Imagine your great grandparents’ generation discovering a way of doing something that made much more sense than the alternative. Then imagine that this became reinforced by further evidence from your grandparents’ generation and then even more reinforced by your parents’ generation. You would think that this highly evidenced way of doing things would be the default. But that doesn’t seem to be the case when it comes to leadership.

Way back in the 1940s Kurt Lewin, a forefather of Organisational Psychology, said that there are two ways a leader can cultivate high performance.

If I asked you in the 1940s what you thought those two ways were, the chances you would probably say: “one is the ‘carrot’ approach and the other is the ‘stick’”. By carrot you would be thinking about incentivising and rewarding people for what they deliver. By stick you would probably be thinking about the leader reprimanding people when expectations weren’t met. 

However, Lewin explained that reward and reprimand are just two sides of the same coin. Both assume that the person is not motivated in the first place. It therefore falls on the leader to provide the motivation needed to get the job done.

Lewin pointed out that there is an alternative that may be a far better use of the leaders efforts. The alternative is to clear away any obstacles that are getting in the way of people achieving results. This approach assumes that the individual is motivated but that their capability to deliver is hampered by things that block their performance. Things including - bureaucracy, poor systems and processes, lack of resources, politics, lack of clarity, and your own examples, no doubt

Theory X and Theory Y

Douglas McGregor in the 1950s termed these two approaches Theory X and Theory Y respectively. Unfortunately, you can see that organisations still rely more on Theory X than Theory Y. This can be seen in golden handshakes and incentives used to lure people into joining an organisation, bonuses based on annual reviews and golden handcuffs that mean you can try to check out but you’ll never leave (cue a famous Eagles song!)

The argument for continuing to lead using Theory X has been challenged many times over the years.

In the 1960s Victor Vroom of Yale School of Management came up with one of the longest standing models of motivation, called Expectancy Theory. It proposed that people will put the effort into achieving something when they ‘expect’ their efforts to be worthwhile. To be worthwhile the person must feel confident they can achieve the goals that have been set for them. People will then only put in further effort if they feel they are getting some sort of reward for achieving these goals. And, most importantly, the rewards must be of value to them. When this cycle is broken the effort - performance continuum breaks down.

So, if performance goals are unclear, and the path to achieving them is continually blocked by factors outside of the person’s control, people’s willingness to keep putting in effort will be diminished. This suggests that the best thing a leader can do is to invest their time in working with their team to agree clear goals and then unblocking the path to success.

This need for clarity of expectations, freedom to take risks and leader support is is supported by one of the largest studies into Performance Management, carried out by The Corporate leadership Council in the early 2000s. 19000 employees and managers were monitored for 2 years from a diverse set of organisations (34), industries (seven), and countries (29). The aim was to consider which leadership behaviours had the biggest impact on employee performance.

One of the most effective drivers of performance over the 2-year period was employees understanding the performance standards expected of them. This one factor improved performance by 36%. Interestingly, another highly related driver, ‘Clearly communicates expectations’ had between 10–20% effect. This is still high but it demonstrates the real difference between setting expectations and employees understanding and buying into those expectations.

Other key drivers (that had 30% positive impact on performance) included freedom to take risks, fair and accurate feedback and two-way conversations that help me do my job better. This supports the need for leaders to focus their attention on agreeing goals together with their team and then supporting them to achieve them.

And what rewards do we expect for our efforts?

Again the answer is not new: Deci and Ryan in the 1980’s demonstrated that there are two types of rewards to consider. There are ‘extrinsic’ rewards, provided by the organisation in the form of money, benefits, bonuses and other tangibles.

More importantly, there are ’intrinsic’ rewards that come from the enjoyment of carrying out our work, the personal development we gain from our role and the positive working relationships we foster.

Deci and Ryan suggest that intrinsic rewards are better than extrinsic rewards at increasing engagement and sustainable performance.

Their findings were backed up by a highly regarded meta-analysis of studies into motivation by Meyer et al in 2002. More recently (2018) Gallop carried out one of the biggest surveys into the future of work and found that there has been a definite shift in employee expectations between those born since 1980 and those in previous generations. In particular, the majority of the current, and future, workforce see their job as a key part off their identity and their life and as such are seeking different rewards from their work. Expectation has shifted away from extrinsic rewards, towards intrinsic rewards.

Past

• My pay check

• My satisfaction

• My boss

• My annual review

• Correcting my weaknesses

• My job supporting my life

Current - Future

• My purpose

• My development

• My coach

• My ongoing relationships

• Developing my strengths

• My job being a key part of my life

What lessons can we take from this?

• We can choose how we lead. Our choices are based on our beliefs and our beliefs will shape our actions

• If you are employing people who aren’t motivated in achieving results for you, you are in for a hard ride! You will have to be the driver of their performance.

• Just choosing theory Y (or X) doesn’t make you a good leader - you need a map to help you and your team get there. See here information on Mastery, Autonomy & Purpose (MAP) that might help

• The more you involve people in the goals you (collectively) are trying to achieve, and help people see how they can contribute towards those goals, the more ownership of achieving those goals you can expect. See Focus on Outcomes and Roadmaps

• The more you are able to get out of the way, and clear any obstacles that are blocking your team’s success, the more engaged they are likely to be

• The more you invest in two-way conversations that guide people and help them do their job better, the more likely people will positively respond with correctly aligned effort and positive achievement.