Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us pdfdrive com

STEFAN SAGMEISTER

Designer



Taking a new job and holding most jobs are similar. Enterprising souls might be able to scratch out some autonomy over task, time, and technique—but autonomy over team is a taller order. That’s one reason people are drawn to entrepreneurship—the chance to build a team of their own. But even in more traditional settings, although far from typical yet, a few organizations are

discovering the virtues of offering people some amount of freedom over those with whom they work.

For example, at the organic grocery chain Whole Foods, the people who are nominally in charge of each department don’t do the hiring. That task falls to a department’s employees. After a job candidate has worked a thirty-day trial period on a team, the prospective teammates vote on whether to hire that person full-time. At W. L. Gore & Associates, the makers of the GORE-TEX fabric and another example of Motivation 3.0 in action, anybody who wants to rise in the

ranks and lead a team must assemble people willing to work with her.¹⁹

The ability to put together a pick-up basketball team of company talent is another attraction of 20 percent time. These initiatives usually slice across the organization chart, connecting people who share an interest, if not a department. As Google engineer Bharat Mediratta told The New York Times, “If your 20 percent idea is a new product, it’s usually pretty easy to just find a few like- minded people and start coding away.” And when pushing for a more systemic change in the organization, Mediratta says autonomy over team is even more important. Those efforts require what he calls a “grouplet”—a small, self- organized team that has almost no budget and even less authority, but that tries to change something within the company. For instance, Mediratta formed a testing grouplet to encourage engineers throughout the company to implement a more efficient way to test computer code. This informal band of coders, a team built autonomously without direction from the top, “slowly turned the organization on

its axis.”²⁰

Still, the desire for autonomy can often collide with other obligations. One surprise as Atlassian ran the numbers on its task autonomy experiment was that most employees came in substantially under the 20 percent figure. The main reason? They didn’t want to let down their current teammates by abandoning ongoing projects.

Although autonomy over team is the least developed of the four T’s, the ever- escalating power of social networks and the rise of mobile apps now make this brand of autonomy easier to achieve—and in ways that reach beyond a single organization. The open-source projects I mentioned in Chapter 1, in which ad hoc teams self-assemble to build a new browser or create better server software, are a potent example. And once again, the science affirms the value of something traditional businesses have been slow to embrace. Ample research has shown that people working in self-organized teams are more satisfied than those

working in inherited teams.²¹ Likewise, studies by Deci and others have shown

that people high in intrinsic motivation are better coworkers.²² And that makes the possibilities on this front enormous. If you want to work with more Type I’s, the best strategy is to become one yourself. Autonomy, it turns out, can be contagious.