What does science know about motivating employees that businesses too often ignore?

That’s the topic of an 18-minute talk by (nonpracticing) lawyer Dan Pink. He frames it as an argument to the jury of the audience.

In this 2009 talk, he describes the science of motivation, which is fairly well known. He reports that for professional or knowledge-work task, intrinsic motivators work better than extrinsic motivators. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose beat money as a motivator.

This result has been shown repeatedly, in numerous studies across multiple fields and far-flung cultures.

He’s limited to 18 minutes by the format of the TED conference, so he can’t go into some important qualifiers on that statement. (The most important qualifier is that a perceived inequality in extrinsic rewards can destroy motivation. If the worker next to you is getting paid twice as much for the same work and you don’t believe that, if you prove you’re better, the situation will change, bets are off.)

The legal world, at least within private law firms, straddles the motivation gap. So much is made of monetary rewards: bill-lots-of-hours-to-make partner, associate/partner inequalities, even the fixation in the legal press on bonuses. Money is often seen as a major (or even the only) measuring stick.

And most of my readers aren’t in position to change that, even if they want to.

So let’s bring this to a level where you can use these findings.

As a project leader, you’re generally not directly responsible for compensation decisions, and your team knows that.¹

The biggest tools you have for motivating your team are intrinsic motivators. Autonomy. Mastery. Purpose.

I’ve written about these before, and I talk about them in my classes, but here’s a summary:

• Autonomy allows team members to decide for themselves how they’ll solve the problems they’re facing. Provide the vision. Ensure they know the business goals, deadlines, and so on. Then get out of their way. Even the most junior members of a team will perform professional or knowledge-worker tasks better if they have autonomy, though of course less senior team members may have that autonomy over considerably smaller and shorter-termed pieces of the puzzle.
• Mastery is the satisfaction and feelings of competence that come from completing tasks. An effective project leader finds the right-sized challenges for each team member. Challenges can come from both broadened scope — doing new stuff — and lengthened autonomous periods — more responsibility. Team members who feel they’re building mastery are happier, and will contribute better, stronger, more creative work.
• Purpose comes from contributing to solving problems of importance. Importance doesn’t necessarily mean world hunger. A problem may be important to a business unit or to the firm’s future, for example. It doesn’t have to be the whole firm or the whole corporation; it just has to encompass a larger world than the pure writing of the brief or researching the facts².

Intrinsic motivators, all other things being equal, beat extrinsic motivators for your team.

Dan Pink’s talk isn’t short if you think of it as three billable six-minute intervals gone! However, it may provide some valuable insight into managing and leading your teams, with a potentially larger payoff. (And he’s a very effective speaker and a lawyer, so you could think of it as researching your own trial skills….)

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¹The managing partner might also lead a particular project, for example, but let’s look at the more common cases rather than the exceptions.

²One of my annual tasks in Microsoft’s legal department was to present and defend our (rather large) IT budget. I spent no time describing the systems themselves. I about half of my allotted time describing the very substantial savings we were reaping from this IT spend, but I spent the other half (subtly) painting a picture of how these systems allowed us to support Microsoft’s products and how that work aligned with Microsoft’s vision for changing the world. We always got the money we asked for. We didn’t ask for the moon, of course, but when other cost center IT budgets were being cut, sometimes substantially, we held our own. A sense of purpose was at least at that time an intrinsic motivator that was an important part of the Microsoft culture.

My new book is The Off Switch: Discovering Your Work-Work Balance. It is available starting today from Amazon.com. You can order it through your local bookstore as well. (You can also click here and I’ll get an extra $2 in royalties because it doesn’t go through Amazon in the same way.)

I’m pleased with the result. I think it contains a lot of useful tips and suggestions that can save you 30 minutes a day in which you can be more productive… or go home and see family… or if need be goof off in a more creative manner. I’ve honed and taught these suggestions over the years, and I’ve seen the real results they produce.

I’m not kidding about getting 30 minutes a day back.

As the old song goes, “I ain’t too proud to beg,” so I’ll beg you to enter a positive review of the book on Amazon! Please?

(Okay, done begging. It was getting unseemly.)

Here’s the summary:

We are the always-on society. On the phone, on the computer, on the go. 

We do email like Pavlov’s dogs; the new-mail bell dings, the screen exerts its magnetic pull, and our mouths start watering (at least mentally). We check our phones waiting in line, while talking to others, even while driving. We spend hours in ineffective meetings, re-deciding what we thought we’d decided in the previous meeting. We scurry through the warrens of the Internet, chasing after an elusive link (or the latest sports score) as if it were a white rabbit with a pocket watch.

We’re trying to ride off in all directions at once.

It’s neither fun nor efficient. It isn’t low-stress, either.

It’s also avoidable, or at least controllable.

What we need is an off switch.

Actually, we need a collection of off switches. Just as each room in the house has its own lights with their own off switches, each of these threats to productivity (and sanity) have off switches.

This straightforward and highly focused book defines those off switches. It describes how and when to use them, and it does so in simple, readable terms that lead to action and results.

It’s time to take a new look at attention, focus, efficiency, and effectiveness. The book shows how to escape the trap of the tense present, how to stop bouncing from mini-task to mini-task. Reduce interruptions and partial-attention tasks, and we reduce stress as we build effectiveness as workers and as leaders. 

We can accomplish more with the same amount of effort. We need to find the off switches in our workplaces and working lives, and flip them. That’s the process of discovering our work-work balance… which is the first necessary step in achieving a long-term work-life balance.

If you watched TV this weekend, you likely saw the new Microsoft ad about the father grocery shopping. (If the embedded image above doesn’t work, watch it here.)

This is the most interesting and important ad Microsoft has done since perhaps Windows 95. For professionals, it matters for three reasons.

First is that it’s spot-on, if you’ll forgive the pun. Microsoft has been unable to develop ads that resonate with professionals the way Apple ads have done since the original iPod ads. “I’m a PC” was interesting for computer geeks and helped employees feel better about the beatdown Apple was laying on them with their “I’m a Mac” ads, but it didn’t have the light touch that I think this spot does. If Microsoft can come up with two or three more ads that nail it for the public — not computer-oriented folks — the way this one does, I believe, their stock will finally start climbing again.

(Should ads make a stock go up? In an ideal world, probably not, but here it will be seen as evidence that Microsoft is picking up its game.)

Second, it shows Microsoft’s vision of a connected world, without ever saying anything directly. Microsoft has had this vision for at least a decade, but this is the first time they’ve found a way to connect it with real people, sans “Microspeak.”

By the way, this ad shows something you can do today — with the best app that no one knows about. In fact, you likely already have the application shown, OneNote. I can’t say enough about how OneNote can boost productivity, even if you don’t use it to update your shopping list on the fly.

Third, and here’s where I think it’s really interesting, step way, way back from the ad. Consider how it tells a story. Nowhere does it talk about being connected, “the cloud,” OneNote, or anything else. In fact, the tagline is “family.” Even the name of the spot, “Keep Shopping,” is unrelated to what they’re really showing.

What they’re showing is a vision of the future.

I talk in classes and in my books repeatedly about the need for vision. Every project can benefit from a clear, simple vision — a picture of the desired future state. It’s not about how you get there; the project team will work that out. Rather, it’s all about the “there,” and only about the “there.”

This ad is a project vision in graphical (video) form. It’s a picture of the desired future state — not that the kids will keep updating Dad’s shopping list, but that we will someday not think about what are really artificial separations among our systems. There are the office (and Office) apps. There’s the phone, the PC, the tablet. There’s home and work. There’s Facebook and the browser and mail.

Microsoft is positing a vision where all of these distinctions disappear beneath the work itself. These distinctions are crucial to programmers, who need to make it all work, but they should and could be irrelevant to users. We think now of Facebook and Outlook and such because we have to. Imagine a world wherein we didn’t have to; we could just somehow, in some magic way, make it all work and play together.

The beauty of the ad is that Microsoft is showing that vision, without hitting us over the head with it, without even speaking its name.

On your next project, consider developing a vision along these lines. It doesn’t have to be slick, let alone a video (!!), but it shouldn’t be mundane, pedestrian.

It should move people.

It should demonstrate the hoped-for future state.

It’s not simple, but it’s not terribly hard either. It will pay big rewards. All it takes is a bit of thought and a little effort.

Now go buy the coconut. And do your homework.

(And maybe start playing with OneNote, which is included with Microsoft Office. It really does the stuff shown in the commercial, including the automatic synchronization, and a whole lot more besides. And no, I never worked on the OneNote team.)

In my Legal Project Management courses, I teach a section on estimating hours or effort.

I focus on situations where there are significant unknowns. People have at least some practice and confidence (not always warranted, but confidence nonetheless) in estimating tasks where the task is well defined and matches work they’ve done before.

Much harder are situations where you haven’t done the work previously, or you know that you don’t know enough, or both.

Impossible goal?

No. There are techniques for estimating reasonably well in these situations. They work.

An article Friday in the Wall Street Journal Law Blog talks about these kinds of situations in a different but parallel environment: estimating trial verdicts from brief case summaries.

Author Joe Palazzolo seems a bit surprised by how well these types of techniques work. (Or perhaps he plays up the surprise because it makes for a better article.)

I’m not surprised.

James Surowiecki speaks to this issue in some detail in his highly interesting book The Wisdom of Crowds (affiliate link).

We know more collectively than we think we do.

Remember Watson? The computer that beat (sort of) two all-time Jeopardy champions?

(I’ll return to the “sort of” in a minute.)

Here’s an article from the NY Times by the person who pulled the Watson team together. I know many readers of my articles are lawyers, or work with lawyers. When you read the article, substitute “lawyer” for “scientist.”

Sound familiar?

If it does, hear it as a cry for how you can strengthen your team using the techniques of Legal Project Management. David Ferrucci brought these same techniques to the Watson team. Let’s call it Project Leadership for Professionals, where LPM is the variant specific to legal work.

If it sounds unfamiliar, if your firm is already working as an effective team with minimal jealousies and little me-firstism, that’s terrific. You’re ahead of the game.

Watson Sort-of Won on Jeopardy (An Extended “Footnote”)

I said Watson sort-of won. It’s score was higher, much higher, and Ken Jennings made a nice joke about welcoming our new computer overlords, but Watson and the two humans weren’t playing the same game.

If you’re a Jeopardy fan, you know that there are three factors critical to winning.

One, of course, is knowledge of a huge variety of subjects, from the mundane to the sublime to the ridiculous. (Questions about, say, Lady Gaga could fall into all three of these groups at once.) Watson had this part down, as did the human champions.

Another is the ability to unravel subtle clues, puns, and twists. Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter were outstanding at this aspect. As a guy who spent decades at Microsoft and other computer industry companies, I was truly amazed and thrilled at how well Watson did here as well. It wasn’t nearly as good as its human competitors, but it was far better than I expected.

The third requirement, though, is superior buzzer reflexes. Great players understand that they need to ring in at times before they’re sure of the answer, and that they have to discern the subtle rhythm between the time host Alex Trebec finishes saying the “answer” and the system operator releases the buzzer lockout². If you try to buzz in before the lockout is released, your buzzer is disabled for the next quarter of a second¹, an eternity in Jeopardy time. You can only supply the “question” if you have successfully rung in.

And here’s where it wasn’t the same game at all.

The humans had to feel out the right timing, with a significant penalty for being early. Watson, however, was “told” when it could ring in. (It received an electronic signal when the system was unlocked.) Since computers don’t have reflexes and can respond virtually instantaneously, it could ring in perfectly whenever it had enough confidence in its answer. If you watched the show, perhaps you noted how often Watson won the ring-in contest.

It would have been a very different contest if Watson had been programmed with a certain degree of randomness with respect to ringing in, or if project leader Ferrucci had been required to ring in manually in Watson’s stead.

Of course, that wouldn’t have made the sponsor of these three Jeopardy episodes very happy. (Yes, IBM sponsored it. Which they should have; it was terrific publicity.)

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¹Some folks say the lockout is half a second, not a quarter of a second. That’s a double eternity.

²Here’s a link to an unfortunately named site where a former Jeopardy champion describes the buzzer setup. The URL (name of the link) is almost NSFW, but the content is unobjectionable.

I’m a PMI member, but there’s no question that their formal definition of project management verges on self-parody.

Larry Downes in Forbes has an article on the decline and (they presume) fall of Best Buy. Other than the hagiography of Amazon.com,¹ there are some very interesting points in the article.

Before you read it, though, consider what you think intuitively is Amazon’s core advantage over Best Buy.

Did you say pricing?

Now go and read or at least skim the article, and then consider BigLaw as it stands today as Best Buy. (It’s a thought experiment, not a perfect comparison by any means.)

A lot has been written, deservedly, about whether BigLaw is at risk from overpricing itself. I think there’s certainly risk there, especially outside bet-the-company (or at least bet-the-department or bet-your-career) matters.

But Downes point, which I support, is that Amazon is beating Best Buy not primarily on price but on customer (client) service.

I know from having bought a large flat-screen TV², a computer, a monitor, two powered USB hubs, a bunch of DVDs, and some other electronics-related items in the past six months that Best Buy is often competitive with Amazon on price.^3,4 Not always, but often.

However, Best Buy’s customer service is awful. The salespeople I’ve spoken with are as un-knowledgeable as those Downes describes in his article. They don’t know what’s in stock without physically walking into some back room, disappearing for minutes at a time. They know very little about their products, and sometimes cannot even find them. (“Where are your Harry Potter DVDs — all of them, not just Deathly Hallows Part 2?”) And the layout of their stores is haphazard. In other words, it’s almost as self-service as Amazon.com… but not as well organized.

They’re not listening to their customers. They’re not listening to direct feedback, and they’re not “taking the temperature of the room.”

Does BigLaw have a similar problem? Obviously it differs from firm to firm. I know at least a few firms that are out front in trying to understand what their clients want, even sometimes when it’s no more than an inchoate client longing.

But I know many others that are in denial that there could be a problem.

Legal Project Management by itself won’t make a non-client-centered firm into a client-focused one. That requires cultural change (of which LPM can be a part, of course). However, a core tenet of Legal Project Management is that the project is about the client’s business needs and vision of success.

Consider the Best Buy problem. They appear deluded, according to the article, into thinking they’re serving their clients (customers) well. I’m a customer⁵, and I don’t think they are.

Where does your firm sit on the Best Buy /Amazon continuum of client service? Are you practicing the LPM principles of business need and vision? Can you do more?

As I said, Best Buy isn’t a perfect metaphor (and the article itself isn’t perfect).

But a metaphor needn’t be perfect to be useful in stimulating thinking on an issue.

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¹I’m a fan of Amazon, and I think they’ve done a lot of things right. (I also believe they’ve stumbled into a lot of this rightness, but they did have the great good sense to recognize it and build on it.) That said, they’re not perfect by any means, but you’d never know it from the article.

²Yup, gave in to the kids.

³They or other brick-and-mortar options (e.g., Staples) were competitive on everything but the USB hubs, where for some reason they were charging 50% more.

⁴By the way, I do not check stuff out in detail at a brick-and-mortar store and then buy on Amazon. I think that’s unethical, but I suspect I’m in the minority. I’d rather negotiate price with them instead if there’s a significant disparity — “Can you match this if I but it today?” That said, if I know what I want, I’ll certainly compare prices on line.

⁵When it comes to electronics, I’m a very knowledgeable customer. If they’re not able to help me, how well can they help those who lack other knowledge sources to fall back on? I don’t expect them to necessarily know more than I do about computers, after all those years with Microsoft and other software companies, but they certainly should know more than I do about televisions, for example. The folks I dealt with in buying our TV couldn’t meet even that relatively low bar.

(Does anyone use “Flash” anymore — not the Adobe program but the term meaning “news bulletin”?)

It was reported yesterday that Darth Vader has died. Okay, not all of Mr. Vader, as the New York Times might style him; last I heard, his voice (James Earl Jones) was still with us. But the fencing master who performed his light-saber duels passed away recently.

I’m no Star Wars fan, but Darth Vader has always had a cameo in my classes on Legal Project Management and Leadership.

Backstory

Backstory is a movie term for the stuff that has happened to a character before you first meet him or her. Actors develop a character’s backstory to “get into character,” to create believability in a role. Audiences sometimes glimpse such character backstories at least indirectly. How did Hannibal Lecter become a cannibal? Why did the six-fingered Count Rugen kill Inigo Montoya’s dad? (That one’s detailed in the book, though only the event itself is mentioned in the movie.)

The onscreen (or onstage) action also has a backstory. What happened before the movie started? Audiences may also learn more or less about this backstory as the movie progresses. Sometimes it’s unimportant to the progress of the movie. We don’t care how Tom Hanks’ character in Sleepless in Seattle met the wife who’s newly deceased as the movie opens (though I bet Hanks made up the full story in his preparations); all we need know is that he cared very deeply about her.

But sometimes a backstory plays an important role. The film Memento is entirely backstory; figuring out the backstory for a movie that travels backward in time is the end in itself.

Which brings us to Darth Vader.

The first two Star Wars films, taken together, contain perhaps the best-known backstory revelation in movies. Why is Vader so obsessed with Luke? What pulls them together? Why can the troopers breathe when the doors of the spacecraft are open to the vacuum? (I’m not the only one who thinks Star Wars is silly, but it remains a great example.)

In the middle of the second movie, Luke confronts the dueling Vader (in the undercover person of the late Bob Anderson), and Vader delivers that most memorable backstory reveal: “I am your father.” (Heavy breathing omitted.)

Why Does Backstory Matter in Projects?

Virtually all  projects have backstories attached by the time a project manager becomes associated with them. Why are we doing this? What does the client or customer really want? Really need? What was promised? What does he think was promised? What’s the real business problem? And so on….

One of a project manager’s first tasks on any project is to figure out as much of the backstory as she can. That’s how you begin identifying the players and their goals. That’s how you begin figuring out how they’ll define success.

Do you have to take up their definition of success? At a minimum, you have to deal with it, either to accept it or to work to modify it. Crossed expectations are a sure path to project failure.

Start by figuring out the backstory.

My new book is (finally) going to press, now that we’ve resolved some problems with the way the cover was printing. It’s called The Off Switch: Discovering Your Work-Work Balance. It should be available on Amazon and in bookstores shortly.

Both the NY Times and Slate have recent articles that touch on some of the drivers behind the new book. I think there’s a lot more to both the problem and potential ways to address it, which is why I wrote the book. Still, Slate and the Times at least starting to see that there is a problem represents a good start.

Yesterday I wrote about some simple self-preservation strategies, a/k/a backing up your files. Today I want to add two other simple methods.

By the way, what’s this have to do with Legal Project Management or The Off Switch? See below.

• External hard drive: These devices now cost less than $100¹ for insane amounts of storage space. They’re apparently a bit tricky for Mac users, but mine plugs into whatever PC I’m using with absolutely no fuss. I just drag my entire core folders (Consulting, Talks, Articles, and my books) over to it once every few days or so when I knock off work for the evening. There is a risk that if my house were to burn down I’d lose both the copy and the original… but I also have this stuff backed up in the cloud, as I noted yesterday.
• Flash drive: Whenever I head out on the road to teach a class or give a presentation, I also carry a copy of my presentation on a tiny flash drive. Again, these things are amazing — $20 for 16GB, for example, and it’s the size of a large vitamin pill! (Warning: Do not swallow. And if you do, don’t go swimming for at least an hour.) So if I get to the venue and my laptop isn’t working and there isn’t Internet access, I still have a copy I can run on a borrowed laptop.

The Legal Project Management connection? That’s easy. Control the things you can control easily, and you’ll have more time and energy to deal with the inevitable surprises that you can’t control. Backing stuff up is one simple example. It takes only a few seconds to do it right²… but it can save you an enormous amount of stress and strife.

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¹Disclaimer: If you purchase either of these items via the links, I’ll earn a couple of pennies… literally a few cents. But I suppose it adds up….

²It will also take you a few minutes — once — to set it up. It’s time well invested. Do it over lunch, or as a break when you’re fried from working on all-consuming other stuff.