Hierarchy of Lead(ing)

Apparently, Those Who Know Best decided that it would be a good idea to encourage folks in the office to donate blood. An effort that's of a piece with earlier efforts to field a team for the local ACS Relay for Life (something which--I might add--I did a subpar job in managing when it was my turn).

With that disclosure, two things struck me about the email that was fired--shotgunned, really--to the general mailing list.

1. In an effort to do good, the drive has been cast as a contest. (In other words, a purely internal (and highly personal)--i.e. intrinsic--motivation has been replaced by an extrinsic--i.e. external--reward system.
2. The email never actually spelled out what the top bleeder would "win." Which effectively nulls out any motivation to go above and beyond.
   

Being a complete wimp about needles--despite being assured by trained medical personnel that I'm "good bleeder," thanks to highly visible veins--I have worked myself up to either donating blood or signing up to be called on for such on short notice. But not often.

Granted, that's me being me. But I started noodling the idea of motivation--particularly the extrinsic kind that can might just pass for intrisic if it's done with the right finesse. And, given that the only formal training I've had in what makes human beings tick comes from good ol' Psychology 101 in college. (In retrospect, I think my prof. and I had a tacit bargain: I could skip out of class some Tuesdays for speech tournaments and he could guinea pig me in class b/c he knew that anyone who did that sort of thing had more defenses than your average freshman. It was a pretty symbiotic relationship, all in all.)

But I digress in navel-gazing. The snippet of Psychology 101 to which I refer is, not Pavlov's drooling dogs nor Skinner's baby-in-a-box nor even the infamous Milgram or Stanford Prison experiments. No, I mean Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (without which, it seems, it is impossible to write a book on organizations these days). The premise of the hierarchy is that human needs are built as a pyramid, with what we would consider the most basic--i.e. primitive--motivations at the bottom and the more sophisticated (although hardly effete) driving forces at the top. The pyramid structure is mostly valid, although slightly misleading. For example, think of the vibrancy of Stone Age cave-painting or--much more amazingly--the Viktor Frankls and Eli Weisels of this world.

And while it's not 100% apples-to-apples analogous, I'll take a highly subjective stab at the comparable hierarchy in operation at the office:

Growth: Do I have room to play? To connect? To fail and grow?

Control: What percentage of the week do I spend merely reacting vs. adding value?

Ethos: Do I grok why we're doing what we're doing as we're doing it?

Roadmap: Do I know what needs to be done (and can I do it)? Then what?

Security: Will I still have a job when the rent's due? How easily can I be replaced?

Survival: Can I pay my (part of the) bills on the income from this job?

To my way of thinking, this is the "pyramid" (and, yes, I know it doesn't much resemble one, but you get the point) to which the Powers That Be should focus on building--assuming that there's any pretense to harnessing the value of employees who are not merely punching a clock.

I suppose, theoretically at least, you could make a point of hiring the Frankls and Weisels of this world--the people who make a conscious choice to transcend whatever's thrown at them, if only for their own sakes. But I know I wouldn't invest in the company that built a business model around that...any more than I'd knowingly invest in a the old-school carrot-and-stick school of H.R.

But let's back up for a second. The sender (notice I didn't say "author") of the afore-mentioned email about blood donation is new to our office and relatively young besides. I want to be clear about that, mainly out of fairness: No one deserves to be slammed b/c Those Who Know Best aren't necessarily the quickest learners. (Not from where I sit, anyway. For all I know, my co-workers' mileage may vary.)

So, against my better judgement, I'll slip a quick word--destined for upstream consumption--that "contests" require some sort of prize, even if it's only bragging-rights. Either that or an office-wide philanthropic effort should be built on some kind of buy-in. Because pandering to our most mercenary instincts is bad enough...but offering no pay-off in the bargain? I'd rather not see that much #fail in one place at one time. And because, for a cynical as I've become (not to mention a downright snob about which battles I'll fight) I'd don't want to see someone set up to fail (even when the set-up's not deliberate). Especially not on the first effort.