A Low-Cost Way to Improve Performance

By: Nick Tasler

How do you motivate employees when your cash cow is low on milk—when there is no longer room in the budget for the usual financial incentives like pay raises and bonuses? The answer is simple: Make work meaningful. Build on your people's natural desire to see how their work fits in with the grand scheme of things. All workers want to feel that what they do matters to other people, that their day-to-day tasks are somehow indispensable.

To make that connection clearer for their people, companies like Medtronic (MDT) have for years invited customers to give testimonials at their annual meetings. Qualcomm (QCOM) collects and shares stories with employees about how cell phones have saved people's lives in emergency situations. The Volvo Saved My Life Club lets customers and employees alike share stories of how Volvo's safety features kept them safe in potentially fatal car crashes. DaVita (DVA) routinely shows its employees video segments in which patients and family members express appreciation for their kidney dialysis work.

The message these practices send to people inside the company—from the shop floor to the C-suites—is that "without your work, the world would be a worse place." It's more powerful than a pat on the back from a manager. It's like a pat on the back from the universe. Now that's all well and good in a New Age, touchy-feely sort of way. But amid all of the turmoil businesses are facing right now, should efforts to make work more meaningful really be a priority? After all, nobody is going to feel good about work if the company has to close its doors.

Bottom-Line Impact
According to research by Adam Grant, an associate professor of management at the Wharton School, making this connection doesn't just improve morale. It also has a huge impact on the bottom line. Grant has discovered that when people get to meet a living, breathing person who benefits from their work, their job performance skyrockets. In one study, Grant found that university fund-raisers who listened to a scholarship recipient tell how the assistance had benefited him increased by 200% the number of weekly calls they made to potential donors. The average amount of funds they brought in jumped 500%, from $400 per week to more than $2,000 per week.

That's an impressive increase in performance by any standard. It's especially so when you consider what did not happen to create the surge in productivity. The callers were not offered a raise. They did not go through extra training to sharpen their interpersonal skills or persuasion techniques. Their managers did not receive extra training on how to be more charismatic or transformational. It required no internal branding effort to communicate a newer, more inspiring vision. The only expense incurred by the organization—time or money—for this dramatic increase in productivity was the 10 minutes of time that fund-raisers spent listening to the beneficiary of their work.

Grant has found the same kinds of performance increases in sales reps, firefighters, police officers, lifeguards, and MBA students. In his opinion, it should come as no surprise that making work more meaningful should motivate significantly higher performance. What does surprise him is how slowly most managers are responding to this motivational opportunity. "In national surveys over the past three decades, meaningful work has swamped all other job attributes as the No. 1 feature that Americans value in a job, yet so many managers spend very little time thinking about how to make work more meaningful," he says. Is it any wonder why it affects bottom-line performance?

On the flip side, research shows that employees who fail to link what they do to the benefit it provides others are much more likely to slack off. The moral of the story is that meaning matters.

Improved Quality of Work
Introducing managers and employees to the beneficiary of their work taps into a slightly different and perhaps even deeper human need to believe that what we do is important—that rolling ourselves out of bed every morning serves some greater purpose. Making that connection doesn't just motivate people to do more work. New evidence also indicates that it improves the quality of work. For example, when radiologists see a patient photo before viewing that patient's X-ray, they actually make more-accurate diagnoses.

A large body of research in social psychology is now showing that the basic desire for meaning grows under threatening conditions created by times of war, natural disaster, and economic uncertainty. Times just like right now. So why not help your people use their jobs to satisfy that hunger for meaning, and create a substantial performance increase in the process?

I believe that most managers truly care about the well-being of their employees over and above their contribution to profitability. Unfortunately, they often feel forced to make a choice between organizational performance and employee well-being. Helping employees to see their work as more meaningful is one of those rare instances in which employee well-being is not just compatible with, but also contributes to, the organization's financial growth.

To start infusing a greater sense of meaning into your organization's work, Grant recommends these strategies:

1. Invite customers who have benefited from the company's products and services to come in and speak to employees about the impact those products and services have made in their lives.

2. Conduct surveys and focus groups about not how easy or fun your products or services are, but rather how to have a greater impact on the people who use them. Then communicate to your employees the specific role they can play in making this impact.

3.Collect stories directly from beneficiaries, and share them via town-hall meetings or on the company's intranet.

4. Structure group discussions about other beneficiaries who might value the work that employees do.

5. Provide recognition for employees who have gone above and beyond the call of duty to help beneficiaries in meaningful ways.

If you can increase the sense of meaning your employees feel, you should see a notable increase in performance and engagement. And who knows? You just might begin to find your own job as a manager that much more meaningful.

Questions from Seth

By: Karen Rulifson

I just read this on Seth Godin's blog (great blog by the way), and it really resonated with me. Take a minute to ask these questions to yourself, and most importanty, ask the question, 'why?' after each one. This is a great quick way to help you prioritize.

Who are you trying to please?
What are you promising?
How much money are you trying to make?
How much freedom are you willing to trade for opportunity?
What are you trying to change?

What do you want people to say about you?
Which people?

(and after each answer, ask 'why?')

Prime Your Mind For Action

By: Nick Tasler

In my last article, I explained why people who believe they control events in their life are such an asset to the companies they work for. Good leaders also wanted to know what about everyone else? How can they get other team members to adopt that same proactive mentality, even during anxious and uncertain times? At least temporarily, you can inspire that grab-the-bull-by-the-horns attitude in just about anyone. A quick experiment illustrates how:

Phase 1: Think about a decision weighing on you right now. It can be any choice that involves asking "should I do X or should I do Y?" For example, should I stay in my current position, or make a lateral leap? Should I go to that training seminar next week or play hooky? Should we invest in that new venture now or wait until next year? Once you have that vexing question in mind, think about a couple of the short- and long-term consequences of both options, and then about some of the challenges you'll face with trying to act on one of those options.

Phase 2: Think about a project you're already working on. Maybe you've already given that new venture a green light and are ready to dig in. Maybe you've decided to go ahead with that systems upgrade you had been putting off. Or maybe you already concluded that you want to try your hand leading a new department. With that project in mind, jot down a few of the steps you'll need to take in order to successfully implement that plan.

Deliberation vs. Implementation
The two phases above represent routine mental exercises we carry out every day—deliberating some choices and implementing others. Had we been monitoring your mood, your self-esteem, and your perceptions of risk during this experiment, we would have likely found you in two very different states of mind. In experiments like these, psychologists Shelley Taylor at UCLA and Peter Gollwitzer at NYU found that when people think about implementing a decision they've already made (Phase 2) it puts them in a far better mood, significantly raises their self-esteem, and makes them feel much more in control of the world around them. In fact, while locked into phase 2—what Taylor and Gollwitzer call the "implementation mindset"—people even believe they are less vulnerable than others to random events like getting mugged, being in a car crash, and falling victim to an earthquake.

When we mentally shift gears from deliberation to implementation, from contemplation to action, it changes more than the just way we see the decision at hand. While mapping out the plan for implementation, we feel more confident and more invincible about ourselves in general. That's because implementation is a cue for our brains to zoom in on how to get the job done and to tune out the self-doubt and vulnerability that inhibit action.

A Mindset is a Powerful Thing to Waste
The implementation mindset stirs up what Shelley Taylor calls "positive illusions," which are somewhat unrealistic, self-serving beliefs. Around 90% of people believe they are just a little more competent, smarter, or kinder than average. "Generally, most people are more optimistic than facts warrant," she observes. Nearly all people hold healthy, positive illusions about themselves some of the time, but Taylor says that's a good thing. That's not just because positive illusions make people feel more chipper. She has found that mild self-aggrandizing can also foster higher creativity and productivity, and help us persist more when tackling challenging goals like, say, weathering a recession.

But positive illusions come and go. When we find ourselves knee-deep in deliberation—agonizing about how we will continue to provide for our families, or how we can retire when the funds in our 401(k) have vanished—positive illusions disappear almost entirely, leaving us feeling much more like pawns than knights. That's why recessions are a double-whammy. Economic ruts are hard enough to pull out of even when we're operating at full steam. But uncertainty about the future also puts employees and managers in a constant state of deliberation—fretting about the consequences of what might happen next, rather than confidently implementing plans of action.

The good news is that, with a little effort, we can kick-start the implementation mindset.

How to Bite Back When Reality Bites
One of history's great mysteries is why George Washington felt so compelled during the first year of the Revolutionary War to meticulously oversee every detail of the renovations on his homestead, Mt. Vernon. Washington knew full well that if he didn't win the war, he almost certainly would be granted a one-way ticket to the hangman's gallows for treason. He also was fully aware that he was getting clobbered. Despite all the stress and anxiety, Washington spent late nights on the front lines writing letters home specifying things like what colors the new curtains should be in the living room.

Washington wasn't delusional. By mapping out his home improvement project, he was fostering the implementation mindset, which then allowed him to persist in the overwhelming war effort. You can do the same thing from the front lines of your battle to beat the recession or meet your growth targets for the coming quarter.

1. Pick a Project You Are Already Thinking About.
As Washington proved, this project doesn't need to have anything to do with your work. It just needs to be a project you have some measure of control over. It could be growing tasty tomatoes, planning a vacation, shaving a few strokes off of your golf game, helping your kids do better in school, or losing 10 pounds.

2. List Five Implementation Steps. Jot down five actions you will take that, if carried out properly, will virtually guarantee success on your project.

3. Identify When, Where, and How. Peter Gollwitzer's research has proved that this last piece is critical, so don't take a shortcut now. Write down when, where and how you intend to take each of the five implementation steps. For example, if your project is "plan a vacation," one step might be: "After dinner tonight, I will look at vacation packages on my laptop." From there, your brain will know what to do.

You can then do the same exercise with your people. To get more bang for your buck, you might want to work with them to select a work-related project that you would both like to see accomplished this quarter. Then coach them on breaking down the implementation steps and identifying the specifics of when, where and how they will carry out these steps. When performed this way—as a coaching exercise focused on a real work project—your reward will be twofold. You'll not only prime your people's minds for action on all their work activities, but also help them to deliver on a specific milestone for the quarter. Everybody wins.

The Time to Implement
When I spoke to Shelley Taylor, she was quick to point out that "positive illusions are rather like fire. They can light your house, or they can burn down your neighbor's house." What she calls "windows of realism" furnished by the deliberation mindset are vital to accurately estimating risks and costs. You could (and indeed many people do) argue that propping open more windows of realism a couple of years ago might have prevented the recession altogether. When you're trying to determine whether or not it's a good idea to embark on a new venture or invest in expensive real estate, the implementation mindset in you or in your people can be very detrimental. It can inspire unwarranted optimism and careless judgments.

But if you're an executive trying to clear the recession malaise from your corporate climate, the windows of realism in your office space are probably open far enough. It's time to implement.