Primed to Perform

There are six basic motives behind people's work. Play, purpose, and potential strengthen performance. Emotional pressure, economic pressure, and inertia weaken it.

Why people participate in an activity affects their performance in that activity. Their motive affects their performance.

Play occurs when you're engaging in an activity simply because you enjoy doing it. The work itself is its own reward.

The purpose motive occurs when you do an activity because you value the outcome of the activity (versus the activity itself). You may or may not enjoy the work you do, but you value its impact.

The potential motive occurs when you find a second order outcome (versus a direct outcome) of the work that aligns with your values or beliefs. You do the work because it will eventually lead to something you believe is important, such as your personal goals.

Emotion pressure, occurs when emotions such as disappointment, guilt, or shame compel you to perform an activity. These emotions are related to your beliefs (your self-perception) and external forces (the judgments of other people). The work itself is no longer the reason you're working.

Economic pressure is when you do an activity solely to win a reward or avoid punishment. The motive is separate from the work itself and separate from your own identity.

The most indirect motive of all is inertia. With inertia, your motive for working is so distant from the work itself that you can no longer say where it comes from—you do what you do simply because you did it yesterday.

First is tactical performance. This represents how well a person executes a plan. Tactical performance is the "productivity, efficiency, and control."

The military uses phrase "VUCA" to describe the limitations of tactical performance. The letters VUCA stand for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Tactical performance is not enough to address VUCA. People and organizations need to adapt.

Together, culture and strategy, and their outcomes—adaptive and tactical performance—are like yin and yang. Like yin and yang, they are two halves of a whole, both important for performance.

Strategy helps us focus all our energy on a few critical targets. It is a force of strength. Culture, on the other hand, allow us to react to the unpredictable. It is a force of agility. Together, they create a complete view of performance.

Emergence occurs when the individual components of a collective are able to organize themselves into a system that is far more complicated than the sum of its parts.

Emergent organizations must encourage citizenship. Citizens teach and help one another, spread new ideas, and share innovations.

Once a week, you should look at your tactical goals and think about how they can be translated into adaptive goals. Informally, you should ensure that all your people are constantly working toward a set of adaptive goals of their own choosing.

Your objective is the anchor of your organization's identity. It should explain your "why" to your people and your customers.

A code exists so that your employees can adapt, make complicated decisions without having to check in with leaders all the time. It is the set of playground rules—once you know the rules, you are free to play. A behavioral code is complete when you can leave your people to make their own decisions for the company and trust that those decisions will be made appropriately.

The most powerful and the most overlooked source of total motivation is the design of a person's role within an organization.

To become a high performer capable of both tactical and adaptive performance, your job must enable you to understand how your work creates impact. Better still, it should give you the ability to continually improve that theory.

While every job us subject to nonnegotiable policies and strategies, a well-crafted role should also have a place where it's normal to experiment an learn. we call this zone "the playground.

Sometimes it's not enough to change the way one person works. You have to change how everyone works together.

Another outcome of the typical promotion system is the Peter Principle—the idea that if the prize for good work is a promotion, everyone will rise up the ranks until they reach the point where they're no longer good at their jobs.

A managerial promotion should not be a reward given to the top performer. It should be a path pursued by those who find play in learning how to manage and coach.