Stop Destroying Motivation with Dan Ariely

+ Notes

My guest his week, Dan Ariely needs no introduction. But just in case, he is one of the worlds most influential psychologists. His work - and he - have inspired and continue to feed my passion, mission, vision and work. In this gloves-off conversation, he explains how leaders build work cultures that kill motivation -dead. He explains what to do, and what not to do, to unleash productivity, efficiency, and innovation. Here’s just a few of his top tips:

You get what you measure, so be sure to measure the right things You CANNOT ignore the way people feel. Feeling empowered = success Bureaucracy and rigid processes stifle excellence and innovation Promoting diverse players to senior positions is not enough. The most successful companies nurture environments where diverse hires FEEL absolutely equal to the colleagues. Architect cultures where people feel safe to share and discuss opinions Basically, If you want to get the best from your most important asset, people, you have to CREATE culture. There are no quick fixes.

+ Transcript

KATZ KIELY 0:07
Good morning, good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are, whatever you're doing. Thank you so, so much for dedicating the next half hour of your one precious life to listen to this episode and I promise you, you will not regret it. So today's guest needs no introduction. If you don't know who Dan Ariely is, you really should. He and his life have pretty well changed my life. He is apparently the second most influential psychologist in the world. And a dear dear friend. What he has to say or what he will say I'm sure is the stuff that is pivotal to your success, dear listener. So I would strongly recommend that you give yourself a space to actually stop and focus. But before that, I just wanted to do one of the things that I do, which is kind of out loud thought noodling. So one of the things I wanted to share with you is something that you probably know, but this is the week that Microsoft overtook Apple to become the world's most valuable company. Why do you think that happened, dear listeners, and it's a story that I use and I tell all of the time why do you think that happened? It happened because the leadership of Microsoft have made some massive and transformative investments into, what do you think, - the behaviors that they incentivize, they have invested in what they measure, they have invested in how they operate, they've invested in their culture. And what does that mean? Well, I'll tell you, I know what it means that lots of people who left Microsoft when it was hierarchical and bureaucratic and fairly impossible to work in, are coming back. So here's the thing. Here's the thing. COVID has in my eyes shone a bloody great spotlight into what people are no longer prepared to take. I'm sure that you've heard about the great resignation. If you haven't, then I would strongly recommend that you go and have a look at the data. People have had enough. They are not prepared to work with companies that don't respect them. The only way that your company will differentiate is by nurturing create cultures, where people feel valued. Your culture, the way that you work, the behaviors that you reward that will make the difference between win or lose. And that's why my company, my business, the people I work with in my business, that's why we do things the way we do. Our programs are a manifestation of built on the foundations of the Create framework. Because we understand that knowing something, having an ambition, talking about something is not the same as doing something. So our entire stack is about how do you support human centric change. And so learning experiences are designed so that leaders really connect and they feel safe to share the things that are getting in their way. And they co create workable solutions to those shared challenges to the challenges that matter to them. They feel rewarded and recognized. They see progress their teams then see and feel the difference and they feel safe to be part of that change as well. And I just wanted to tell you, you know, I love to watch the metamorphosis that happens as you develop relationships and community and trust between leaders and if the leaders don't exhibit those behaviors, you can forget the rest of the organization your colleagues are not going to exhibit those, those behaviors. I'm only sorry, I just went off on a rant there. Sorry about that.

KATZ KIELY 4:56
So before I introduce you to the the extraordinary and he is extraordinary, I just wanted to say again, really massive thank you to all of you that have sent me feedback and suggestions for what you'd like to see more of and how I can improve the show because everything can be better always. And getting that feedback is so important to me It energizes me makes me want to carry on talking to these amazing people which by the way is phenomenal. So we have a newsletter. If you want to sign up to the newsletter, go to Katzkiely.com and sign up there. Go to wearebeep.com obviously if you want to find more about our imaginal leave leader culture change behavior change operations change programs. And actually if you want to contact me personally, I really want to hear from you, listener I want to hear from you personally. So email me at katz@wearebeep.com and I promise I'll get back to you. Enough of all that. Let me introduce you to the amazing Dan Ariely.

KATZ KIELY 6:14
Dan Ariely, so excited to have you as a guest on humans leading humans. And in a way I think I could say that if I hadn't met you, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now. And I wouldn't be making this podcast. So I'm really over the moon to have you as a guest on Humans, leading humans. What is the things we always do on this podcast is to just tell the listeners, how did we meet and I was thinking today she was walking. It's been eight years ago.

DAN ARIELY 6:51
It's been a long time ago. Remember how long ago but it was all about a past life you had. It was a project we met somewhere in London for drinks. And you at the time were working on this amazing project that basically said, can we use small contextual changes to change how people perceived their role in a physical environment? And can we create pictures of eyes and babies and to basically take a place that has not such a good history with violence and theft, in change their reality and you managed to do quite an impressive job in changing behavior. And we met and talked about it and it was there's a lot of experiments in social science that you know, do a picture of eyes or paintings and so on, but it's not so common to take somebody who takes these ideas and think about them in a big way and try to change some the behavior of a whole area. So it was it was impressive to see how a germ of an idea that starts in academic literature can be expanded to change the lives of lots of people. So that's my first memory and then of course, we got to meet in lots of other places.

KATZ KIELY 8:22
Yes we did. And one of my guests before was actually Harley, who is now the chief culture officer at Burning Man. And dear listeners, I remember sitting with Dan, and I just been invited to Burning Man, and I think I asked you whether I should go and you're like, Well, I would. What do you mean you got invited to Burning Man?. And since then, we've had some fun down day. Yeah. Anyway, Dan so what I usually do at the beginning of the podcast is I sent you the Create framework, how leaders create culture, what popped in your mind when you look at the framework?

DAN ARIELY 9:00
Ok. So look, frameworks are always over simplification and there's always things that require more nuances in them and so on. And it's also the case that it's never the, the situation where one size fits all. But if I think about some of the essence, that resonates with me, a lot of it has to do with what motivates people and what we think motivates people but actually doesn't sometimes create harm. So that's one then the second is how do we measure something's and how sometimes the measurements are creating a bad impact? So let's start by something simple, which is to talk about measurement and equality. So in the US, there's an index called the SHE Index. It's very nice idea. They say, let's count the number of women at the board level, and let's count the number of women it ends up being the percentage but let's count the percentage of women at the board level. Let's count the percentage of women at stock management and less let's invest in companies are good at that. And that sounds like an interesting useful idea because it is about equality, right? If you have more equal number of women at the board, more equal number of women at the top management level, that's equality. However, how do you think investing in this strategy fares compared to the S&P 500? better, worse, the same? What would you guess?

KATZ KIELY 10:49
I would have guessed, it would be a lot better.

DAN ARIELY 10:53
Most people guess it would be a lot better. It's actually a lot worse. Not worse by a little worse by a lot. Now, does it mean that investing in companies that treat women equally is a bad idea? Of course not. But it means that maybe we measure the thing that is easy, rather than the thing that matters. And you know, when I first say, companies that treat women have more women in the company. It sounds like a good idea, but let's think about it. What are the assumptions? The first assumption is that equal number of women equals treating women fairly. Not at all. You can you can have very few women and treat them equally and they would feel good and you can have lots of women and treat all of them badly and they would feel terrible. These are two separate concepts, equal numbers. Treating equally not the same thing, right? You have to have a level of superficiality in how you think about the world if you think that those two things are the same, but the moment you think about it, it's obviously not the same thing. And then the second question is treating women at the top equally, let's say we're equal at the top, but it doesn't mean that we treat women across the company the same. And you care a lot about people feeling equal. Let's say the women at the top would feel equally treated, not just numbers, but really feel equally treated. Would that necessarily penetrate throughout the organization? Not at all. Now, I actually have data from hundreds of companies over many, many years, about how women and men feel at the company, how they feel about the fairness of their salary and the fairness of their promotion, and all kinds of things like that. And I say what if I don't count the women at the top, but they look throughout the company, 1000 people per company and I look at the companies that the way that men respond to how fair they feel about salary and women is the most equal. Now it's almost never perfectly equal, but the most equal let's say what would happen if I invested in companies same thing, that machine because what would happen if I invested in companies that women feel like they're treated more equally? That index does exceptionally well. About 5% year over the S&P 500. So there are two important points here. One is you think a lot about how to get people to feel like they're being treated equally. Feel equal. And one version of this is gender. It's not everything right? You can have other mute, but one, one version in gender and my two comments to start out thinking is that we have to really think carefully about what it is that we're measuring. Because we might be measuring what's easy rather than what's important. You know, the people came up with sheet index. I don't think they thought too carefully, but but in addition, they measured what is easy. But then I thought to myself, the losses that we get companies and quantify how the employees feel about the company, how they feel about coffee and about how to get people to feel like they're being treated equally, feel equal. And one version of this is gender. It's not everything right? You can have other means, but one, one version in gender and my two comments to start out thinking is that we have to really think carefully about what it is that we're measuring. Because we might be measuring what's easy, rather than what's important. You know, the people came up with the sheet index, I don't think they thought too carefully. But But in addition, they measured what is easy, you know, it's so easy with ESG, whatever is just to count the things that are that are simple to count, but we really have to ask ourselves is are we really capturing the inherent psychology there's the psychology of the people who work in a company and what happens when they feel like they're being treated fairly? And you know, how, what do we measure at the end and when we go further and further from that measure, it's it's tougher. So that's one it's important to figure out what we measure and then of course, it's another evidence of how important it is to treat people fairly and equally.

KATZ KIELY 15:45
And I was talking to Bracken two weeks ago and talking to Gary and talking to you know, most of the people that I've talked to in this series of podcasts have talked about equality, equity, people feeling they can be 100% themselves at work. And there's a lot of talk. There's a lot of ticking of boxes. What can people do something pragmatic that leaders can do to make sure that people feel safe enough psychologically safe enough to be 100% themselves? Because as you say, I can't remember what's the data show about the success of companies where people feel equal.

DAN ARIELY 16:28
Let's take this into into parts. So I told you I have data about hundreds of companies over many, many years and how people feel and I did the following exercise. I say, let me quantify human capital. Let me take companies and quantify how the employees feel about the company, how they feel about coffee and furniture and how they feel about their manager and the purpose and so on. And let me quantify that for each company. And let me see what would happen if I invested in companies were doing that well. What would happen if I invested in those companies compared to what happened would happen if I invested in their S&P 500 or some some other index? In the companies who do well on this, on these indices do much better financialy.In some sense, it is obvious right? If you think about the company company, what they have is human capital. That's the engine of growth. No CEO comes on the stage and say, I don't care about the quality of my company just running straight. I can replace anybody, nobody really cares. But we end up not treating people this way. So that's one it's really important to understand human capital. But you know, a little bit, not a little bit but a lot in line with social science. Some of the things that people SEO, HR manager thinks will matter don't matter. And some of the things people don't think will matter, do matter. So for example, lots of organization focus in salary, easy, measurable under their control, found that salary is not a big predictor of success in the stock market. Companies who pay better don't necessarily do do better. On the other hand, fairness in salary matters a lot. But that's a different story because you know, what, what motivates us is inequity in the notion of fairness, feeling appreciated, matters a lot. So So companies are often focusing on the wrong thing. They often focus on the wrong thing when they try to create a good motivational environment. They focus on, you know, a job they focus on let's do another module for sexual harassment, and let's do another compliance thing and so on. So people don't focus on the things that really motivate people and I think a lot of the challenges have to do with the modern, legal perspective, and I'm really worried about this. You know, one of the things that kills motivation, is bureaucracy. Because if you think what bureaucracy does, it basically tells people we don't trust you. So imagine I told you know what, you can you can take people for dinner, or for lunch, but if you take them for lunch, I want to see a receipt and I want to have a topic of the discussion that you had and I want to see what purpose it had and then I might approve the process. It will take you 20 minutes to fill the paperwork and so on. And that process that I'm right now imagining probably came about because somebody misused it. And that's terrible with people. Misuse, trust, but the nature of bureaucracy is to take a mistake that happened once and instead of saying, that's the cost of business point, people will make mistakes. If you say I don't want to feel any other mistake, so let me create a bulletproof process and I don't care what I lose time I'll tell you kind of a personal story and then I'll do this I had once a partner for some small business venture, we were going to do something very small and not a big part of my life or her life, but we're going to do and as we we worked on it for a while and then I learned that she cheated me in all kinds of ways. The contract she signed was not what she told me to sign the amount of money was not what she told me. When I talked to her about it she anyway, lots of lies that I found out.
And it was heartbreaking. Because I trusted her she I thought she was a friend not just in a business associate. And I was heartbroken by it and my first instinct was to say I never want to experience anything like this again. So let me always start reading contracts and make sure I because you know what happened with her is she did everything I had no idea what was going on. I just trusted her. And my first instinct was are not going to experience this betrayal again. So from now on, I want to read every contract, I want to understand but then I thought to myself, the losses between we get from trust are very clear. Here, somebody cheated me. Things happen. The gains are often not very clear. But the amount of work and process and creativity I'm able to produce by trusting people is amazing. But I don't notice it because I don't go throughout my life saying oh my goodness, today, I must have saved saved 50 hours because I trusted those five people to do different things and if I didn't trust them, it would probably take me another week. To get through the work we get through today. So you get used to trust and it seems natural to you. And when there's a break you see the cost of the break but you don't see the benefit of trusting people. And the world in general is moving toward a world of here's a catastrophe or something bad happened let's protect ourselves and the cost of that we don't care about and that's a very, I think a very dangerous perspective because it kills it kills productivity. It kills. willingness to try it. It kills trust. It kills intrinsic motivation.

KATZ KIELY 22:29
Yeah, there's a chap called Sir John Timpson, who I interviewed in a previous podcast. And he does a very strange thing. He has a whole bunch of shoe fixing shops all over the country, and they fix watches and whatever. What's interesting is that 20% of his staff are from prisons, that ex cons and he does something very strange at the beginning when he hires them because he knows they've got nothing. You can't set up your life. You can't get your life back on track if you've got nothing, so he lends them some money so they can get somewhere to live, and he pays them exactly the same as he pays everyone else. And so I said to him, that's an extraordinary amount of trust. So how often is it fucked up, excuse my French? And he said, well, I could probably over the 10 years counter on one hand, and beyond doubt the people that we bring in from the prisons, they're so grateful, they feel so motivated because I trust them. It's never really a problem. And yet people go back into this, you know, don't do that. Therefore, everybody is living in a culture of fear whereby on one hand the board are saying we want you to be innovative. On the other hand side going to do anything you guys are getting wrong.

DAN ARIELY 23:47
So the getting is wrong is interesting and, you know, in decision making, we think about the two ways of getting it wrong. One way of getting it wrong is having a mistake. Another way of getting it wrong is the fing was never created. So imagine that you have a group of people at the office and they can try something new. And if they try something new and they push the envelope, they might get something wrong as well. And you will notice that you will notice that they tried something new and you will notice that they failed and they wasted money and time and so on. There is another mistake of not trying anything new. And that's that's also a mistake, right? It's a mistake of saying these people sent in warm chair for three years, and we wasted their energy and motivation and they just didn't create anything useful. But that is not a visible mistake. Because you don't have the counterfactual. When you have mistakes that are driven by action, it's visible. Let's say I work in a company and I tried to I don't know, create a new gadget and I failed in a big way. You could say, what if you did a better job upfront? What if what if. On the other hand, if I don't put any extra efforts on anything, and I just wore my chair and do the least amount of work possible? And I gave up on lots of things. There is not a counterfactual. You can't say oh, then here's what could have happened if you actually worked hard now you don't see that. So we have a bias towards seeing mistakes of action, over mistakes of inaction. And what bureaucracy does is to make it such that as many more mistakes of inaction compared to action. If I wake up today as a researcher and I say I really have an interesting idea, but they can't be bothered. Because it's too much work and the bureaucracy is too complex and so on. Nobody will ever be able to notice that there was a mistake of inaction. On the other hand, if I do research and I offend somebody.

KATZ KIELY 26:05
Exactly. So what do you do? What do people do? What do leaders do to avoid that?

DAN ARIELY 26:10
So you know, this, this concept goes under a psychological safety. And I think it's also connected to resilience. And it's also connected to what we call secure attachment. So so secure attachment is this parenting style. And one way to think about it is imagine you have a kid who is three years old, and you go with this kids to the park, and you say why don't you go to the swing? And if the kid stands up and goes to the swing and doesn't look back, they have secure attachment. They know that you're going to be there if something bad would happen. But if the kid walks a little bit and looks behind to see that you're there and from time to time swings and turn around and so they never know if you're there or not there then they don't have secure attachment. And they're unlikely to develop resilience. And if you think what resilience really is. I mean, there's lots of versions of it, but one important one is that we know that somebody will be there to catch us if something bad will happen. We can't imagine a world with no negative consequences. We can't imagine a world with no mistakes. The question is what do we think will happen when there's a mistake? And if we live in a world where mistakes are punished very harshly when nobody is there to help us. That's a world with no resilience, those who will with no secure attachment, and it's the world with no with no motivation, that the thing about resilience like is like a security blanket. Take another example, imagine we have somebody who can either go and somebody have low income, who can decide to go and try and get a degree at university. It's a cost benefit analysis. It might put them higher, but it will also cost money. And if that person thinks that the downsides are devastating, that if they make a mistake, if they don't, they will lose everything, they will never take the chance. But in society, in society in general, in companies, we want people to take chances. We want people to try new things. And one of the conditions is to say that if something will go wrong, we will catch you. And it's true for society as a whole. It's true for an organization.

KATZ KIELY 28:35
It's this concept of knowing that somebody Jim, I don't know if you met Jim Lord Jim Knight, I'm not sure if you have yet. But he was talking about you know, at the end of the day, whatever organization you're in, whether it be a government or whether it be the civil service, or whether it be a university or a corporate, you have to build community and that community has to be built upon the fact that you know people have got your back. And if you don't have that you don't have to trust and you know, the trust index show some pretty terrifying things about the levels of trust across the board as you correct rightfully saying, if and if no, people don't know what to trust and don't know whether they trust do you end up with all sorts of bizarre things happening.

UDAN ARIELY 29:18
Yeah, you know, of course, an extreme example for this is the canceled culture. And then there's a lot of all kinds of bad behaviors, but there was a professor recently, at university here in the US. They chose the 1954 inappropriate movie to his class. Anyway, they thought it was inappropriate in what way? It was a movie from 1954 where a white actor colored his face in black, to portray a black person and blackface they call it and it was a practice in that period. And now it's considered inappropriate to dress up and and it wasn't just that that actor tried to imitate their culture and so on. And anyway, we can ask, you know, what function it did then what function it does now, but, but that that professor wanted to show something about a fella that was the movie was a fella and tried to show something. And the students were outraged. And, you know, it's trying to be that there's lots of things these days where the first reaction is being outraged. Yeah, the first reaction is not a reaction of that was an interesting choice. Can we talk about the pros and the con? Absolutely. And and the thing the thing about this, the aggressiveness, the people being so sure about their own beliefs and not being open to other, not creating a dialogue, but being accusatory, first of all, is that it creates a very tough culture. And I'll give you an example from the university. So I have a friend who teaches a class at an American university on game theory. Game theory is this hyper rational theory about how actors understand each other and make decisions in a competitive environment. And you could do it incredibly mathematical. Which then it's very important but very boring. Or you can try and tell stories. Not instead, but in addition, and you can say, you know, it's Russian versus the US, it's men versus women. It's company X versus the employees. Let's think about multi actors in in a competitive environment that have to think about the other side. And he told me, we talked last week, he said, there is not a single topic that somebody doesn't object anymore. Yeah. And because the objections which you can think about it is the signal for failure. He tried an example, somebody got offended. Now we don't look at the 99% of the people who are happy with that example. We look at just a person who got offended by that example, their voice gets amplified. And now he said he's no longer able to teach it in a non boring way. But if we go back to the main topic, the main topic is motivation. And when we think about motivation, it's important to understand that people have a tremendous drive. Many times the goal of companies is just not to slow people down. Like it's not it's not that companies need to create incentives. The first thing is to stop destroying motivation, people want to go to work and to feel productive and efficient and they want to contribute. People want all of those things. I mean, if the company if the workplace doesn't allow us to do this, we look at it other places where people you know, run marathons and create hobbies and volunteer people are looking for good things to do, to feel a sense of belonging, connection, contribution, progress, all of those things are part of human nature. If the organization that you are that you belong to allows you to do it, that's wonderful. Everybody benefits. Why should you work and feel miserable and find the joys of motivation somewhere else? No, let's find them in the same, the same place. My university gets much more benefit if I find my motivation for contribution and help and belonging its own within University rather than looking for in other places. So companies need to first of all, stop killing intrinsic motivation and bureaucracy is one of those things Punishment for mistakes, cancel culture, are are the next thing of psychological safety now. And then after we stop killing demotivation we can start thinking about how do we bring it up? All of these things, by the way become more important during COVID and after COVID. And why is it? Because we work more from home. So think about is an analogy think about the kids in the classroom. A kid in the classroom in a standard bathroom in class sits and the teacher is there to kind of force them to study. Sit straight, put your phone down, don't talk to Joey, you know that the teacher is there to control them. And the same thing is true for our work environment. So I'm in my office here I have a glass wall people can see me, I mean there's a way to control each other. It's not the teacher but it's, it's similar. Now, when COVID happened and kids are studying from home, the power has changed. Now the kid can just mute the teacher how he can turn her off or him off and in office an intrinsic motivation is much more important. In the classroom, there was importance for extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation. Now, intrinsic motivation is much more important and the same thing is also true in the workplace. If we think that people are going to keep on working from home some of the time it means that the role of intrinsic motivation is more important. And how we develop it therefore is is much more important because let's say you take a day a week. Let's say people will work from home a day a week. If that day a week is at full blossom. People can you know, are extra motivated, it could be better than working from the office. Because people have their own environments. They could be more productive, they can have less interferences, all kinds of things. But if people are unmotivated will be less valuable. So the figuring out intrinsic motivation during COVID and post COVID is extra important.

KATZ KIELY 36:23
100% 100% then, again, it's going back to this thing about trust, isn't it? I remember when I was when I was working for a UN, you were not allowed to work at home, and I couldn't get anything done at work. So eventually I started working from home I was like, you know what, I will get more down home trust me on this. And I think people still struggle with it. And I think bosses are still thinking the only way you're going to get the best out of people is by having them in the office for those hours. It's

DAN ARIELY 36:55
Here's what happens. You know, in the same way that I trusted this business partner and failed. Businesses will experience things where they will say I wish I didn't do it. But when they decrease trust and create a layer across everybody, you're basically destroying a lot of value. In the same process. We have to develop a world in which we learn how to deal with things that we don't like as part of life. You know, in the same way that let's say we took driving. If we had zero tolerance for driving mistakes, we would just not allow people to drive or we would create these machines that you know people couldn't listen to anything, they would fixate their eyes. Just imagine that we were trying to create the world in which nobody ever made a correction. Now, it's perfectly great to try and reduce corrections. Let's have a warning. system, let's have lights, let's have all kinds of things like that. But if our tolerance is zero, we will not get anything. So so we have to figure out how do we understand that for people to innovate and be motivated we need to also get them to feel safe and secure and that means that we need to help people feel that mistakes are understandable.

KATZ KIELY 38:34
Are okay and that it's okay to speak out.

DAN ARIELY 38:37
The discussion is fine if you think that the punishment is very hard for anything. It's just not worthwhile doing anything.

KATZ KIELY 38:46
Smoothing slightly across I remember we went for lunch at some point in the Gerkin I seem to remember we had a panorama and you were telling me about some research you've done about incentives. And how people make assumptions, when actually those assumptions are usually really wrong. And I wonder whether you'd like to tell us about that.

UDAN ARIELY 39:06
So very quickly, but but the assumptions about incentives are wrong in different ways. It turns out that big bonuses, create both motivation and stress. But often the stress is more powerful than the motivation. So performance goes down. And it turns out that bonuses creates implicit competition between people and that competition rather than being positive is often creates less less collaboration between people and more envy. You know, let's let's imagine, imagine we work in a company that has a bonus and you get 2% more bonus than me. First of all, there's a question of do I think it's fair do I perceive you to being 2% better than I do? And the odds are no, because I see everything I do. I don't see everything that you do. So I have an overall inflated impression of my own staff and under impression of you, but I also am not going to help you. So the whole the whole model for for compensation is basically makes very simplistic assumptions is people are rat in the maze and they don't want to work and we need to give them some money to want to work but the reality is people in the right environment people want to work and want to be efficient and often often, these financial designs are actually creating more damage than than good.

KATZ KIELY 40:35
So what from your research have you found does motivate people?

DAN ARIELY 40:41
The things that motivate people or a sense of meaning, belonging, feeling appreciated. Psychological safety is incredibly important, feeling that the company is moving in the right direction, actually caring about your team members. Now often people do things not for the company as a whole, but they do it for the for the team member. That's one of the things I'm really worried about these days, is that teams are no longer social teams. You know, after a year and a half in video conferencing if we don't care about our team members in the same way, that's a part of our motivation. And if that goes away, that's very unhelpful. So basically, everything that makes us human is a part of the things that are important. And everything that makes us a calculating machine of cost and benefit is not negative, but often just not that important. And what we do is we just focus on the wrong thing. We focus on the things that are easy - salary compensation, and let change the bonuses that change the percentage of whatever rather than thinking how do we say thank you to people?

KATZ KIELY 42:04
Yes, yes. I was thinking a personal example. I worked very, very hard on a piece of work. And you know, if I put more into it than maybe I should, and I hand it over to the person who's asked me to do this piece of work. I don't even get a thank you. The feeling of that. I suppose it doesn't matter really. But it really matters because I don't want to do that again. For that person ever.

DAN ARIELY 42:37
So on the negative side, you know shredding people's work, not saying things, not saying I read what you wrote, create a lot of demotivation on the positive side, even text messages of saying thank you increase the productivity and people in the production facility. And but I have to run to my next.

KATZ KIELY 42:58
My darling down okay, so before we leave, before we leave, I need to ask you one last question. What do you want to call your episode of Humans leaving leading humans?

DAN ARIELY 43:11
How do we stop destroying motivation and start to build it?

KATZ KIELY 43:18
Gorgeous, so lovely to see you. And I'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much. Oh, my goodness, Dan, I think I think I was enjoying that bit too much. I just loved that conversation. And I know that I'm going to be listening to it again, because there's just so much to take out of it and I just can't thank Dan enough, because as you can imagine he's he's a little bit busy. So taking time out to share his insights with me and actually with you, dear listener, is it's just I just feel quite honored. And what did I take away from it? Well, I guess that being rational, making assumptions doing what's normal, will get us nowhere. And it really struck me as Dan was talking that when we start working with the companies that we work with, most of the senior leaders really resist talking about the way that they feel, they don't want to talk about the way that their colleagues feel. It makes them uncomfortable. They feel safe to talk about what they think what they do. But guys, it's the way that people feel, that's what motivates them. It's the way that they feel and therefore behave that way. What drives productivity and efficiency and effectiveness and agility and all of those things. Every single client that we talked to says that they need to embed in the way that their company's working. So you can you know, you can pay massive salaries, and that will probably win talent, but will it keep it? Because the truth is that we all look for workplaces where we feel rewarded and recognized and empowered. All of those things in the Create framework. And especially now in the time, it's a great resignation. I really struggle with people thinking that another training module is going to make them win or teaching your workforce to code. It's not going to make you win another buying another tech solution without the culture change without changing what you measure how they really incentivize is not going to make you win. And you cannot be innovative. Everyone talks about innovation unless your teams are empowered to take informed risks and be honest about when things go wrong. Just you know, remember, Gary Kuhn was talking about this in this episode, that it's just you know, take informed risks allow people to take informed risks, figure out what the worst that can happen is, surely it's better to try something and learn from it, than not try at all. So I want you to ask yourself, are you destroying motivation in your quest for risk free? And I just keep thinking, you know, the world will never go back to normal and thank God for that because normal, it's never really worked has it? So what we need to do is look away from mental models of normal and look at the science. The data is all there and the findings are clear. What will make you win is building trust. Trust is what bonds communities and that's what you need to nurture, you need to nurture, a community where everybody knows everybody else has got their back is to psychological safety. That Amy Edmondson talked about in her episode a couple of episodes back. That's why I do what I do. That's why I've built beep.

Leadership programs are all about building real relationships between humans they build communities of trust. And that, dear listeners is the only way you can get change to stick oh dear I think are going to around. Okay, I got into a rant there. Sorry, guys. But I'm passionate because it's just there and we can get there but we just need to move away from those mental models of normal so thanks again, for all of the people who've sent me feedbacks. It makes me really I know it's just great. It doesn't matter what the feedback is because as you know, I believe everything can be better always. So even if it's somebody saying I didn't like this or you should do more of that. I love that. So please get in touch with me at katz@beep.com. You have been listening to Humans leading humans towards the future of work that works for people. This podcast is brought to you in partnership with the marketing society. And if you're a senior leader, and if you need to know how and the network's to succeed, get over to their website and sign up because it really is a great great tribe of human beings of change agents. Thank you. Thank you so much as always, just fantastic super Terranea for the magical sting of stings. areata. We are beep to find out how we help large organizations to embed the Create framework through developing communities of trust. If you love this episode, pass it on to any friends and colleagues you think might need a shot of inspiration. If you've got a boss who doesn't understand what Dan has just told us. pass this on to her or him. Thank you. So so much for dedicating half an hour of your time to be with me in this podcast. Please subscribe. The links are in the notes. Be inspired, be imaginal be more human. And I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.

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