February 2010

This month’s blog comes from a rather cramped spare room at my parents, where we’re currently squatting whilst we look for a new home. The experience of selling our home of the last two years got me thinking about motivation.

I believe there are essentially only two forms of motivation. We can be motivated to run towards something - a goal - or away from something - a fear or discomfort. Sometimes, they co-exist.

When we launched ourselves into this latest mini-adventure, we had a clear goal – we were planning to spend a couple of years living and experiencing life in France, working, as we do now, from home, with one week in six spent in the offices in Alston. The goal was exciting, and enticing. I imagined spending my weekends riding through the sun flecked forests of Normandy, drinking wine on the terrace in the evenings, walking with my white German Shepherd to the local Boulangerie each morning to buy some bread, taking lunch in the local town square – you get the picture.

For a combination of reasons, we’re probably going to hold off our move to France for a little longer, and we realised this a few weeks before we sold our house. So, what motivated us to continue with the sale? Well, mostly, a desire to escape the howling 80-mile an hour winds and non-stop rain that have launched themselves at our hilltop farm almost, it seems, without pause for the last two years. (In fairness, we had been warned before we left the relative comforts of Alston that things were a bit dire in the Wear Valley but thought we were hardier than we ultimately proved to be!).

So, here we see the two forms of motivation co-existing – running towards something positive and running away from something negative.

I suspect that in the current climate, a lot of the second form of motivation is being used in organisations around the world. And that can be useful if we want people to react quickly – we’re basically tapping in to the same drive and energy that would lead them to run from a fire, or, in the case of Indiana Jones, a rolling boulder. But what happens when they sense they’re out of danger? They stop.

So, here’s my thought (finally, I hear you scream): If you want your people to deliver long-term planning, and a sustained high-level performance; in other words if you want to keep them motivated for the long term, you’re more likely to achieve that if you give people something positive to run towards – as long as it’s somewhere they truly want to be.