2 for the price of 1!

Looking for a new job has made me think a lot about what motivates me and how I can motivate other people and how I like to be motivated myself. So being a person that likes to read, I of course read a couple of books about it. And although they are written more than 25 years apart I find that they have very much the same message at their root. Since I find the two books very good I thought I'd share them with you and write a short review of them.

The first book I had actually read before – several times. I originally found it on my parents bookshelf about 10 years ago when I had just started abakion with a 6 former co-workers and was looking for information about how to lead a company. I found it so inspiring I tend to reread it every 3-5 years just to remind myself of how easy leadership can be if done right. It is called “the one minute manager”.

The thing about the book is that although it is about management and leadership It is not a traditional textbook on how to become a good manager. Instead it is a tale of a young man looking to become a good manager and how he discovers what it means as he speaks to a manager and the people that he manages. As it turns out you just need to understand and do 3 things to be a good (1-minute) manager:

1. Give 1 minute Goals
2. Give 1 minute Praisings
3. Give 1 Minute Reprimands

The basic idea is to give your employees simple but clear goals – they must not be more than 250 words and be able to be explained in a minute. Then try to catch them doing something right (i.e. getting closer to the goal), and then immediately praise them and give them feedback. Only if they are clearly not doing the right thing – i.e. getting closer to the goal do you reprimand them and then

your reprimand is targeted clearly at the work they do and not the person, again with clear feedback.

The book is so good because it promotes very simple ideas and do it in a way that lets you discover them and why they are good along with the storyteller – it becomes your own personal discovery. It also give you a very simple (you could even say a 1 minute) check-list of how to be a good manager so it is very easy to act on in the real world.

Probably the best thing about the book is that is is very positive – I love this quote they have: “Everyone is a potential winner – Some people are disguised as losers – Don't let their appearances fool you”.

The second book I read is “Drive – the surprising truth about what motivates us”. I read this because almost all the speakers that talked about agile development at the GOTO conference in May in Copenhagen recommended it and cited it as an inspiration. Furthermore I had seen this very good animated short version of the book and found that it resonated well with how I think. But 10 minutes of video is just an appetizer so I wanted to read the whole book to get deeper into the material.

And I was not disappointed. What I found good about this book, is that it seems to make explicit all the tacit knowledge that I have myself accumulated our the past 10-15 years working as a consultant and product owner on what motivates me and what I have seen work when I have tried to motivate others.

The books basic tenet is that command and control oriented way with extrinsic rewards as the prime motivators that has been the standard for managing businesses the last couple of hundred years is out of date. In a work environment where problem solving and creativity is the norm, extrinsic motivators actually is detrimental to good performance. And the book backs it up with solid scientific studies.

If you want to get good performance from your employees in the creative and constantly changing environment most businesses find themselves in these days, the best way to do it is if they are intrinsically motivated – i.e. they want to do a good job themselves. And the way to that is to let them solve tasks they way they want to, allow them to get better at it, and make it clear why the tasks is important. He sums it up in these three words:

• Autonomy – the desire to direct tour own lives
• Mastery – the urge to get better at something that matters
• Purpose – the yearning to do what we do in service of something large than ourselves

The book is packed with references to studies that prove what it says. And at the end there is a couple of chapters with a tool-kit, that helps you transform yourself and your business to use intrinsic motivators to get better results.

In the start of this blog post I wrote that I find both books have the same message at their root. And that is that at the core of good leadership is the fact that I is all about people and caring for people. If you trust in people to get things done they rarely let you down if you can convey that you trust them to do it themselves.

By giving people a 1 minute goal you give them both ample autonomy to solve it and at the same time give them the purpose of the tasks because 1 minutes goals are something that is agreed on between the employee and the manager. And because both minute praisings and minute reprimands concerns feedback on how well or how bad the job is done it does not comprise autonomy and helps the employee towards mastery.

If there is only one thing I could change it the “Drive” book, it would be to add “the one minute manager” to the fifteen essential books list it contains. Apart form that both books are both easy to read and have a very important message for everybody. I highly recommend both of them to any manager that wants to know how to become a leader and improve the results of both his own work and that of the company he works for.