Daniel H. Pink writes on why we do what we do when it comes to our work (h/t Delayed Echoes),
Business writers, myself included, have emptied many a toner cartridge opining on ‘management’. But rarely have we taken a step back to scrutinise the concept itself. We act as if it somehow emanated from nature or was delivered to us by God. In fact, management is something somebody invented. It is, as business thinker Gary Hamel says, a technology. And it’s a technology from the 1850s. British railways notwithstanding, there are very few technologies from the mid-19th century that we’re still using today.
Management is the ideal technology if you’re seeking compliance – getting people to do what you want them to do, the way you want them to do it. But in today’s workforce, which demands much more in the way of creative and conceptual capabilities, we don’t want compliance. We want engagement. And self-direction is a far better technology for engagement.
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This is one of the many aspects of our nature that separate us from donkeys. Yes, we do respond well to carrots and sticks in many circumstances. Yes, those second drive motivators are effective for certain tasks. But in the end, human beings are not simply smaller, slower, better-smelling donkeys. We have a third drive – the need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. That’s what makes us human. And increasingly, it is our humanity that makes us effective.
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