The intrinsic motivation exercise

For me, the best thing about being a manager is bringing together remarkable individuals and, through coaching and experimentation, molding them into remarkable teams. For an employee to do their best work, their work and role must be well aligned with their intrinsic motivations. This is more challenging than it might sound since many individuals don’t understand their own intrinsic motivations.

In my role as a manager, I created this exercise to help employees gain an understanding of their intrinsic motivations by answering three simple questions. Once a manager and employee have a shared understanding of the employee’s intrinsic motivations, the manager is in a better position to adapt the employee’s work and role to align well with their intrinsic motivations.

I wrote this blog entry to share this exercise with other managers, employees I directly manage, and individuals whom I mentor. I hope you find it helpful, and I welcome feedback.

Backgrounder: Intrinsic motivation

The first good explanation I found regarding the topic of intrinsic motivation was in Clayton Christensen’s “How Will You Measure Your Life?” In this book, Christensen applies his excellence with business theory to answer the question “how to be happy at work?” Key to this, of course, is intrinsic motivation.

Christensen introduces psychologist Frederick Herzberg’s two-factor theory to motivation, which proposes that a good work situation requires both of the following:

• Good hygiene: Fair pay, safe work environment, lack of bureaucracy, etc.
• Motivators: Challenging work, alignment of work with one’s values, recognition, personal and professional growth, etc.

Good hygiene is critically important and by no means easy, but it’s outside the scope of this article, so I won’t say more about it here.

In my experience, most managers don’t explicitly seek to understand employees’ intrinsic motivations (“motivators” in Herzberg’s terminology). They are either entirely oblivious or, in the best case, they merely have a high-level intuition, e.g. “Joe gets a kick out of exploring new technologies.” To that point, I have found that oftentimes the employees themselves don’t really understand their own intrinsic motivations.

I developed the “three questions” approach to better help us some level of insight and shared understanding, albeit imperfect, of their intrinsic motivations.

The three questions

The three questions loosely deal with past, present, and future, and attempt to nudge the employee past abstract thoughts and towards concreteness.

These are the questions:

1. Describe a concrete experience where you felt extremely engaged and happy with a piece of work you contributed to (in a team setting)
2. What does your ideal day look like?
3. What would you love to be doing two years from now?

Next I’ll discuss these questions in some detail as well as how I integrate the findings into the work environment.

1. Describe a concrete experience where you felt extremely engaged and happy with a piece of work you contributed to (in a team setting)

In this question, I want the employee to recall a real, concrete experience where they felt a keen sense of engagement. This helps get us past vague ideals, e.g. “working with smart people,” and to rather describe an actual experience where things went great. I add the “team setting” qualifier based on my belief that delivering great outcomes requires a motivated, interdisciplinary, diverse team, vs. a brilliant individual flying solo.

When reviewing this answer, I make sure we understand not just what went well but what characteristics of the situation made it special and engaging.

The answer to this question does not inform any direct action, but I find it helps the employee get into a good mindset for the next two questions that are directly actionable.

2. What does your ideal day look like?

I ask this question to understand an employee’s preferences to weekly and daily rhythms, meetings, individual work, group work, etc.

It need not merely focus on work matters. Some employees have mentioned that they value getting a good night’s sleep which will lead me to be careful never to schedule a meeting before a certain time, e.g. before 9 or 10am.

One recurring answer I hear is that these knowledge workers often struggle to find chunks of uninterrupted time that allows them to perform deep work. As their manager, I can proactively direct them to block regular, significant chunks of time for this sort of work and then I can use my position of privilege for good and protect these chunks of time for them from unsympathetic outsiders.

These may seem like small things, but in my experience people genuinely appreciate when you take explicit action to support their wellbeing and productivity — it’s unfortunately rare.

3. What would you love to be doing two years from now?

This question helps me understand an employee’s near-term aspirations in a timeframe where I can directly support them to move towards this future state.

Next I look for win-wins where their leveling-up will help them make a bigger, more positive contribution to our desired outcomes. We then build an integrated learning plan that includes a combination of on-the-job experiences, self-study (books, articles, etc.), mentoring, conferences, etc..

Finally, the fact that we’ve been discussing intrinsic motivations in a concrete way helps us avoid the trap of moving towards a next role that would move them away from their intrinsic motivations because of some extrinsic factor. E.g. a brilliant individually contributor engineer might initially claim that they wish to become a manager due to perceived higher status, but then realize that the additional meetings, HR issues, etc. would be out of sync with their intrinsic motivations, resulting in unhappiness all around and perhaps failure.

Logistics

I introduce and explain these questions during an early 1–1, but ask the employee not to rush to answers. I suggest that they consider the questions and their answers for several weeks, perhaps going offline once or twice in that time to jot down some initial thoughts before coming back to me with initial answers for discussion.

My experience is that most people don’t explicitly think about these sorts of deep matters—they are crowded out by mundane but important matters; I give them the time and space and permission to spend work time thinking through these important questions.

When they are ready, I ask them to provide their answers via a shared Box note that is only visible to the employee and me. I review the answers and we iterate a bit, e.g. if they were too abstract or if I need to ask clarifying questions.

When I feel like we’ve reached a concrete shared understanding, we take actions to help create an environment compatible with their intrinsic motivations and supportive of their growth goals. We checkpoint on these topics throughout the year. If I have the good fortune to work with an employee for a long period of time, I eventually ask them to redo the exercise after 18–24 months, since people’s mindsets and needs change over time.

Conclusion

I hope this technique is helpful to you as a manager, or even as an employee. If you see flaws in it, or know of better approaches or prior related writing, I hope you will share them below.

Acknowledgments

Thanks much to Barry O’Reilly and Chuck Brant for early feedback on a draft version of this article.