Motivation according to Spots & Myers
I found this recently and wanted to share it. It came in some text after Maslow, Macgregor and Herzberg which are great references on the subject. However I was kind of taken by the simplicity of this contribution.
I looked up Spots & Myers on Google but I can find no reference. Anyone heard of them? Could this be Isabel Briggs Myers? Hmmm.
Things a manager should do to ensure his team is not productive:
- Ask as much as possible
- Criticise his employees in front of their colleagues
- Blame them for their mistakes
- Treat them without any respect for their feelings
- Do not consult before taking action
- Do not explain your actions
- Refuse to take your employees’ ideas into account
Things a manager should do to ensure his team is productive:
- Provide structure
- Inform
- Listen
- Encourage new ideas and responsibilities
- Consult before taking action
- Show your esteem
- Spend more time on building relationships than technical problems
And with that said, I think the above makes a good reminder of communication objectives for my next mission: communication and team coaching for a complex and pressurized IT project at a major French telecommunication company that is undergoing major contractual changes.
Bon weekend!
Nicholas
[updated with English translation on 6 June 2007, original French is below]
Ce qu’un chef doit faire pour que l’équipe ne soit pas productive:
- Demander plus que possible
- Critiquer ses collaborateurs devant leurs collègues
- Les blâmer pour leurs erreurs
- Les traiter sans respect pour leurs sentiments
- Déclencher l’action sans consulation
- Ne pas expliquer les actions
- Refuser de prendre les idées des collaborateurs en considération
Ce qu’un chef doit faire pour que l’équipe soit productive:
- Prévoir une structure
- Informer
- Ecouter avant de passer à l’action
- Entraîner à plus d’idées, de responsabilités
- Déclencher l’action après consultation
- Montrer de l’estime
- Passer plus de temps sur les rapports humains que sur les problèmes techniques
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“Passer plus de temps sur les rapports humains que sur les problèmes techniques ”
I once had someone work for me who, when I asked him in an appraisal if he’d ever considered a management role said “the trouble with humans is they don’t come with a reset button…I much prefer computers…”
I always admired his honesty – just wished a few of my peers in management had his self-insight!
Liam
This “Spots & Myers” reference sparked my curiosity. But “Spots” seems utterly unknown in the world of psychology (he isn’t a dog, is he?) “Myers” could be Isabel Briggs Myers as you suggest (such “productive team” statements can be expected from MBTI consultants), but there are many “Myers”. It could be David G Myers, prolific author the best-selling psychology textbook in America. While investigating, I found by chance something for myself on David G Myers’ web site: his latest summary on “happiness” http://www.davidmyers.org/Brix?pageID=48 . I found it very interesting – not that it positively contributes to my research, but it gave me precise vocabulary and references to demonstrate how my own ideas deviate from prevalent conceptions on “positive emotions”.
Fascinating happiness summary, many thanks. I find particular resonance today in the strand about how different states might be categorised and named (perhaps because I’m trying to work out how this wonderful weather’s making me feel). And I ask myself how this question might affect the way we think about change programmes.
I suppose it comes down to that ol’ chestnut, “what’s in a word?” Some of the words we use to describe positive emotional states are: ‘happy’, ‘joyful’, ‘excited’, ‘jubilant’, ‘contented’, ‘pleased’, ‘glad’, ‘cheerful’, ‘delighted’, ‘on cloud nine’, and so on. Are these all describing the same, or at least very similar. states or are there subtle but significant differences? If so, organisations need to explore these, both when they are developing their own strategic/change objectives and when they communicate these. After all, terms of the language they use in their communications. We all take it for granted that the cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) theorists got it right in terms of highlighting strong a causal link from people’s thoughts to feelings to behaviours. Indeed, many organisations’ change communication programs seem to bear this strongly in mind (consciously or unconsciously) when they seek to affect attitudes and behaviours.
And how do they try to affect these attitudes? Through communication – not the greatest revelation, sorry, but it leads to I think a more interesting question about change communication language: “Do communicators take enough time to consider the subtleties of the different words they use relative to:
(i) the emotional states that people actually feel (or are capable of feeling) generally, whether at work or not;
(ii) the feelings (or potential feelings) that their employee audience(s) might have about the change; and
(iii) associations people/employees might have with different words?
This is all the more complicated when we consider that all these subtle differences will also need to be carried through when global organisations are translating their communications across national cultures (something we’re exploring at Melcrum at the moment in a wider research project about challenges and best practice when it comes to communicating with global/dispersed workforces). Those fantastic HSBC ads at the airport at the moment highlight just how complex this cross-cultural communication can be…
Another point made in the summary article is that ‘happiness’ is more about a short-term, markedly-elevated state (perhaps equivalent to a laugh), compared with ‘contentment’, which describes a more balanced, longer-term one (perhaps equivalent to a a more general warm feeling inside). Organisations do tend to focus on affecting thoughts and feelings to create the latter (or similar sustained, positive states) rather than the former. But they don’t always, and I’ve heard a number of stories about organisations who should know a lot better, which have offered quick-win, HAPPY-making incentives like bonuses, group hugs and even divisional trips to the Bahamas (very rich financial institution) as high-profile components of their change communication, which have backfired badly. After all, it’s actually worse than the article suggests: as anyone who’s had the good or bad fortune – “good” because they’ve been off work, “bad” because they’ve had to resort to daytime TV – to see Oprah, Trisha, Donahue or the like talk to lottery winners will know, people who experience large amounts of excitement and joy from a lottery win don’t just come back to where they were, but can go on a real downer. They then think confused thoughts, they feel conflicting negative emotions and they behave in quite unusual and destructive ways. And organisations don’t want that – employees will already be thinking enough negative thoughts, feeling enough negative feelings and exhibiting enough unconstructive behaviour as a result of the change itself, never mind having to deal with the results of such extreme, emotive communications.
There’s a very great deal more to say on these subjects I think but I should probably leave it there at the moment. I would, of course, be very interested to hear other people’s thoughts and experiences when it comes to language and emotions.
Best wishes
Graeme
Well, Graeme, this interrogation about how to name positive subjective feelings is part of my research, although my focus is more descriptive than practical at this stage. Also, it will be the subject of my 2nd book – the one which I currently write being more about negative emotions in a cognitive approach (pure “appraisal theory”, not cognitive-behavioral).
Measuring happiness from what people say when asked is typical of the behaviorist approach. Behaviorists are reluctant to speculate about what people feel, because it can’t be recorded, whereas verbal testimonies can be. Nevertheless, we can strongly suspect that the same verbal testimony will reflect very different subjective experiences in different individuals. Optimistic/pessimistic bias, as well as variety/poverty of the subjective history, are heavy factors of doubt. For myself, I can’t ascertain today that my own verbal testimony about my degree of happiness would be reliable and meaningful, but I am 100% sure that my testimony would have been totally unreliable and meaningless 5 years ago, because, in the meantime, I was lucky enough to regularly experience many different delightful feelings which I never felt before. Proper literary names don’t even seem to exist for these feelings – at any rate, they have nothing to do with the common good-news-bad-news-related joviality which David G Myers seems to refer to. As far as I know, buddhist monks have their own jargon to refer to certain pleasurable feelings, but they don’t seem to categorize them as “emotions”, their general viewpoint being more “spiritual”.
As for making use of positive emotions in consulting, I guess that the underlying science is far too embryonic to allow intervention with consistent results. For instance, it’s widely believed that good mood or joy will foster quick and creative work, whereas bad mood or sadness will make people slow and inefficient (see for instance the neurologist Antonio Damasio, “Descartes’ Error”, end of chapter VII). But there are counter-examples: I recently read about the experiments of the French university researcher François Ric who found opposite results. He asked subjects to immerse themselves in either happy or sad memories, then gave them a problem to solve. The “happy” subjects provided poorer and more stereotyped answers, whereas the “sad” subjects produced more profound and creative solutions. This is just to say that the relationship between emotions and performance is tricky and subject to prejudice. Regards
Hi Daniel
That’s fascinating stuff. I suppose musicians/artists create most when they’re under duress and/or are sad. So, perhaps all the happy companies just aren’t very creative. Change may not make us very happy, but it sure is good for us…
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