What Flips Your Pancakes?

While these things are still important to me, as an experienced business owner not far from retirement, I find myself being motivated more frequently by the fear of loss. I’ve worked hard to establish a network of satisfied clients and a major piece of market share in our niche, in addition to a solid reputation. So the pancake is flipping to the other side. Now I fear losing clients, market share, or reputation. In the beginning I didn’t have much to lose, but now I have a lot to protect, so my motivations and my behaviors are different. 

In my investments, I am now more concerned with the return of my investment dollars than I am the return on the investments.  When I was younger, I would invest in initial public offerings, micro-cap stocks, and the like. My desire for gain and my risk levels were both very high. But now I invest in large-cap stocks, municipal bonds, and annuities. These products are much less risky and help to mitigate my fear of loss. 

 

Motivation in the Knowledge Economy

Through the years, I’ve also learned that being a business leader means acquiring a talent for inspiring different types of people who have various types of motivation. In today’s knowledge economy, it’s getting harder and harder to measure performance and simply motivate by reward or punishment. It seems like it was easier in the assembly-line days, when a job and money were enough for a manager to motivate  his or her employees to get things done. For example, some employees are motivated by the desire to gain a good career path, and the fear of losing a promotion to a co-worker, while others are motivated by the desire to gain raises, extra benefits, or just plain old praise and public recognition.

Believe it or not, I remember from my college psychology class that money as a motivator is at the lowest levels of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. (Parents: Those tuition dollars do eventually pay off.) In addition to a paycheck, I think employees also expect praise and recognition, and the opportunity to apply their skills so they can feel proud about what they do. They also need a sense of job security, they expect to be challenged, and they want to feel what they do contributes to some sort of social good. These are all at the higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy. Whatever the cause of motivation, I know that motivated employees do better work, are more productive, and take pride in providing good service to customers.

Business leaders can be effective motivators of their organizations (and of themselves) if they understand that what flips one person’s pancakes might not flip the next person’s. We have to take the time to get to know our co-workers, our employees, and ourselves.

I’ll close with a quote from one of my mentors, the late author and management guru, Peter Drucker: “We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books [and articles] about it.”