How to increase motivation and help create a high-performance team
A 500% increase in motivation may be easier than you think. According to a famous experiment in which researchers ran a lottery with an interesting twist, you can boost motivation at least 500% with one easy process. Here’s the experiment.
How to motivate your staff.
Half of the participants were randomly assigned a lottery number, and the other half were given a blank piece of paper and asked to write down any number they choose as their lottery number. Each lottery number had an equal chance of being drawn as the winner.
Then, just prior to drawing the winning number, the researchers offered to buy back the lottery tickets, and here is what they found. No matter what location or demographic the experiment took place in, they always found that they had to pay at least five times more money to those who wrote their own lottery number than to those who were given a lottery number. In other words, those who wrote their number were 500% or more committed to their number than those who were given a number by someone else.
Statistically the number they wrote had no more likelihood of being the lottery number chosen than a number on a ticket given to them, but they valued the ticket with the number they wrote five times more than a lottery ticket with a number given to them!
What motivates employees?
This study demonstrates how to motivate your team when leading, managing and selling: Let people make choices for themselves. They will likely be about 500% more committed to the outcome.
Former CEO of IBM Sam Palmisano led the company’s turnaround, which included a change effort to move IBM toward a values-based management system. During a three-day online interaction, Palmisano empowered more than 50,000 employees to rewrite IBM’s century-old values. The change effort was enormously successful.
The best for-profit and nonprofit organizations I’ve worked with had leaders who involved the whole team in the development of their vision, mission, strategic plan and values. The leadership teams for both organizations drafted the mission, vision and strategic plan, and then worked with all employees to revise and refine them and had each individual team/department define all of their actions to accomplish their major goals. Neither of these high-performing leadership teams drafted the values, though; like Sam Palmisano at IBM, they worked together as a whole organization to define their organizational values.
How to increase employee motivation.
This piece of high-performance psychology is pretty simple, When people make their own decisions, they are more motivated and committed to everything connected with the decision.
Because you are reading this, you’re probably in business. And on a personal level you may have a significant other, and some of you have children. How do you interpret this research finding in your life? How can you apply this finding? How might you increase motivation in the important people in your life? Notice that I am asking you questions so that you can come up with your own answers rather than me providing you answers? Thought I’d practice the 500% motivation principle on how to motivate your team, whether it is a business or personal team.
