If you look at your life and remember all the important events, you will see three major states of mind; motivated-demotivated and ‘nothing’ state. I am tempted to put the ‘nothing’ state into the basket of demotivated state, but I know there is a subtle difference. There are so many schools of thought when it comes to motivations and I intend to touch upon the important ones in this blog.

Prime Motivators by David McClelland:
Let me start off by the work of David Clarence McClelland, an American psychologist who was known for his work on motivation ‘Need Theory’. The major themes of McClelland’s work were on the personality and application of that knowledge to help people make their lives better. McClelland claimed that motivation is “a recurrent concern for a goal state or condition as measured in fantasy, which drives, directs and selects the behaviour of the individual”. He came up with three Prime Motivations – Need for Achievement, Need for Affiliation, Need for Power. All of us are motivated more by one of the three Prime Motivations. It is quite easy to tell who is motivated by what, and I will explain this through examples.

We see a lot of people pinning their ‘Employee of the Month’ certificates in their cubicles. There you go, you have evidence of someone being motivated by ‘Need of Achievement’. These guys definitely need to see what they will achieve at the end of a task before they start off with that task. Some of them are quite easily motivated if you appreciate them for everything they do. ‘Achievement motivated people’ are often ‘High-level thinkers’ and will look at the big picture first rather than the process. So, when there is a new project announced, they will visualize the end result first and may not be interested in knowing the process related details such as budget, number of people required, quality requirements, compliance requirements etc. The more challenging the task, the more they are interested in achieving the outcome and come in the limelight. The need for achievement can sometimes override the need to be a bit cautious and ‘go-for-it’ attitude creeps in. Sometimes, relationships take a back seat because the need to win is too strong. There are other channels through which someone with ‘Need for Achievement’ motivated person can be identified. Take Facebook for example, where a lot of people have their profile pictures with medals or victory gestures. As a leader, if you are leading the ‘Need for Achievement’ person, make sure you give them challenging tasks, refrain from micromanaging and give them the space to think independently. Appreciate them at regular intervals because that keeps them going. Multiple tasks are not a problem for these guys.

Quite similar to this, you find some people who click photos with celebrities, politicians, well-known businessmen and influential people. That pretty much talks about the ‘Power’ or the ‘Powerful’ connections they have to ‘get things done’. These are the ‘Need for Power’ people. They want the authority, control and freedom to make decisions along with the responsibility they are entrusted with. ‘Need for Power’ people often get stressed when the power or control is taken away from them. These guys can be more individualists compared to the Achievement guys. Their endeavour is about how to be perpetually invincible so that no harm can touch them ever. Another thing that is common between the Achievement guys and the Power guys is that both would be flexible to change processes as many times as it takes. If I had to choose one out of these, the Power guys would be more open to change. As far as the process is concerned, even though they are not too headstrong about following a process, they don’t like it if they are not in control of it. A lot of organizations which believe in Theory X approach will have business heads which are power-oriented.

Then you have people who print the emblems related to their profession at the back of their car; like Doctors, Chartered Accountants etc.to indicate the ‘noble profession’ they belong to. You often hear people say, “We belong to the elite group of teachers and our mission is to educate others”, “We lawyers are in the business of justice”, and so on. These guys are motivated by the concept of ‘Need for Affiliation’. They want to be a part of people who belong to certain group, class, creed, profession, demography, geography or status. I see such examples everywhere. Just outside our housing society, we have a group of Royal Enfield Bullet owners who meet and go on an adventure together every Sunday. I doubt if they would ever change the brand anytime in their life. Nowadays, you see vegans advertising themselves on social media and the ones who connect with them are mostly the ones who have the same belief system about being vegan. I have a friend who became vegan because he wanted to be a part of a group of people and do something together and share thoughts and ideas. I was recently invited to a business networking group meeting organized by Business Networking International (BNI) and I noticed how everyone in that meeting was eagerly helping each other to grow the individual businesses using contacts they had. They proudly wore the BNI brooch on their blazers and shared the group photos on social media as ‘Proud BNI Member’.

After the information and social age started, we saw the importance of social media and how everyone was eager to share what they are doing on various social media platforms. You can clearly see that people are posing themselves as followers of certain political parties or thought leadership and they feel proud to be a part of a certain theme of a perfect world. Some are liberals, some are intellectuals and then you have nationalists. All driven by ‘Need for Affiliation’.

Towards and Away-from Motivation:
When you want to cross a road, what is your goal? To reach the other side, right? You might add one more word to the statement. To reach the other side safely. In this statement, there are two goals which you must have noticed. ‘To reach to the other side’ seems quite ‘towards’ or ‘positive’ and ‘safely’ sounds a bit more like ‘you don’t want to be hit’ or ‘away-from’ or ‘negative’. I am not in favour of labelling anything as positive or negative, hence we will stick to Towards and Away-from. To put it in a simple way, a person with ‘Towards’ motivation, built an aircraft; a person with ‘Away-from’ motivation, built a parachute.

You see these motivations in various professions. Sales and Marketing guys, Business heads, Production and R & D guys are more Towards (go-for-it) oriented. Accountants, lawyers, auditors, compliance professionals are mostly ‘Away-from’ oriented. You will find lawyers checking any document for loopholes and mistakes because they don’t want to fall in trouble.

When it comes to selecting the right profession, a lot of people know what they don’t want, but they don’t know their true purpose and vision. I know a lot of frustrated sales professionals who are willing to do anything else but not sales. But that is not a very good approach because there needs to be clarity about where one will find happiness. We all are either more Towards and fewer Away-from motivated or vice-versa. No one can claim that they fear nothing. A severe form of Away-from is fear and a severe form of fear is a phobia which is an irrational fear.

It is believed that creativity and innovation require, ‘Towards Motivation’. A person with high ‘Towards Motivation’ will try out new things and may end up inventing/discovering something. But there is also a tendency of making mistakes because not every experiment ends up with perfect results. On the other side, Away-from people tend to be more predictable and they like tried and tested processes. It is believed that Away-from people might be averse to change.

I have just given you food for thought to think about interpersonal dynamics in the areas of Relationships, Parenting, Leadership and Consumer buying patterns. All relationships are not as perfect as the ball-socket joint. Are there frictions because of the Towards-Away-from conflict? Kids often want to try out new things. How comfortable are we as parents to let them do that? Are we afraid that something will go wrong? Are we, as parents, more Away-from to let our kids try out new things, which could be slightly risky from our model of the world? Are you the kind of a Leader, who likes to play safe? What percentage of Consumers are likely to try out a new brand that is newly launched? Does this percentage change with Geography/Demography? Towards and Away-from motivation seems to be a very simple concept to understand and it is. But when you go deeper into the application part, you will know that it is exciting and insightful as well.

Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation:
I remembered a situation when I was working with a Software organization. I used to head Learning and Development over there. The organization was very conservative in all it’s approaches, even though they had an ‘Employee of the month’ award in the category of ‘Most Innovative Employee’ which they used to give out. I had my appraisal meeting and I said to the HR Manager and the Vice President that the organization is too Extrinsic in terms of implementing anything. The idiots thought, the word was eccentric. What I was trying to tell them was, they were just copying what other organizations were doing. None of their policies or initiatives were linked to their overall mission or vision.

When you get motivated by others telling you the benefits or the pain areas, that’s extrinsic motivation. I had a student who came to me one day and said, “Sir I won’t be able to attend your class next week because I have to attend my sister’s marriage”. I was quite surprised with the choice of modal operator he used; have to. It was as if, he didn’t want to attend the wedding, and someone was forcing him to. I told him that he had his own choice to attend the wedding and he doesn’t have to do anything. Then he corrected his language and said that he wants to attend the wedding. And then I playfully said to him, “And you want to miss my class? Ha Ha”.

What do you say to yourself when you wake up in the morning? I know a lot of people who say, “I have to get up so that I can reach the office early”. So extrinsic! Then I know some people who would say, “Wow, today is the big day and I am looking forward to my all-important meeting”. When you feel like doing something from inside, that is Intrinsic motivation. So, when I go to buy a t-shirt for myself, I buy it because I like it and I want to have it. There are others who try the t-shirt in the changing room and come out to show it to their loved one. Other people’s opinions are important to them. There is nothing wrong in being extrinsically or intrinsically motivated. But I would imagine that a person who has runs his own business, should be intrinsically motivated. You can be extrinsically motivated when you are looking for options or learning new things. If your current way of doing things is not helping you, you would rather be extrinsically motivated. You could try to link this to extroversion or introversion, but I don’t think it fits perfectly.

Think about couples in relationships and the permutations and combinations of each one being extrinsically or intrinsically motivated. The thoughts would give you a rainbow of insight. Think about a boss and employee; with the same permutation and combination. Are your kids intrinsically motivated or extrinsically? And are you okay with that? If not, what do you need to understand?

Well, I could go on and on. I would love to have your perspective on this. Feel free to connect with me. I am quite ‘Towards-motivated’ to listen to your thoughts. Also, I am a people’s person because I belong to the noble group of professionals that are into learning and development. And yes, I want to (not have to) know more perspectives and learn new things.