Reward, recognition, praise. It doesn’t matter how you do it; what matters is that you do it again and again. Money is not the only effective reward, or even the most effective. Reward excellence. Encourage employee participation. Do this in ways that people appreciate.
—Dale Carnegie
Our topic here and in the following chapter is the fourth essential people skill, assertive ambition. At first glance, you might find that title somewhat redundant. After all, isn’t ambition assertive by its very nature? Is it possible to be ambitious without being assertive?
Actually, assertiveness as we’ve defined it is not an inherent element of ambition. Remember: There’s a difference between being assertive and being aggressive. An ambitious person may be very forceful and determined without being assertive in the true sense of the word. Aggressiveness often implies getting ahead at the expense of someone else. Assertiveness is a much more inner-directed concept. It’s doing what you really want and getting what you really deserve. It includes other people doing the same.
With this in mind, let’s make a distinction between what might be called intrinsic and extrinsic ambition. When people are extrinsically ambitious, their ambition is directed toward a target outside themselves—toward an external payoff or reward, and usually that reward is of a physical or material nature. The ambition of a new employee in a company, for example, might be to gain a specific title or to earn a certain amount of money within a certain number of years. But for an intrinsically ambitious person, the payoff is more emotional or even spiritual. It’s a feeling of personal achievement or inner satisfaction that can’t be touched or packaged. Ultimately it is more meaningful than a company car, a corner office, or even an expense account.
Here we will focus primarily on how you can develop assertive, intrinsic motivation in yourself. In chapter 14, we’ll see how you can share and impart the principles to your team members. But whether we’re talking about personal ambition or collective ambition for your whole organization, there are certain key ideas that you need to absorb. Some of them may surprise you.
We’ll begin by looking at some very interesting things that have been learned about motivation and peak performance. Although these insights were gained through controlled studies (sometimes in laboratory settings), you’ll quickly see how the information is transferable to the real world.
You’re probably aware, for example, that in laboratory experiments, animals can learn complex tasks when they’re rewarded with a bite of peanut butter or breakfast cereal. In the same way, students are promised a grade of A for good work, and salespeople get larger commissions when they close more deals. It just stands to reason that external rewards promote better performance. This seems like a simple law of human nature.
And that’s the problem. It’s too simple. It’s also wrong.
A growing body of research suggests that the benefits of traditional “rewards” are not as great as they might seem. Amazingly, social psychologists are finding that external rewards can actually lower performance levels. This becomes increasingly true over longer time frames, especially when the work involves creative thinking or initiating new ideas. Studies have also shown that intrinsic interest in a project (the sense that a task is worth doing for its own sake) generally declines when someone is externally rewarded for doing it. If an external reward such as money, praise, or a job promotion is the reason you’re engaging in the activity, that activity will come to be seen as less worthwhile in its own right.
The implications of this research are truly startling. It suggests that the basic premises of performance and reward in the corporate environment may actually be discouraging to improvement and top achievement. The fact that rewards can have counterproductive effects is based on a variety of studies, and they’ve come up with such findings as these.
• Children who are rewarded for drawing are less likely to draw on their own than children who draw just for the fun of it.
• Teenagers offered rewards for playing word games enjoy the games less and do not do as well as those who play with no rewards.
• Employees who are praised for meeting a manager’s expectations actually suffer a drop in motivation.
When one study asked a group of college students to invent imaginary movie plots, the students who had been contracted for rewards experienced greater difficulty. In similar research, a group of creative-writing students were asked to compose poetry. Some of them were given a list of external reasons for writing, such as impressing teachers, small amounts of money, or recommendations for graduate school. Others were given a list of intrinsic reasons: the enjoyment of playing with words, satisfaction from self-expression, and so forth. At the end of the study, the results were clear. Students given the extrinsic reasons not only wrote less creatively than the others (as judged by twelve independent poets) but the quantity of their work dropped significantly. Rewards, it seems, can have this kind of negative effect primarily with creative tasks, including higher-level problem solving. Findings show that the more complex the activity, the more it’s hurt by extrinsic reward.
This research questions the widespread belief that money is an effective and even necessary way to motivate people. They also challenge the assumption that any goal is more likely to be achieved if it is rewarded. What is the logic behind these findings, and what do they tell us about how ambition should really be motivated?
First, rewards encourage people to focus narrowly on a task, to do it as quickly as possible, and to take few risks. If you feel that the task is something you have to get through to get the prize, you’re going to be less creative, enthusiastic, and motivated.
Second, people come to see themselves as being controlled by the reward. They feel less in command, and this may interfere with performance. To the extent that your experience of being self-motivated is limited, your ambition will be reduced as well.
Finally, external rewards can erode intrinsic interest. People who see themselves as working for money, approval, or competitive success find their tasks less pleasurable, and therefore they don’t do them as well. Money may work to “buy off” intrinsic motivation for an activity on a long-term basis. Research also shows that trying to beat others has the same effect. People who competed to solve a puzzle quickly were less likely than those who were not competing to keep working at it once the experiment was over.
There is general agreement, however, that not all rewards have the same effect. Offering a flat fee for participating in an experiment (similar to an hourly wage in the workplace) does not usually reduce intrinsic motivation. Problems develop, however, when the rewards are based on performing a given task or doing a good job at it. So the key lies in how a reward is experienced. If you come to view yourself as working to get something, you may no longer find that activity worth doing in its own right.
There’s an important distinction to be made here, and it’s a slightly subtle one. On the one hand, you can tell someone (or tell yourself) that you’ll get a reward if you perform in a certain way. This is generally ineffective over the long term, as we’ve seen. But what about looking at what someone is already doing and rewarding the behaviors that are in the direction of the desired goals? For example, telling a team member that he’ll get a bonus if he writes a good report is ineffective. It’s much better to give him the tools and techniques to write a good report, and then giving him a bonus when he does so.
Any task, no matter how enjoyable it once seemed, is devalued if it’s presented as a means rather than an end. For example, a group of volunteers were told they could not engage in an activity they liked until they first took part in another activity that they also enjoyed. Although they liked both activities equally, the subjects soon came to dislike the task that was a requirement before they could engage in the other.
There is a little story that illustrates this principle very nicely. Neighborhood children were harassing an elderly man, and he finally devised a scheme to put a stop to this. He offered to pay each child a dollar if they would all return on Tuesday and yell their insults at him again. The children were definitely surprised by this offer, but they eagerly complied and received the money. As he paid them, however, the man had something more to say. He could pay them again for insulting him on Wednesday, but this time the rate would be only 25 cents per child. The kids were a bit disappointed, but they went along with the new rate. They returned on Wednesday and insulted him again. But then, as he handed out the quarters, the old man informed them that Thursday’s payment would be just a penny. The kids were disgusted. “Forget about it!” they said, and they never taunted him again.
The principle that’s working here isn’t limited to money or other forms of physical reward. When praise or positive verbal feedback begins to be experienced as controlling, the effect on motivation can be similar to that of a financial payment. A study of corporate employees found that those who were told “Good job, you’re doing just what you should be doing” were no more motivated than those who received only quantitative feedback.
There’s a difference between saying “I’m giving you this reward because I personally recognize and appreciate your work” and saying “You are getting this reward because you’ve met certain standards.” The first is a personal, human interaction. It’s an example of assertive people skills. This ignites assertive ambition, both in the person who hears it and the person who says it.
The negative impact on motivation through reward can be minimized by playing down the significance of these rewards and trying not to use them in a controlling way. You can’t force ambition or motivation, but you can create an environment in which those qualities can take root and flourish.
In simplest terms, ambition can be defined as wanting to achieve something that is desired or planned. In more poetic terms, it is having a dream and experiencing success when that dream is attained. Your ambition is rewarded when your dreams come true.
Exactly what makes up those dreams varies from one person to another. Dreams are a subjective experience, and so is the ambition that moves us toward them. They can take as many different forms as there are different human beings in a family, a company, or even in the world. In a similar way, the feelings that work against ambition are also subjective and individual. For our purposes here, however, we’re going to identify those feelings by one word. Then we’re going to look more closely at what that word represents, in order to minimize its effect on our lives. As a leader working with a team of diverse individuals, it’s very important to grasp the multifaceted meanings of this word, to identify how the meanings express themselves in your team members, and to work consistently to eliminate them.
What is this single word that represents the polar opposite of assertive ambition? The one word that always pulls the plug on motivation and achievement in a business setting? The word is fear.
As we’ve tried to show, ambition is a subjective experience and so is the fear that works against it. Still, there are certain very important points that should be made about fear; insights about how it begins, how it works, and how it can be eliminated. Generally speaking, there are four factors that give rise to fear. Let’s take a look at those factors right now.
As a leader, you’ve probably noticed that there are basically two different categories of employees. There are people who can do several things well and who have the potential to move up in the company in a number of different directions. A team member might be good at sales, for example, and perhaps that person is also good in human resources and customer service. While they are related fields, they’re also different from one another in a number of respects. Then there’s another kind of team member whom we can call a specialist, as opposed to the kind of generalist we’ve just been speaking of. These are people who are very good at accounting, for instance, but they really aren’t comfortable doing anything else. They like the sense of mastery and control that comes from working in their specialty. They can be very ambitious individuals, but their ambition will follow a specific path in an organization. A very good accountant can become a very good chief financial officer, but nobody’s interests would be served by moving that person into human resources.
In short, people generally fall into two main categories: those who really excel at one thing, and others, who are good at many things although perhaps not truly outstanding at any of them. A good leader should be very reluctant to believe that some individuals simply aren’t good at anything. Everyone has a strength of some kind. The unfortunate thing is, not all of us recognize what that strength is, either in ourselves or in the people around us. Over the long term, few of us capitalize to the greatest possible degree on our real strength.
The cause of this can be a lack of self-understanding, a lack of focus on who you really are, or a lack of awareness or acknowledgment of what you really do well. It’s a form of fear, because it is usually based on trying to live up to what you think you’re supposed to be, instead of being who you are. It’s trying to be a different kind of person than you really are. In terms of ambition, it’s aspiring to the wrong thing at the basic level of your own identity.
The Successful Specialist
Among people who are specialists, the most successful individuals recognize this quality early on. They see what they’re good at and what they enjoy doing, and they channel their careers in that direction. Their ambition asserts itself in a way that’s congruent with their essential nature. They pursue the right major in school, for example. They go to work for companies that have a need for their particular skills, and they seek out mentors who can help them develop their inherent strength. Their key to success is that they focus ambition in the best possible direction. For a specialist, the danger lies in being afraid of admitting what that direction really is. If you are a specialist, your ambition should be channeled within a parameter that you must be very reluctant to violate.
The Winning Generalist
Conversely, some people are gifted at many things, but they turn that strength into an area of vulnerability. It’s good to be a generalist, but it’s not good to spread yourself too thin. Many generalists allocate their resources to a variety of areas but might not make a strong impact in any particular area. If you’re a multitalented individual of this kind, don’t be afraid to focus your ambition. When you’re working in a particular area, don’t become distracted or attracted by something else. Focus on one area at a time. Ideally this should be an area in which your skill will allow you to really take off. It should be an area that can help you achieve your future goals and that will assert your ambition in the larger context of your organization. When you can do that, you’ll become successful not only in terms of your place in the company but also in the eyes of the most important judge of all—yourself.
So, to sum up this first category of fear that impedes ambition, it’s fear of recognizing who you are, what kind of talent you have, and making the most of it.
Fear Disguised as Impatience
A second kind of fear manifests itself as impatience. It’s being afraid to take the time to develop your abilities, and therefore very quickly either giving up or getting in over your head. This is something that happens very frequently in the corporate environment, and it’s especially common among very ambitious people. You want to get ahead as quickly as possible. When you see an opening, your instinct is to go for it, even if you know in your heart that you’re not really ready.
A very interesting study in this area focused on army parachute training. Among every group of recruits, there were a certain number who froze at the doorway of the aircraft when it came time to make their first jump. Generally these were not soldiers who had shown any indication of trouble during their previous training. On the contrary, they were usually people who had done very well and who were very ambitious about succeeding in this area of the military. And as it turned out, that was really the problem. In their own minds, the people who froze at the door had never confronted the possibility that they might freeze. Their confidence on the surface was so high that they couldn’t acknowledge the vulnerability that lay underneath. They moved ahead too quickly, in the sense that they overlooked what was really going on in their minds and hearts. By not recognizing the presence of fear, they set themselves up for an overwhelming experience of fear at the critical moment.
The second kind of fear, therefore, is fear of recognizing the areas in yourself that still need work. That kind of fear uses ambition to cover itself. It says, “Don’t waste any more time on preparation. You’ve got to get ahead as quickly as possible.” The problem is that if you try to get ahead too quickly, you’re almost certainly going to fall behind.
We’ve just been discussing a certain kind of pressure: the pressure that comes from impatience and the fear that prevents you from taking the time to develop real self-understanding. Pressure can also express itself as other kinds of fear, however. Suppose, for example, that you’re a very ambitious manager and a very effective one as well. You’re moving up in the company. You go from one level to the next, and the responsibilities keep getting bigger. There’s added pressure at each stage, but you tell yourself you can take it, until one day it all becomes too much.
What’s really happened here? Internally, perhaps at a subconscious level, a fear of taking on more responsibility has always been present. The added pressure scared you, but you didn’t want to get in touch with that. You wanted to make ambition, pure and simple, the defining quality of your being. But that’s aggressive ambition, not assertive ambition. Assertively ambitious leaders accurately assess their careers and themselves. Based on that assessment, sometimes they take on additional pressure and sometimes they don’t. People who crash and burn might think that the choice is only between being a leader or a follower. They may think a leader is somebody who never flinches. If that sounds like you, you’re telling yourself you’re not afraid of one thing, when you’re really afraid of something else. What’s more, you’re ignoring the thing that really scares you.
So this third kind of fear is about pressure. It’s not only about taking on too much pressure but about being afraid to admit that there’s even such a thing as too much.
Fear of Seeing Your Limits
Don’t ignore the fact that you can be an assertively ambitious and highly successful leader without wanting to be the CEO of a Fortune 100 company. You can want to lead without wanting to lead everybody. You can still be a hugely influential person even if one or two people are even more influential than you are. There’s nothing wrong with this. Assertive ambition means wanting success however you choose to define it. But don’t be afraid to admit that you have limits or that you even want to have limits. That doesn’t mean you aren’t ambitious, it just means that you’re ambitious on your own terms.
Let’s use an example from the world of sports to illustrate this. In the early 1970s, Pete Maravich was the greatest college basketball player in America. Growing up as the son of a basketball coach, he was schooled to be a pro from early childhood. He dribbled a basketball wherever he went. He dribbled it when he was riding a bicycle, when he was eating his lunch, and even when he was lying in bed. By the time he was a collegiate player at Louisiana State University, he was scoring at least 40 points every game, and he often scored 50 or 60. Of course, that was only the preamble to what he had really been preparing for, which was the National Basketball Association. Once he got to the NBA, there couldn’t be any drop-off. He created an internal mind-set in which he had to score 40 or 45 points every night, and he had also created that expectation in his fans. Of course, he was now facing the greatest players in the world, but that didn’t mean he could be any less productive than he was against high school players or collegians. Pete had put himself into a very difficult position. If he didn’t score twice as many points as any other player in the game, he considered himself a failure, and everybody else did as well.
This is an example of the fourth kind of ambition-related fear. It’s fear of seeing what your limits really are or that you even have them in the first place. The fact is that everybody has limits. There’s no dishonor in seeing that yours may be slightly different from the next person’s, especially when the only thing that prevents you from doing so is fear of seeing that reality. It doesn’t mean that you’re any less ambitious. It just means that you’re ready to assert what’s true about yourself.
In a business environment, respect is a very important concept. It’s a mistake to measure respect in terms of how much others respect you. Instead, focus on how respectful you are to your team members and how much respect you have for yourself. When you do this, you’ll realize that the respect you show to others will be returned to you. This is especially true in the corporate world, where it may seem that your goal is to blow past everybody or even to walk right over anyone who gets in your way. In terms of ambition and people skills in general, this aggressive approach is a mistake. If the objective is to make it to the top, it’s easier getting there when others are supporting you or even pushing you, not when you’re stepping on them every chance you get.
This is such a key point. Even if you’re a hugely aggressive manager and you make it to the top, your job will be a lot easier if your team members are there to support you. How good will you look if everybody bails out on you?
If you’re genuinely bright, talented, and ambitious, fear not. You’ll be noticed. There’s no need to blow your own horn, much less to do so at the expense of anyone else. In fact, praising everyone around you is an excellent way to be assertively ambitious. A leader is most effective when he empowers others to do well.
It’s not really a matter of being a sweet person or a mean person, of being a good cop or a bad cop. Instead of thinking in terms of good or bad, think in terms of trust or lack of trust, and trust in yourself most of all. These are not easy concepts to grasp. It’s so tempting to mistake mere aggressiveness for assertive ambition. Greed and insensitivity are strong psychological forces that are amplified in business. By turning away from those temptations, you may pass up on some short-term gains. Ultimately, though, you’ll reap the trust of others and gain the long-term prize.
In the next chapter, we’ll continue our discussion of assertive ambition with an emphasis on how you can maximize it in your team members.
ACTION STEPS
1. Surprising evidence revealed that external encouragement toward people of various ages did not prove to be effective. They were driven more by internal factors. Can you think of a personal example where promising you a reward did not help motivate you but actually demotivated you? What are some activities you do for the intrinsic value?
2. Some research argues that when you receive monetary or other rewards for the work that you do, you can actually be demotivated. Reflect back on your life. Have you ever had a hobby of other area of expertise that you excelled in but ultimately did not want to turn into a business? Perhaps you turned a passion into a business, then found yourself no longer enjoying the activity. Write about any such revelations that you or someone you know has had.
3. Genuine praise carries a great deal more weight than praise that is spoken with manipulation in mind. Take note of when you praise others, and stop yourself, if possible, before you make any statement. Ask yourself what your intentions are. If your praises are sincere and in no way a manipulation, go ahead. If, however you discover that you are using the praise as a means toward an end in your personal agenda, refrain from making any comments. Write about your findings and any insights you may have discovered.
ACTION PLAN NOTES