The benefits of motivated people are easy to identify: They generate greater productivity, creativity, and job performance. While motivating individuals can be a challenge, the most effective approach to having a consistently motivated staff is to hire and retain intrinsically motivated people.
Intrinsically motivated people have the personal drive to engage in activities for the inherent pleasure, satisfaction, or challenge involved. They are engaged in the work for their own reasons that aren’t driven directly by rewards, recognition, or pressure.
Because intrinsic motivation originates internally, it tends to drive more sustained engagement than motivation based on external rewards. These external incentives—such as bonuses, promotions, benefits, or prizes—are offered by others to boost a person’s willingness to complete a task or project.
Intrinsic motivation is especially important when the work is challenging, time pressured, or has high accuracy and precision requirements. Lab work often has all or most of these attributes. To have long-lasting success in the lab, people need to be able to deliver very high-quality technical work, exhibit innovative problem-solving, persist in the face of multiple experimental failures, and complete tedious, repetitive lab tasks with high experimental precision. Unfortunately, extrinsic rewards have short lifetimes and don’t provide the persistence or grit that is required to creatively solve problems and accomplish the science.
In the book, Drive, Daniel Pink clarifies three key drivers for intrinsic motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Each of these drivers feeds an aspect of motivation for people who are internally motivated. The more lab managers cultivate a work environment that supports intrinsically motivated individuals, the more that motivation will translate into positive performance.
Autonomy
Intrinsically motivated people flourish when they have some control over their work. They will supply the drive to deliver high-quality work through self-direction and ownership. By giving them more control over how and when the work is accomplished, they will take responsibility to deliver, be accountable for the outcomes, make good decisions regarding the challenges, develop their skills, and exhibit pride of ownership.
Providing autonomy is the opposite of micromanagement. It is about providing clear expectations and objectives and then letting the individual determine how to meet those needs. Hovering and second-guessing their approach will only serve to demotivate them.
Lab managers can provide ownership opportunities to everyone on staff. The ownership needs to be scaled to their level of responsibility and expertise, but there are opportunities to suit every skill level in the lab. Another way that lab managers can provide more autonomy is to work with staff to apply job crafting to their role. This allows people to flex their roles and objectives toward their strengths. The more people work in their strengths, the more engaged they will be and the higher their performance in the job.
Mastery
Mastery is the growth of an individual’s skills and expertise. Investing in people to develop their potential and grow their strengths enables them to do more and to be more confident in delivering their work.
Engaging in strong training and development programs improves employee engagement and feeds intrinsic motivation. There are many ways lab managers can drive increased mastery in staff, including coaching, internal and external training, and development opportunities.
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Purpose
Having a clear and concise purpose for the lab helps staff connect emotionally to their work. The purpose is the answer to a whole series of “why” questions about the lab, such as,
- “Why does the lab exist?”
- “Why does the lab do what it does?”
- “Why do the staff work so hard?”
- “Why is this work important?”
The “why” drives the vision and mission of the lab. It is important for people to contribute to something larger than themselves. A clear purpose connects people to that mission.
Lab managers can communicate the purpose of the lab through activities like creating a clear vision statement that drives strategy, prioritization, and key results. Having a strategy helps staff understand where the lab is going, why it’s important to get there, and what role they have in achieving the objectives.
The key to having intrinsically motivated employees is recruiting, hiring, and retaining them. Lab managers can include behavioral questions in interviews to get a sense of what motivates candidates as individuals. Here are some interview prompts that might help identify intrinsically motivated candidates:
- Tell me about a project that you worked on just because it interested you.
- Give me an example of when you went above and beyond because you thought it was important.
- Tell me about a time when you overcame a difficult problem without being asked.
- Tell me about a success that you are very proud of.
Even strong intrinsically motivated staff can be demotivated when unneeded barriers are erected between them and what fuels their motivation. Be aware of the negative impacts of actions like overly rigid policies, rules, and team norms, micromanagement in any form, goals that aren’t clearly connected to the lab’s purpose, and poor prioritization.
Enabling intrinsically motivated staff will yield higher performance, better teamwork, and increased delivery of the lab’s key outputs. It is about shaping their roles to align well with their strengths and passions, and then allowing them the space to exert control, make decisions, and master the skills needed to deliver.
