In this article I want to briefly discuss Dan Pink’s idea that we are driven by mastery, autonomy and purpose and then look at ways a leader can guide their team towards receiving the intrinsic rewards that come with each one.

In Drive, Pink usually talks of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. However, one of our contributors frequently changes the order to encourage leaders to use the concept as their MAP to motivating their team, so that the sequence we have opted for anAgileMind.

According to Dan Pink, in his book ‘Drive’, Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose are the three sources of ‘intrinsic’ motivation that drive us,

and when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.

Intrinsic motivation is the personal reward we get from doing our work. This is contrasted with ‘extrinsic’ motivation which is the reward we are given by others for the results of our work.

Criticism

Pink’s book has attracted a few critics but there is also a lot of value in this work.

There is little argument that intrinsic motivation can be more powerful as a self-motivating and sustainable driver of people. This argument was proposed by Kurt Lewin way back in the 1940s and substantiated in the 1980s by the likes of Deci & Ryan. Nothing’s new.

There is an argument that Mastery, Autonomy & Purpose are not the only drivers of intrinsic reward. However, I’m going to leave this debate for another article. Instead I want to focus on what each of Pink’s drivers has to offer.

Lastly, critics point to the lack of practical solutions in Pink’s book and it is this I want to focus on most. I want to use the following few paragraphs to go beyond ‘what’ motivates people to consider ‘how’ to motivate them.

That’s a lot to cover in one piece, so consider this a summary and I will return to each element in more depth in later releases.

So – here goes: what has this model got to show for itself and how can we apply it?

Mastery

According to Pink, this is the desire to grow and develop our skills, especially in the areas where we excel. There are some challenges here in that we can’t always work on what we want to, particularly if those things are out of kilter with what the team, the customer and the organisation need right now. However, this isn’t really Pink’s point, he is pointing out that we need to give space for people to develop and we need to look for opportunities for people to grow.

Where I don’t think Pink goes far enough is extoling the virtues of new growth – leaders helping team members tap into their potential and discovering and developing new skills. For example, leaders may identify particular leadership capabilities that exist within the team and start to nurture them and by doing so unlock the door to emergent leadership within the team.

In terms of how leaders can do this, one thing they can do is ensure there are regular points of freedom and growth built into the team’s cadence. For example, maybe we infrequently, but regularly reserve a retrospective to learn more about team dynamics so that we can learn to collaborate and problem-solve more effectively. Maybe once a month we get time to sandpit some ideas we’ve been working on, and maybe once a quarter leaders meet with individual team members to discuss their development.

Autonomy

According to Pink, the more we feel we are directing our own lives, and influencing the world around us, the more driven we are likely to be.

We should point out here that the extent to which we feel we have autonomy is partly self-driven: some people feel more able to influence the world around them (they are said to have a high internal locus of control) and as a result develop strategies to do just that, regardless of circumstance. However, there are also many things that leaders can do to help their teams achieve a greater sense of autonomy.

Instead of the leader making decisions on behalf of the team, they can guide the team towards reaching informed decisions themselves. The emphasis here is on the word ‘guide’. Too much autonomy without the right amount of maturity can lead to chaos, which can be equally demotivating. See Focus on Team Autonomy.

In anAgileMind we also argue that autonomy, on its own, is unlikely to lead to high performance. Instead the team will need to adopt rigour and discipline to help them make the best of the autonomy they are given.

For example:

• Backlog refinement activities provide the team with autonomy over their work ordering, preparation and prioritising

• Planning activities that help the team better size their work allow them to take control of timelines and costs

Purpose

This is the human desire to work on something that has meaning and that we deem important. If you really want to get into this it is best going back to the original proposer of this concept, Victor Frankl. Frankl was a leading psychologist and survivor of several concentration camps during the second world war. His book, A Man’s Search for Meaning, is brilliant at explaining why purpose matters so much to us.

There are two famous quotes from Frankl that are relevant here:

 Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’

 Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power as Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.

These quotes are both closely aligned with the views expressed by Pink and Sinek, but made at least 50 years earlier.

Frankl ably demonstrates that we are driven by causes bigger than ourselves and we want to feel like we are contributing towards those higher purposes. The more a leader can help the team understand the customer’s vision and the end user’s need, the more likely they are to find ways to make that vision and that experience come alive. Suddenly overcoming barriers becomes a call to arms rather than a blocker to our progress.

Better still, the more exposure the teams gets to their customers’ visions and the more it is made real, the more engaged they are likely to be. Time spent with the customer, even the end user, is invaluable to the team’s understanding of ‘why’ they are doing what they are doing. This helps them better understand the need for quality and helps them question the value that they are generating. Purpose can sometimes be quickly forgotten when we are down in the weeds so needs regular reinforcing through customer and stakeholders reviews. Working towards outcomes is another constant reinforcer of whether we are contributing towards the client vision, or not, and drives better prioritisation of work.

However, Frankl also demonstrates that meaning is not just found in giving oneself to a cause but can found in every moment. It is found in the way we respond to a given situation and what we learn about ourselves in that moment. This is one of the huge benefits of regular retrospectives, they give the team time to think about what they did over the last cycle of work and what they want to do differently to improve over the next cycle.

Don’t forget the multiplier effect

Whilst Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose can be significant drivers of motivation in their own right, they become much more powerful as a joint force. Think of applying Pink’s MAP like a multiplication sum: if you focus on one at the expense of another the overall sum of your efforts can quickly drop to zero. Get the basics right on each element first and build from there.

Lastly, each element reinforces the other, for example, the more we understand the overall goal we are aiming towards and how our efforts contribute towards this, the more likely we are to manage our autonomy wisely.

I hope that’s useful – please add your comments and questions below – and we will be back with similar articles shortly.