I have a hard time getting my five-year-old son, HL, to keep his playroom clean. Inevitably, we'll fight about it, then it'll get cleaned up and it'll stay that way for maybe a week or so. Then it's back to the same messy state it's usually in: dinosaurs and Hot Wheels cars strewn all over the floor. No matter how much I try, I can't get him to pick things up every day when he's done playing with them so that it stays relatively clean and neat. I have yet to unlock the right motivator that will help him see the value of doing things a different way (short of being a command and control parent, that is).
So much of what we do in internal communications is tied to organizational behavior and psychology. The more we understand about what makes humans tick the better we can frame the business conversations necessary to move the organization forward.
There's a great interview with Guy Kawasaki over at The New York Times recently. He talked about the need for college graduates to be better communicators, to learn to say what needs to be said in five sentences in an email or 10 PowerPoint slides. "What you learn in school is the opposite of what happens in the real world. In school, you’re always worried about minimums. You have to reach 20 pages or you have to have so many slides or whatever. Then you get out in the real world and you think, 'I have to have a minimum of 20 pages and 50 slides.'"
He also had some great insight into what makes a good manager. "Maybe it was just my education, but much of education is backwards. You study all the hard stuff, and then you find out in the real world that you don’t use it. As long as you can use an HP 12 calculator or a spreadsheet, you have the finance knowledge that you need for most management positions. I should have taken organizational behavior and social psychology — and maybe abnormal psychology, come to think of it."
A great new book about psychology and motivation is Drive by Daniel Pink. Pink talks about the real motivators of human behavior and how using these motivators can change the workplace dynamic in meaningful ways. I won't give it away by listing these motivators but you'll be surprised how simple and basic these are to understand and implement: at work, at home, with your children, in any kind of relationship.
The next time you're plotting internal comms strategy, give a really tough look at what motivates and drives your employees. Set up the conversation around these drivers and watch how the results may change. Because when you're talking their language and giving them a reason to act, people will usually do what needs to be done.
In the meantime, I'll work on motivating HL to do what he needs to do to keep his playroom clean, using some of the principles from Drive. I'd hate to have to resort to what used to motivate me to keep my room clean. My backside hurts now just thinking about it.
