By Ryan Quinn
I had an experience recently where I was excited about a course I was teaching but the course faltered somewhat in its implementation. I received a fair amount of negative feedback, which was even more demoralizing than negative feedback usually is because of how excited I was about the course. Shortly after the class ended, however, one of my students sent me an email telling me how she had used the principles from that class to help a friend of hers who is an entrepreneur. He was struggling to figure out how to design his company for the next phase of its growth, and she walked him through the steps we had outlined in class. He was thrilled with the insights he developed during this process, and she expressed that excitement in the email she sent to me. After feeling down about how the course went, this got me motivated about my teaching again.
Interacting with Beneficiaries
The ability to interact with my students and to see how my work benefits them is one of the privileges of being a professor. When you really care about the topic you are teaching and the people you are teaching the topic to, it not hard to make a positive difference in their lives and their careers. And seeing the difference you make is a motivating experience.
Not all jobs have that same privilege, however. In fact, there are many people who go through the motions in their work each day just to get it done and collect a paycheck. They do not know how their work fits in to the broader work of the organization, or what value their work adds to the world. Adam Grant, a professor in organizational behavior, has shown that a simple intervention in the work of people like this can have a significant impact on their motivation, experience, and performance.
Telemarketers and “Pro-social Motivation”
Grant is interested in a topic called “pro-social motivation,” or the motivation to do things that help others. One of the first workplaces that he studied pro-social motivation in was the call center for a group of telemarketers. This was a job where people were making minimum wage, punching the clock, and spending their days and evenings getting rejected for a living so that they could raise funds for a university.
Grant and his colleagues divided the telemarketers into three groups. He sent a university student who had received a scholarship that was funded in part by the work of these telemarketers to the first group, where they got to ask him about how he obtained the scholarship, what classes he was taking, and what he was planning to do after college. The second group read a letter from the student about the impact that the scholarship made in his life. The third group had no contact with the scholarship student. Grant and his colleagues then measured how many minutes each telemarketer spent making phone calls, and how much money they raised. They measured these variables a month after their ten-minute intervention to see if their intervention had any enduring impact.
It did. Comparing with the telemarketers’ performance before the intervention with their performance one month after the intervention, Grant and his colleagues found that the telemarketers who interacted with the student increased their time on the phone by 142% and increased the money they raised by 171%! Any changes that occurred for telemarketers in the other two conditions were negligible. Ten minutes of interaction with a person they were benefiting had a dramatic effect on the motivation and performance of these telemarketers.
Since this initial experiment, Grant has replicated and extended his research in the laboratory, in the field, and in different occupations. The results are similar. We have invited Adam to write an entry in this blog for us in the future to share some of the details of his work since this original study, which he will do after recovering from a busy summer.
How to Inspire Pro-Social Motivation
In the meantime, Adam has shared with us some guidelines to help leaders who want to help their employees find motivation in the value that they create for others. To help people find the value they create in their jobs, Adam begins with a “beneficiary audit.” He asks managers and employees to list all od the people and groups who can potentially benefit from the jobs in question. Then he asks the employees:
- Which beneficiaries do you rarely see, meet, or receive feedback from?
- Which peole and groups benefit most significantly from the job?
- Which beneficiaries do you find it most meaningful to help?
Any group that appears in answer to one of these questions represents an opportunity to establish more motivating connections. Leaders can accomplish this for their employees by
- Contacting beneficiaries outside the organization and arranging opportunities for employees to meet them
- Working with beneficiaries inside the organization to structure expressions of gratitude for employee
If these kinds of opportunities prove to be elusive, leaders can also share stories about other people doing their jobs in ways that make a difference, encourage employees to craft their jobs in ways that will help them to make more of a difference, or identify new beneficiaries that employees might also be able to create value for.
Each of these interventions are relatively simple and yet can have a significant impact on employees’ work. And we do not have to wait for leaders to arrange such opportunities. Like my student who let me know how my class had helped her and her friend, we can all take a moment to think about how others have benefited us with their work and take a moment to let them know.
[...] I ran across a new study, conducted by Adam Grant, a colleague of ours whose work I mentioned in a previous entry, and James Berry. These scholars tackled an interesting question in the research on creativity. [...]