What drives you to perform at your best? Is it money, fear of punishment, reward or is it something more than that?  Daniel Pink, in his newest book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us draws some research based conclusions I think you may find useful.

Sometimes there is a mismatch between what science knows, what we do personally and what business does. Citing work by Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School and others, Daniel Pink asserts that this is the case with human performance. The theme of his newest book can be summarized in his sentence, “The science shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but a third drive- our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to live a life of purpose.

Daniel Pink boils down true motivation into three elements:1) autonomy 2) mastery, the desire to continually improve at something that matters, 3) purpose, the desire to do things in service to something larger than our self.

Leadership Application

For leaders and managers, coaxing great performance out of an employee may not be a matter of paying lavishly in exchange for putting the business first and suppressing their inner selves.  Especially for fostering creative, conceptual work, the recommendation is to be sure a fair wage is paid so you can take money off the table and people can focus on the work.

Physicians in high-profile settings like the Mayo Clinic face pressures and demands that can often lead to burnout. Research presented in the Archives of Internal Medicine, May 2009 by Tait Shanafelt, et al., demonstrates that letting doctors spend one day a week on the aspect of their job that was most meaningful to them-whether patient care, research, or community service- could reduce the physical and emotional exhaustion that accompanies their work.  Doctors who participated in the trial policy had half the burnout rate of those who did not.

What can you do in your work environment to create more autonomy, mastery or sense of purpose- in exchange for more engaged staff? 

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