Well.. to some extent, the first line of this article has the solution to that problem, i.e., if as a business owner, you hire motivated employees then you don’t have to bother about pushing them to work hard and be fully engaged. Unfortunately, we don’t have tools to identify or evaluate the motivated spirits of our prospective employees. So, how do we deal with this now?

In 1940, Harry F. Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin established one of the world’s first laboratories to study primate behaviour. One day in 1949, with his two other colleagues, he did an experiment and put a mechanical puzzle in the cage of a monkey. It was a simple one for you and me, but not so easy to solve for a thirteen-pound monkey.

To his surprise, without any external motivation like a banana or anything else, the monkey began playing with the puzzle and within 13-14 days, almost all the monkeys became pretty good at solving it. Now it was quite interesting to Harlow and his team as nobody ever taught the monkey how to solve it, nobody ever gave any incentive to solve the puzzle, and nobody even applauded when the monkeys solved it, but yet monkeys did it all, in fact, two-third of the time they cracked it in less than sixty seconds.

Scientists then were aware that two forces that drive actions in animals either the biological- eating and drinking; and copulated to meet their sexual desires.

But none of the two motivating forces were at play here as solving the puzzle neither led to food or sexual pleasure.

So what was causing this behaviour?

Harlow named it the Third Force the sheer joy of solving the puzzle. Solving the puzzle was its own reward, he said. Performing the task was fun in its own way, and the monkeys enjoyed it.

Harlow understood from that behavior that there is more than the food, drink and sex that we seek. He then concluded that our understanding of the motivation is incomplete and we need to include the Third Force in our efforts to motivate others.

Twenty years after Harlow’s experiment, another psychology graduate Edward Deci in 1969 chose motivation as his dissertation topic and conducted further research on human behaviour. In 1977 along with another student Richard Ryan, came up with a theory called Self-Determination Theory (SDT). SDT is based on the three main pillars, which came out of the research and lab experiments conducted by Deci and Ryan. According to SDT, there are three innate psychological needs – competence, autonomy and relatedness. Furthermore, SDT explains that when these three needs are satisfied, we are motivated, productive and happy, and vice- versa.

We understand from the work of Harlow and Deci, that humans’ default setting is being active and engaged, not being inert and passive as it is largely presumed by the organizations even today. The strategy guru Gary Hamel has observed that management is a technology and hardly few organizations have oiled and overhauled their technology whereas most organizations only pay lip services. He further emphasised that despite our understanding of human behaviour, the central approach of managing employees is yet ‘command and control.’

I fully agree with Gary’s statement, yet I feel that command and control are integral part of some organizations, especially in factory and manufacturing settings.

Deci and Ryan laid greater emphasis on autonomy saying it is the most important out of the three pillars. However, not many organizations have benefitted from this discovery.

William Mcknight, President and Chairman of an American company 3M in 1940s, was a visionary and believed “Hire good people, and leave them alone.” He went way beyond what I call the true practices of empowering employees. He allotted 15 percent of the work hours for employees to work on existing problems of their choice or experiment on new ideas. Art Fry, one of the employees at 3M, came up with the idea what you and I today know as ‘Post-it Notes.’ It was not one of his regular work assignments. Today, there are more than 600 types of post-it notes which are marketed to more than 100 countries in the world, and former head of research and development at 3M had said that most of the inventions that the company relies on even today have come from that 15 percent of work time allotted to employees. 

The idea of inventing Post-it notes was not part of the regular work. A simple effort to boost autonomy at workplace, Mr. McKnight achieved success way beyond anyone else could even image, let alone the cultural impact on the rest of the organization.

Today, as Gary correctly pointed, we have not learnt from the science of management. Besides its proven achievement, there is surprisingly a small number of organizations that have moved in this direction. Google is one such organization. Google has long encouraged its employees to spend one day a week to work on a side project, and some googlers use their 20 percent of time to develop something entirely new. Google Talk, Google Translate, Google Sky, Google News, Orkut, and even Gmail were born out of that 20 percent of time. 

Just stop for a moment and imagine a world without those post-it notes and even gmail. Small yet highly powerful results of small efforts made by 3M and Google, and their product will resonate the world for generations to come.

All this could happen to your organization too, only if you believe that there is a Third Force in each one of us. There are scientific results that have proved that it exists and yet we ignore it. Humans are wired to be Players, and not Pawns.