Myth of Sticks and Carrots: Boosting Lean with Deming (Part 5)
Traditional management uses "carrots," like bonuses, and "sticks", like Performance Improvement Plans, to motivate employees. But are humans really built that way? In this episode, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz dive into the myth surrounding that approach and talk about what actually motivates people at work. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.7 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Jacob Stoller, Shingo-Prize winning author of The Lean CEO and Productivity Reimagined, which explores applying Lean and Deming management principles at the enterprise level. The topic for today is myth number four, the myth of sticks and carrots. Jacob, take it away. 0:00:46.2 JS: Thank you, Andrew, and great to continue our conversation. Yeah, it is widely believed that people are motivated by threats and rewards. And to demonstrate that, all you have to do is go into an HR department and look at the job descriptions and the reward programs. And it's all assumes that people are motivated by externalities, right? And that goes back, actually, it's a very, very old way of looking at the world, that there's a term, it's a bit of Latin here, homo economicus. And it's the idea that humans are sort of goal seeking creatures. They seek what's better for them, and it's all material. They'll seek their material gain, and they will behave in very predictable ways, according to that. So you can set up external motivators, mainly money, and you can regulate the way people will behave. 0:01:38.2 JS: So that's the assumption that many businesses are built on. But science has proven that that's not the way human humans work. There've been a number... And starting really in the 1950s, a number of scientists have sort of poked serious holes in that thinking. One of them is Edward Deci, who talked about motivation and did a number of experiments to see that, to find out that people, you know, their motive for doing tasks really kind of transcends rewards. Often they'll do something, for the satisfaction of doing it, in spite of the rewards being greater. We have Frederick Herzberg who developed something called Hygiene Theory. And that's really that... He determined in an organization that money can't actually be a positive motivator. It can't motivate positive behavior, but lack of money can motivate negative behavior. 0:02:49.6 JS: So, you know, and a number of experiments to support that. And then we have, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, hard to pronounce, who talks about joy at work and really did experiments and kind of proved that joy at work isn't just some kind of fancy idea that somebody had. But it's actually a scientifically proven principle. Whereas when people have joy at work and they're fully engaged in their work, they do much higher quality work. So that's kind of the background really here. So what we want, when we manage, is we want people to be intrinsically motivated so that they do their best work. And Deming principles are very, very, I think representative of that. I think Dr. Deming understood that people are motivated when they feel a part of something, when they contribute, when they feel that their team members around them are supporting them. And so that's what we try to do. And Lean eorld tries to do that, and we try to do that with Deming principles. 0:04:06.8 AS: You know, when I start off my discussion on this with students and people that I teach in seminars and the like, I always ask them, you know, which, do you believe in, a carrot or a stick? Do you think more people are motivated by rewards or punishments? And it's a great... 0:04:18.1 Jacob Stoller: Oh, okay. 0:04:24.1 AS: Way to kick off a conversation. But, you know, obviously we're gonna get some people that say, I want people to be feeling, you know, positive rewards and feel positive. And then you have the other people that... What
