you one specific one.

When we measure motivation using our best implements, we won’t say, “Pete, how do you feel about your work?” What we say is, “Pete, think about your next quarter, the quarter ahead of you. And as you think ahead, do you see that work as it’s going to be fun and interesting, or do you see it as boring? Do you see that you will have a lot of personal impact, or do you see that you won’t?” So, play and purpose, and we kind of go through all the motives that way.

But by making this forward-looking, making this about the work you haven’t done yet, the measurement doesn’t become about complaining. It becomes a diagnostic to improve something that hasn’t happened yet. It becomes about anticipation. Very simple example of how our instruments are designed to avoid the problem of fomenting complainers. But that’s simply that. What we do is we say to an organization, “Every single team, every quarter, should do a health check. That health check is not a survey you do on your own. It’s a conversation you do as a team.”

And in that conversation, we suggest “The first 10 minutes, everyone does fill out this questionnaire, this diagnostic. You’re doing that first 10 minutes on your own. You immediately, as a team, get the results, and the results guide you through a conversation as a team to commit to something to change.” Because a lot of times, measurement, what’s the point if it doesn’t lead to action? And on these topics, a lot of teams are ill-equipped to take action. They just don’t know.

They don’t know what degrees of freedom they have. They don’t know what the tools are. And so, what we do is we, essentially, say, “Every quarter, every team, do this health check. First 10 minutes, we’ll do this positively priming diagnostic. The next hour and 20 minutes, we’re going to commit to changes we’re going to make in the next quarter based on it.” And that instrument not just measures, it puts you on the path to improvement more or less automatically.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Okay. Well, Neel, tell me, are there any other key do’s and don’ts when it comes to motivation and culture? And I’m thinking, specifically, even for individual contributors who are thinking, “Oh, I don’t know. This sounds like some really cool systems I wish were in place in my organization. But what can I do? Or maybe, how might I be able to hack my own work to experience more play and purpose in it?”

Neel Doshi
Start with yourself. That’s the easiest place to start. What we recommend to folks is, first, just start to understand the science of motivation. You can read Primed to Perform, we have a bunch of other articles. There are a lot of ways to kind of get your head around understanding the science of motivation. That alone is an important first step as an individual, because you want to start to ask yourself, “Am I feeling play in my work? Am I feeling purpose?” That’s kind of step number one.

Step number two is there are levers that you can pull on your own. So, for example, a lot of organizations, as we talked about earlier, their mechanism of alignment is usually just a number, like, your goal. It would be the equivalent of, imagine if I’m coaching a basketball team, and I say, “Okay, guys, here’s your goal. Get 100 points. I’ll see you guys after the game.” A lot of companies actually work that way, which makes very little sense when you think about it.

Like, the goal was the easy part. The strategy is the hard part. The problems to solve are the hard part, like, “Why am I, essentially, not coaching any of that?” So, the second step I’d say to an individual is take a step back from the systems of your company. Maybe the systems are creating pressure. Take a step back from them.

Ask yourself, what problems could you solve in the next month or two that you think will be valuable to your customer, to your team. Really start to understand those problems and start to come up with ideas against them. Just get yourself into a mindset of falling in love with the problem you have to solve, even if your company hasn’t made that easy.

The third thing I would say is get your team to learn the science of motivation, because teams have a lot more degrees of freedom than they think. Individuals, typically, have the least amounts of net degrees of freedom in an organization, but teams have way more than most teams exercise. Teams can do a lot to actually affect their rhythms, their habits, how they think about problem-solving, how they think about novelty and creativity. Lots of that is owned locally.

In fact, what a lot of companies don’t realize is, if you think about motivation as a construct for a moment, play is inherently local. Like, if you’re a large organization, like imagine you’re JP Morgan Chase, there’s very little that Jamie Dimon can do to create play in a working team because it’s inherently a local phenomenon. Purpose is also inherently a local phenomenon.

And so, as a result, when you measure motivation out, a majority of that motivation that’s controllable by the organization, about two-thirds of it, is actually controlled at the team level. Yet, most organizations don’t manage that. So, the third thing I’d suggest, even if you’re an individual kind of listening to this or reading our book, get your team to start to learn how to do this. Get your team to start to experiment in ways that they can improve themselves, and you’ll be surprised by how much a team can actually do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And as we start to imagine, “Okay, we want more play and we’re going to find interesting problems and we’re going to just go after them,” are there some particular pointers that make that effective or not so effective?

Neel Doshi
I’d say a couple of things. One, any team can start to get into the rhythm of a health check. You don’t need your company to do that for you. Like, any team could start to go down the path of measuring, having this conversation, coming up with ways to improve. We have loads of tools for this. Like, they’re super easy to start to experiment with. Like if you’re kind of in that path and you want easy first steps, what I’d recommend is go to Factor.ai and do a health check as a team. Simple as that.

The second thing I’d suggest, have a habit in your team where you take whatever goals that have been given to you and you turn it into problem statements. It’s very simple, but like, let’s say you said, “We want to increase Net Promoter Score of our volunteer group. Okay, what are the three problems that we might want to solve in the next quarter that could get us there?”

Just do that. Just keep doing that every single week. Turn your goals into problems to solve. Make that muscle memory. Make that habit. You start to do that, mindset changes really quickly. You start to realize, “These aren’t pressure systems. Like, I actually have a lot of agency and control.” That’s the second thing I’d do. Like, if I’m transforming any organization, those first two steps are usually our first two steps.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, Neel, tell me anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Neel Doshi
The thing that I often find organizations asking is, “Is this easy?” because everyone’s under pressure, executives are under pressure, CEOs are under pressure. A lot of their pressure is usually on short-term time horizons. And so, there’s often a temptation to say, “Well, I could just use pressure for the next quarter to get that bump that I need to get, and maybe like we deal with this in a few years.”

The funny thing is, at this point, it is just as easy to motivate a performance lift the right way as it is to motivate a performance lift the wrong way. It is just as easy to do it, and you just have to learn a new technique. And so, the one thing I want to make sure every person, every individual contributor, manager, leader, CEO realizes, you want the short-term lift? You can get it by motivating people the right way. You don’t have to motivate people the wrong way to get it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Neel Doshi
I’ll give you one that we often use in our own work, because people come to us and they often say, “Neel, my engagement levels are low, like the engagement scores are low. How do I grow engagement? What’s the trick? What’s the perk? What’s the next ping pong table?” Simple answer. If you want your people to be engaged in their work, make their work engaging. That’s it, full stop. The other one I find I’m often using in change management with companies is “You can’t wake up somebody who’s pretending to be asleep.” One of the biggest problems I find in a transformation is, often, we’ll work with CEOs who’ll say, “I want the outcome that you’re describing. I want the more adaptive organization. I want the higher motivated organization. That’s great.” Their existing systems typically are the problem, and their existing systems usually create a great deal of pressure for their middle managers.

So, the middle managers are usually under the weight of a lot of pressure, and that problem is that pressure makes you less adaptive, less likely to learn, less likely to experiment, less likely to try new things. And so, the ironic challenge of change into a high-performing organization is your high-pressure organization is the thing that thwarts change. That’s the irony of this whole thing. A lot of organizations will implement systems that will incentivize people to resist change.

And so, when we often work with an organization, what we’ll find is that there’ll be people that will say, “We can’t do this. We shouldn’t do this. Like, this isn’t the time to do this,” like, all sorts of change barriers, sometimes overt, sometimes passive, like passive-aggressive. Now, when you talk to those people individually, they’re not bad people.

Like, I worked with one, for example, where we’re doing this big transformation, and I’m sitting down with this person who started off as being someone that was resistant. And, in this meeting, he sits down and he says, “Neel, first of all, the transformation is going really well. Can I talk about my kids?” I’m like, “Sure, let’s talk about his kids.”

He says, “You know, Neel, before I learned your research and read your book, I was a high-pressure dad. All I would do is exert pressure on my kids.” And he said, “I found that they started avoiding me. They didn’t want to spend time with me. I’d come home from work; I’d see that they would scatter. Their grades weren’t very good. And so, we’re going through this transformation, I’m reading your book, and I thought, ‘I am that. I am that high-pressure dad.’”

So, he says to me, “What I did with my eldest son was, I said to him one day, ‘Hey, if you don’t have to go to school, what would you want to do?’ And I really listened, and he said, my son surprised me, he said, ‘I want to go to school. And here’s why, and here’s what I want to learn, and here’s what I want to get.’”

So, his strategy as a father shifted entirely from pressure on grades, for example, to, “I’m going to help you do the thing you want to do. I’m going to coach you, I’m going to mentor you, I’m going to support you on the things you want to do.” He said, “I started to do that. My kids stopped avoiding me. Their grades in every way went up. And, all of a sudden, my relationship has completely changed. I just want to thank you for that in this conversation.”

Now, my point in the story is the people that I often run into in organizations that are resisting change are not bad people. They’re byproducts of the system that the company has built around them. And so, the challenge is the system is causing people to pretend to be asleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Yeah. Thank you. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Neel Doshi
I’ll tell you one that I really adore. Researchers wanted to understand the impact of motivation in the wild, like a natural experiment. Like, is there something that happens in real life that they can actually see and measure?

So, what they found was an interesting case example with sugarcane farmers. So, sugarcane farmers, before their harvest, you can imagine that many of these folks are operating hand-to-mouth, and before their harvest, they have to put out a lot of cash because they’re not actually earning from it. So, before their harvest, most take out loans, most are hawking personal goods to fund their operation, feeling a great deal of pressure. Like, if the harvest goes bad, it’s a real problem for them, and after the harvest, loans are being paid back, their pressure is decreased.

So, the experiment they did was they took these sugarcane farmers, and pre-harvest and post-harvest, they put them through, essentially, a set of intelligence tests, like various forms of measuring cognitive aptitude, flexibility, etc. What they found was that the difference between intelligence for the same people, pre- and post-harvest, was about the difference between going from a 90th percentile on IQ to like a 30th percentile. Same person, just driven by pressure.

What you’re seeing there, by the way, is the vicious cycle of poverty. You’re under a great deal of pressure, economic pressure, like you’re having struggles to make ends meet, for example. Your economic pressure increases, your adaptability decreases. Therefore, your work performance decreases. Therefore, you perform worse, and it’s harder to get a job, and so you end up with a vicious cycle. This experiment clearly showed that, and not even in a laboratory setting, in like a real-life setting, which is one of the reasons why I love it so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And a favorite book?

Neel Doshi
Maybe rather than favorite, I’ll tell you what I’m reading that’s latest. I’m reading a book right now called Pattern Breakers. It’s by a set of seed-stage VCs in Silicon Valley, and they’re laying out the pattern of what they see in ideas that typically result in breakthrough growth. It’s a really good read, especially if you’re an organization that needs to build a culture of adaptive innovation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Neel Doshi
My favorite habit right now is bedtime with my kids. So, one of the things I’m doing these days, which I think is really fun, is I’ll have my kids come up with a bedtime story, and I’ll ask ChatGPT to make it like a rhyming epic. And so, the kids will write a little story, and it’ll be silly. My youngest is about four and a half, so her last story was about how she and her brother went to the beach, they got their foot stung.

They went to a doctor, they went back to the beach, and there were aliens there, and the aliens were messing up the beach, and they had to fix that problem. That was the story that she wanted to tell. So, I just plugged that into Chat GPT, got this long, rhyming epic of the story of “Sam and Cam in the Beach.” So, this has been my bedtime routine for the past few months. It’s just been a lot of fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Neel Doshi
Go to Factor.ai, you’ll see a lot of things there. You’ll see tools to measure your motivation to drive problem-solving your team, to actually just fully manage your teams. You’ll see our research. We publish new research, usually, every other week. So, you’ll see the latest thinking on things like remote work, or burnout, things that are affecting the workplace today, but go to Factor.ai and you’ll find all of that.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Pete Mockaitis
My final challenge is, at this stage of the game, you can find a job that motivates you the right way, or you can turn yours into motivates you the right way. Like, when I first entered the workforce, the reason why I studied this was I was so demotivated in my first job, I couldn’t even tell you why I was. I couldn’t even explain to you the reason that I was feeling demotivated, and I didn’t have the tools to fix that. I didn’t have the tools to understand that.

Thirty years later, we have the tools to understand it. We have the tools to fix it. So, my ask of everyone is if you’re feeling like you’re in a state of demotivation, don’t linger in that. Like, these are now solvable problems. Take a step. Learn more about it. You can fix this.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Neel, thank you. I wish you much peak performance.

Neel Doshi
Thanks, Pete. I really appreciate it.