If you are a manager, supervisor, or an executive at any level, I think you’ll find the latest research on leadership power relevant to your job, the people you lead, and the results you seek. Consider this story shared by a woman in a workshop I was teaching on motivation. While taking her normal elevator…
New research into human motivation is helping managers move beyond carrot-and-stick extrinsic motivators. And while it’s good that we’ve made progress, we still need to keep moving if we truly want to leverage what the new science of motivation is teaching us. In the June issue of Ignite, Susan Fowler, best-selling business author of Why…
New advances in the field of social neuroscience are fundamentally reshaping perspectives on the best way to lead and manage the performance of others. That’s the main message Scott Blanchard will be sharing next week in his presentation at the annual conference of the Association for Talent Development (ATD) in Orlando, Florida. Blanchard’s concurrent session…
Carrot and stick motivational schemes may drive short term compliance, but they don’t work very well when it comes to increasing long term performance, retention, effort, endorsement, or even intentions to be a good organizational citizen. That’s what researchers at The Ken Blanchard Companies found when they looked at the impact different motivational outlooks have…
In a recent online column for Fast Company, motivation expert Susan Fowler uses the metaphor of junk food to describe the shortsighted approach some managers use when motivating their direct reports—reaching for easy motivational rewards instead of digging deeper for sustainable ones. The result is suboptimal motivation, which characterizes three out of a possible six…
Most human resource and organizational development professionals are familiar with Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In his 1954 book, Motivation and Personality, Maslow’s proposed that people are motivated by satisfying lower-level needs such as food, water, shelter, and security, before they can move on to being motivated by higher-level needs such as self-actualization. In a…
In her new book, Why Motivating People Doesn’t Work … And What Does, author Susan Fowler reminds leaders that employees are always motivated—it’s just the quality of their motivation that’s a problem sometimes. Fowler shares how the repeated use of motivational carrots & sticks might get results in the short term, but often have negative consequences long-term. That’s…
Managers often miss the most important part of performance management conversations by focusing only on results and accountability, says Susan Fowler, author of the new book Why Motivating People Doesn’t Work … and What Does. In an interview for The Ken Blanchard Companies’ Ignite newsletter Fowler recommends that managers shift their focus from holding people accountable…
Organizations want their employees to be more intrinsically engaged at work. They want their employees to be more creative, more innovative, and to take more risks. One of the ways organizations are supporting these initiatives is through the use of incentives. While incentives can be a good way to drive short term behavior, you have…