Treat people right and you don’t need carrots or sticks to get quality work.
if people…
– have autonomy, mastery, and purpose
– feel loved and appreciated, feel that the employer is benevolent
– feel safe to fail, to speak up, to share
– feel honestly, fairly paid
…if we have all those things, we dont need carrots or sticks.
I’ve written before including an hour book the edge on manager how I find behaviorist thinking antithetical to what we are trying to achieve. Carrot and stick will observably work, but they don’t contribute to the kind of culture we want to create.
I don’t have a problem with making people aware that they need to change their mindset in order to a achieve what they want.
The best way is to show them good exemplar organisations to create aspiration, then show their system functioning and help them find their own contribution in that. People have to discover for themselves that they are part of the problem.
The keys are:
- Be invitational. You can’t make people change.
- Be patient. We are all on a journey.
- Be humble. Everybody can teach everybody else something.
- Be a servant. Help them as they go.
- Be a gardener. Create the conditions for people to find their own way.
- Be a truthteller. Despite all of the above, there are times where it is important to say what you observe, unemotionally, rationally, with all the evidence you can muster.