I’ve been thinking a lot about motivation lately. I think I’ve concluded that there are two basic types of motivation.

Today, I had lunch with a friend who is competing in two triathlons this year. She’s motivated to do it because it’s something she decided to do, which I see as the first kind of motivation. When you are striving to reach a goal that you set for yourself, you are motivated by whatever caused you to set the goal initially. It’s still difficult to get out and train every day to reach that goal, but because you own the goal, you try harder to find the motivation within yourself to put your running shoes on and go outside.

The other kind of motivation you need to summon is at your job, and for me, that’s a lot more difficult. The reason, I believe, is rooted in goal setting and ownership. I didn’t set the end-of-year profit goals for the company, someone decided it for me. I didn’t decide to complete the XYZ project on time and under budget, some steering committee decided it. Finding the motivation within myself to achieve a goal that someone else owns is difficult for me.

I think this is why people, including me, find entrepreneurship to be so alluring. At that point, my company goals become my goals, and my motivation (should) become easier.

Goal ownership is also how I can find the motivation to work on side-projects and blogging long after I should have turned the computer off.

Getting Goals to work, at Work
I suspect that the periodic employee/manager review process is designed to correct this goal-setting problem, but it doesn’t. Most of the review processes I’ve been involved with, both as a manager and employee, have involved a stage where goals are set for the following review period. In my experience, the output of the corporate goal-setting process has been so rote and contrived that it has never yielded anything motivational.

This is why I think that “owning” a part of your product is so important. I think people need something to take pride in and call their own. When that happens, goals set themselves. And when goals set themselves, motivation follows. And motivation drives quality and efficiency, which any company should want.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 7:21 pm and is filed under programming career. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.