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Kathy Stoddard Torrey

~ Leadership Coach and Trainer

Kathy Stoddard Torrey

Tag Archives: #DanPink

Just Pick Up The Books!

24 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by Kathy Stoddard Torrey in Delegation, Leadership, Uncategorized

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Tags

#DanPink, #LeadershipRules #LeadYourselfFirst #KathySays, #mastery, #smallsuccessesfirst, #starteasy

child cleaning 1K

When my sons were young, I would tell them to go and clean their room. One could handle his part of the job. The other was completely overwhelmed by the task. He would sit on the floor and become engrossed in the books that he was supposed to be putting on the shelf. Getting him to clean his part of the room was a bit of a battle.

I thought about the appropriateness of the chore. Cleaning one’s room is not an unreasonable expectation. However, a room that has gotten out of hand can be daunting. I find my own room intimidating to clean when I put it off for too long.

One day, I decided to break the task up into manageable bits so he wouldn’t feel overwhelmed. I asked him to put away one category of items for ten minutes. For example, I asked him to just put away books for ten minutes. I wanted to set him up for success.

When we first take on a task or assign one to someone else, we want the experience to be a positive one. If we overwhelm someone with too much information in the beginning, they can lose hope. As leaders, we want to do what we can to ensure success early. It’s easy to increase the difficulty of the actions as a person’s skill and familiarity with a task grows.

Instead of dumping an entire task on someone, we can break it down into pieces. If an employee’s ultimate responsibility is to compile information and create a complex report, we can hand over the requirements in pieces.

For example, we could first have them collect the information from the various people they will collaborate with. It would give them a chance to meet fellow employees and learn why the information is important. They could also ensure the information is in the proper format, and learn what that looks like and why we request the information in that way. Then we move on and have them do another piece of the report.

In the book Drive, Daniel Pink states that mastery is one of the things that motivates people. We want to become good at doing things. We want to do tasks well and with ease. Mastery comes with practice. If we ask too much in the beginning, we can make mastery seem like a far-fetched goal. We want people to experience small successes along the way. Each success builds confidence and motivates us to take on the next level of the task.

Another reason to begin with easy is that we want to create a positive feeling about the task and avoid a bad attitude. My nephew’s teacher is requiring four days of creative writing a week. He is eight years old and faces frustration and anger each evening as he cranks out two pages of creative writing. His attitude toward writing is not good at the moment. My sister is currently advocating on his behalf with the teacher so that he won’t decide that he is not a good writer or that he will never write again.

My son was successful when I set a time limit and had him focus on just one part of the entire job. Gradually, we lengthened the time and broadened the scope of what he would do at one time. Each small win made him feel more confident that he could handle cleaning his room.

The key is to ensure that any job we do ourselves or assign to another never feels hopeless. We can all master our tasks – and have a positive attitude about them – if we create small successes that build up to complete proficiency. It might feel like it takes longer to delegate in this way, but the positive feelings and errors that we avoid far outweigh a little bit of time.


For a little bit of fun leadership development, join 53 Leadership Challenges at KathyStoddardTorrey.com.

Want to go further with your professional development? Check out the courses offered at PositiveEffectLeadership.com.

If you are interested in taking your career to the next level quickly, contact me for a sample coaching session at KSTorrey@tapferconsulting.com.

 

Motivating Self and Others: What Motivates Us?

07 Tuesday Nov 2017

Posted by Kathy Stoddard Torrey in Leadership, Motivation, Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

#autonomy, #DanPink, #KathySays, #LeadershipRules, #mastery, #purpose, Motivation

Pink autonomy mastery purpose 550 px

There are almost as many theories of what motivates us humans as there are stars in the sky. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. However, look at the Wikipedia article on Motivation to get a small glimpse into the world of motivation theories.

I’ve read a bunch of them, and I find few of them memorable or useful. I think David McClelland’s popular theory is a little disheartening. He states that we are motivated by a need for power, affiliation, and achievement. Those don’t feel motivating to me, but maybe I am not in touch with my inner power-hungry self.

The theory that I like best is Dan Pink’s in the book Drive. He states that we can foster intrinsic motivation through autonomy, mastery, and purpose. These are simple and make sense to me.

Let’s start with autonomy. We all like to do things our own way. I use a cool demonstration with a dog leash to illustrate how much more we struggle against authority when the leash is short and we aren’t given a lot of freedom. It’s not any fun to follow someone else’s procedure to the letter.

I, for one, like to be able to show some creativity that plays to my own strengths and interests. Otherwise, I feel like a robot. Henry Ford did not understand this concept. He asked, “Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?” Not. Interested. If you want to motivate me, you let me engage my brain and my hands.

I totally get mastery. When I take on a new task or action, I will do it over and over again until I have mastered it. The rhesus monkeys in Harlow’s experiment that we discussed last week are a good example. I still have the wooden Soma cube that I spent hours figuring out as a child. Every now and then, I will pull it apart and put it back together just because I can and want to. I have mastered it, and it feels good to solve it.

The final piece is purpose. It’s a big one! We started out the year setting goals and finding our Big Why as described by Simon Sinek in his book Start with Why. I have published a blog every week this year because I have a sense of purpose in creating and completing them. My granddaughter is one year old. I will be long gone before she is old enough to be interested in the concepts that I teach and discuss.

That thought saddens me because I know how useful leadership concepts are in creating positive relationships and a successful and peace-filled life. I desperately want her to have this information. The only way I see it happening is if I take everything that is in my head and put it on paper. This year is a sort of love letter to my granddaughter, any future grandchildren, and to you! It feels like a legacy – which is very motivating.

When trying to get someone else to do something, it’s a good idea to create autonomy, mastery, and purpose for the person doing the task or action. What can you do to give someone more control over the task? Does the thing have to be done a certain way, or is there some wiggle room for the person to do it his or her own way? Does the person have the opportunity to master the task? Is the purpose of the task clear to the person performing it? We can help others by creating Pink’s three conditions as often and as much as possible.

It’s also worth using Pink’s three motivating conditions to evaluate our own lives. Can you use one or more of them to motivate yourself? If you aren’t motivated to do something, why are you doing it? I don’t mean that in a “you should stop doing it” sense, although that could be the answer. However, many times we must get through something hard to reach an ultimate goal. We can find ways to motivate ourselves using autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Purpose is always the ultimate motivator for me. If I can find a way that an action helps me to achieve my goals, then I can power through it.

We can make life easier if we are willing to create a motivating environment by fostering autonomy, mastery, and purpose for ourselves and others.


For a little bit of fun leadership development, join 53 Leadership Challenges at KathyStoddardTorrey.com.

Want to go further with your professional development? Check out the courses offered at PositiveEffectLeadership.com.

If you are interested in taking your career to the next level quickly, contact me for a sample coaching session at KSTorrey@tapferconsulting.com.

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