Motivation. This is one of the words, which can be often heard in corporate Human Resource Management area. In smaller companies you can hear it too, though. It is often accompanied with the word retention, which is a beast of the same pack. There are professionals in this area, who know tricks and cheats and, probably, get paid well for doing so. The whole idea of controlling human masses in order to perform the work needed is not new. This science is very diverse and has quite a bit of different flavors and techniques used daily around the globe to ensure predictability of the business (and population too).
When I think about motivation for doing all the things we people are doing, I'm rarely thinking about some material, physical concepts, which are driving us forward. Quite often the whole idea of motivation is only being wrapped around such material concept as monetary rewards (salary, bonuses, etc). Those are important, no doubts, but for the majority of us, those are just being an essential part of work hygiene, as well as a good working place and equipment, smart and open colleagues, vacations, etc. You just need all that to start thinking about real work you're hired to perform. Only for people, who lack such basic thing, those things might be motivating [1]. For others it works other way around — lack of such basic hygiene things is a big demotivator.
Sometimes, using monetary rewards as a tool for motivating people, may give unexpected results — people start performing worser comparing to the situation, when monetary question is not on the table at all [2].
Anyone who tries to think about real reasons for his or her actions, reactions and impressions, is being gradually brought to the world of human relations. It's us humans, who is doing real work, who is inventing and creating great products, who is dealing with complex tasks and solves impossible issues. Who is dealing with us, people, at the end of the day. Whatever we do, it's all about people and dealing with people.
It's a common habit in corporate environment to call people resources. It comes from economical science, where it meant to be used for any entity, which is required for a process to produce some product. Feels sick for me. It resembles me also the military world, where some (not very good in my opinion) generals are treating troops as ammo, which is, basically, a single use thing. With such approach, while your resource is healthy and productive (i.e. is profitable), you need it. When it's broken, but you can repair it without spending much other resources - you do that. When it's more expensive to repair it, rather then just to get a new one - you know what to do too. It might work well from the large system point of view, might give you some predictable profits, unless you want to remain human too.
Besides the fact, that we all are humans, not just resources, there is no such thing as similar people. You can try treating people as if they would be basically the same, with similar needs and skills, similar bad and good sides and with only difference in the amounts of those similar things in each and every case. Starting from school (or, actually, from our early days of social life — kindergarten) we're treated as equally equipped for a standard set of tasks we'll need to perform in our future lives. We're forced to start competing with each other without even having a slightest idea of what are our strongest sides and which are the weakest ones. I'm not even talking about the loss of cooperation as a tool to develop and multiply all the skills possessed by individuals.
We're not born equal, whatever is taught to us at school. Each one of us has own agenda in this life and is equipped in accordance with the goals which are set for him/her [3]. But, instead of developing and using our individual strengths, we are forced to believe that we all are the same and if someone is under-performing, that probably means that this person is just being lazy and needs some coaching to get back in-line with others. It might somewhat work (and, apparently, does for last few thousands years), giving some more or less predictable results, which are easy to plan too. That was probably a reasonable approach to produce good workers for the industrial age (which is now over). But the biggest downside of such an approach is that those results are far from being the best possible ones.
This way people will inevitably feel being used, just like those resources mentioned above. And they do feel like that while working for big corporations, especially if they try to think about the world around them and causes of the events happening around them. No one likes being a single use thing. No one is capable of being creative while being a resource. This approach creates many passive actors among employees. Those have no drive inside and can only be used as interchangeable resources in a micromanaged (to some degree) environment. That means no creativity, no talent. That means no freedom to create.
That's why I say that it's all about great people, all about great ideas implemented by them. People need great environment to be great, as birds need sky to fly, as fish needs water to swim. For people that sky and water is love and freedom - that's how they feel themselves great, feel they can fly, feel like a fish in water. That's how you get their buy in, commitment, loyalty and all the other concepts, which are usually abused in corporate world, while could have been used to let great people show themselves.
What it gives to employee? It gives back the right to find and realize own talents, to open own heart and start creating. It's not easy, but it's the most rewarding thing one could imagine — to give love and energy to this world, increasing the level of harmony around us. More freedom means more freedom to make mistakes too. But that's the only reliable way of learning — just watch how small babies are learning the world around them. Learn from them — they all have a talent to do that.
Once I've heard one story about a young manager, who was hired to be responsible for some area. During his first few working weeks he has managed to make a mistake, which resulted in a loss of 20 million dollars. When he realized what happened, he went to his boss asking for resignation. His boss's answer was: "Why would I let you leave now? I've just paid 20 millions for your training!" Impressive! I doubt that guy felt anything far from gratitude, respect and astonishment. And I'm sure he has earned much more then 20 millions for the company later.
What it gives to employers? This is a bit tricky — you'll probably lose some of the power and ability to control your employees on the level as it was before. But tell me, is it so important for the captain of a ship to be aware of every nut and bolt in the engine compartment? Should he be aware of all the technical details of the new approach invented by his crew and used there to reduce fuel consumption while still giving the same speed? Would he be able to invent that himself? Or let's go to the caboose — would it be better if captain would be inventing some new dishes there? He, probably, could, but who would be taking care of the course of the ship then?
Why to micromanage? Just control the course of your ship as a whole and let your loved team (and I hope you love your team!) to do all the magic around to keep your ship moving. Yes, you lose false sense of control, but you get creativity of every member of your team back — something you would never be able to have yourself. When you do this you get and "explosion" of motivation after a while, right after your team starts to trust you.
Love your people and you will get their love back multiplied over and over again. And love in this case means not just words, but mostly your deeds. The best love you can show to them is what is done by your hands, not mouth. Give them freedom to create and you will have hard times selecting the best idea out of the endless stream of those. It takes time, requires lots of patience — it took long time to create all those restraints and you can't get rid of those in one day. But it is worth trying!
[1] And unfortunately there are quite many places on Earth, where those are still too rare.
[2] There is a brilliant video on youtube on this matter.
[3] I tend to think that nothing is random in this world and everyone has a set of predefined goals for his/her life, but YMMV.
