Book Summary Preview : A-ha! Performance

The Big Idea

Let’s face it: what every manager, parent, teacher, spouse, advertiser, customer, coach, politician, business person wants is to get others – meaning our employees, colleagues, bosses, children, spouses, clients, audiences, etc -  to do what we want them to do.  But getting other people to do the right thing, at the right time, with the right attitude, is not easy. In fact, managing people and their behavior can be the most difficult job in the world.

“A-ha! Performance” by Douglas Walker offers remarkable insight and advice on how we can motivate other people to deliver better performance and better results. Written with Stephen Sorkin, the book teaches motivation management – how to build, manage and lead a self-motivated workforce.  Outcome?  Greater and faster success in managing the performance of others. Bonus? An improved workplace environment, and improved personal relationships as well.   It works.

Beyond The Carrot and Stick

Many bosses, leaders, managers and parents think, or wish, that simply telling others what to do will produce the results they want. Still others believe in employing the carrot-and-stick approach, bribes and threats or reward and punishment, to control others’ actions and behaviors. What experience shows, however, is that people perform best when they are personally motivated.

And how do we build personal motivation? By tying desired performance to the satisfaction of employee’s needs and wants.

If ‘location, location, location’ are the three basic rules of real estate, ‘relationship, relationship, relationship’ are the three basic rules of successful managing. Care and credibility are at the core of all meaningful relationships, including business relationships and great working relationships are the key to business success.

To successfully manage a workforce, then, requires that we know how to motivate our workforce. And we can do this by learning the 8 A-ha! Performance Intrinsic Motivation Points.

As graphically illustrated in the book, there are 8 Intrinsic Motivation Points (IMP’s) that explain what happens in the mind between our input and our employee’s chosen behavior. Based on this understanding we can effectively address people and handle performance challenges in ways that payoff better for all parties involved – and with less management effort than you may have exerted in the past.

Understanding Personal Motivation: Needs and Wants

Needs are the hidden fundamentals of motivation and behavior. Everything we do is done in an effort to satisfy or protect one or more of five basic needs. Ask someone to do something that threatens or frustrates his/her needs, and he/she won’t do it. Ask someone to do something we want him/her to do, and that satisfies his/her needs at the same time, and he/she is much more likely to do it.
 
Psychologists identify five basic human needs that are the foundational drivers of all human behavior, and which constitute A-ha! Performance Intrinsic Motivation Point #1 (graphic illustration presented in book):
1. Survival
2. Belonging (Love)
3. Power (Achievement)
4. Fun
5. Freedom

This means that for our workforce to be motivated to perform and achieve desired results, their performance must satisfy or protect, more than it frustrates or threatens, one or more of the above needs. As managers, leaders, advertisers, etc, we will get better results from others if we understand the unrelenting power of their needs and work to ensure that employees are able to satisfy or protect them as they do their work. When managers fail to pay attention to employee needs, the common results are reduced motivation and poor morale – which is a direct cause of sub par performance and attrition.

But while needs may be the basics that drive all behavior, we don’t satisfy them directly. Instead, we satisfy them through wants – specific preferences that are tied to our needs. Our wants make up A-ha! Performance Intrinsic Motivation Point #2 (graphic illustration presented in book). Wants are:

1. Infinite specific individual preferences, based on one or more of the five basic needs
2. The particular motivators of our actions, our behavior
3. Quality, by definition, is that which most thoroughly matches our strongest wants

We are born with needs, but we develop specific wants by experiencing something, or someone that meets three criteria, summed up as A-ha! Performance Intrinsic Motivation Point #3 (graphic illustration presented in book):

1. It’s clear (Clarity: We have to know/see/experience something to want it)
2. We know it was attainable at least once, so it should be again. (Attainability: To want to do something, you have to believe you can do it)
3. The wow or great feeling was a wonderful payoff. At least one, or probably more, of the needs was satisfied (Payoff: To want something, one must see a need satisfying benefit from it).

What do these criteria tell us? For people to want to do what we want them to do, we have to meet these criteria: Clarity, Attainability, Pay-off > Cost (CAP).  They have to be able to see/learn/understand what we want them to do, they have to believe they can do it, and they have to benefit from it by deriving need satisfaction.

Whenever people are not doing what we want them to do, one or more of these CAP criteria are not being met. This means we always need to consider am I being Clear?  Do they believe this is Attainable or possible?  Is there a need satisfying Payoff for them that’s greater than the cost?  Paying attention to what our people need and want, and showing that we care enough to act so that the work they do allows them to get what they need and want is critical.

Caring for employees’ needs and wants builds credibility and their trust in us. If we have credibility and enjoy our people’s trust, they are much more likely to support our decisions and plans, and work with us more enthusiastically and effectively.

Knowing What We’ve Got

In order to know whether or not we’re getting what we want, we must identify what we’ve got. Without knowing what we’ve got, we won’t know whether we’re getting what we want, or not. If we’ve got what we want, life is good.  If what we’ve Got is not what we Want, we’ll be motivated to do something about it.  So knowing what we’ve got is A-ha! Performance Intrinsic Motivation Point #4 (graphic illustration presented in book).

In business, for example, we need to know if the quality of product or service we’ve got to deliver is the same as the quality the customer wants.

 

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