Closing the Employee Engagement Gap with Kurt Nelson

Dr. Kurt Nelson is an applied behavioral scientist, the president and founder of the Lantern Group.  He is also a sought after speaker and recognized leader in human motivation and behavior change. For over 20 years, Kurt has worked with global companies to apply behavioral science principles to drive change in their organizations. All his work is focused on understanding ways to positively influence how people behave.

Inside This Episode

• Why Employees Are Disengaged
• The Four Drive Model to Creating an Engaged Workforce
• How Recognition Reduces Turnover
• The Cost of Disengagement
• Realizing the Synergy of Communication and Culture
• Barriers to Effective Leadership
• Is It A Culture Issue or a Leadership Issue?
• The Impact of Friction on a Company’s Results
• Understanding and Creating Positive Social Norms
• Using Social Proof as a Leader to Effect Change
• The Power of Framing
• The Key to Avoiding Short-Term Behavior Change
• The Biggest Mistake Leaders Make Regarding Motivation
• The Say-Do Gap

Links:

Website:  www.lanterngroup.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kurtwnelson/

Twitter:  @WhatMotivates 

John Ryan
You're listening to key conversations for leaders. This is episode number 16. Welcome, everybody. In today's episode, we're going to be discussing how to close the employee engagement gap with Dr. Kurt Nelson. We'll be covering the four drive model to creating an engaged workforce, the power of framing in conversations, and some of the biggest mistakes that leaders make regarding motivation and much, much more. Leadership is about vision. It's about creating a vision and sharing that vision with others in a way that inspires them to walk with you towards its fulfillment. Along the way, leaders encourage, motivate, guide and even challenge people to bring their best each and every day. And it's all done through conversations. That's what this show is about better conversations for better leaders. Hey, everybody, and welcome to key conversations for leaders. I'm your host Sean Ryan, and today we have a very special guest Dr. Kurt Nelson. Kurt is an applied behavioral scientist. The president and founder of the lantern group, he's also a sought after speaker and recognized leader in human motivation, and behavior change. For over 20 years, Curtis works with global companies to apply behavioral science principles to drive change in their organizations. Welcome to the show, Kurt.

Kurt Nelson
Oh, thank you, john. Appreciate it.

John Ryan
Well, I wanted to start out by asking you, why is it that you think that as you say,

Kurt Nelson
well, that's a that's actually a study from Gallup. So Gallup has looked out they've do a engagement study every year and over the years, it has pretty much been around 85, between 75 to 85%. And I think it's really interesting because you would think with all of the focus that we have had as organizations as leaders within organizations on employee engagement, particularly over the past 10 years That number would have changed. And at least according to Gallup, it hasn't. Yeah. So.

John Ryan
So it sounds like that's been consistent for quite a long time. And I imagine with the clients that you consult with, that you're able to move that needle and create engagement, that that's part of the intention there.

Kurt Nelson
Well, it's part of the intention. So I think, again, the engagement gap, as as we call it as often because people don't feel psychologically connected to the organization. So there's this aspect where what they're bringing to the table, what the company is bringing to the table and what the employee is bringing to the table, they don't match up. And so oftentimes, what we see is, you know, companies trying to increase that engagement by saying, Hey, we need to pay these people more we need to do so a bunch of these extrinsic motivational aspects which do help. I'm not going to say that they don't say they're strong researchers. shows that increases motivation and increases, you know, engagement, at least for a short point, short term. However, there's a number of intrinsic motivators, intrinsic edge edge engagement aspects of this that are not necessarily part of organizations, typical repertoire, right? And so it's looking at understanding what is the purpose of the company? And how does that align with what the individual employees are doing? How are we collaborating? What is that element of being feeling like we're bonding and belonging and part of a team part of a group that has not only shared value going forward, but it has my back if something were to be fall on me. So there's a number of those types of factors that companies I think are missing in how they're approaching some of the aspects around engagement.

John Ryan
So the pay is one thing, but it also sounds like being part of something bigger is what really taps into the intrinsic motivation that we have to connect to a larger community and have meaning and purpose in our life. Is that what I'm hearing?

Kurt Nelson
You, you've nailed that. So there's this aspect. So there's been lots of studies on pay, right and the amount of pay and I'm not saying that, you know, having a higher salary and various different things aren't motivating. And for some people, that's a definitely driver for what they want to be doing. But for most people that after a certain part where they feel reasonably comfortable and secure, and they're able to afford the things that they want to have in their life, adding another 510 thousand dollars on to their salary, isn't really going to move the needle that much, right. It's not going to be a significant driver of their engagement. Having though an alignment with the purpose of the organization and having work that they find challenging. And novel. In other words, there's a model that I use often with companies it's called the for drive model was developed by Paul Lawrence and Noria from Harvard. It's been around for probably about 18 years, we've been working with it for about 14 years. And it basically says there are four underlying drives for employee motivation, slash engagement. And one of those the first one, it's ABCD model. So you can see when I, when I say the four drives, it's easy to remember, the first one is acquire and achieve. So it's the things right, I'm driven to acquire. That's my base pay, bonuses, salary, titles, all of those types of things. And that's a big piece. It's part of this aspect of, of having people motivated, but that is what I think companies tend to focus in on but they miss these other three ins and the other three are the sense of bonding and belonging. So that's the big one right? You You want to feel we're social creatures. We want to feel like we have A relationship a positive relationship with those people that we work with, right? We want to feel like we're bonding with them. The third one is challenging comprehend. It's this idea that to be motivated, we like to be challenged, right? We use this as my video game example, right? If you had a video game, and you, you know, we're working at it, and you got to level two. And level two didn't get any harder any more difficult than level one, you probably wouldn't be playing that level three was the same at level four. So you obviously you mastered level one, you know, you wouldn't be gone on to level two and level three, level four, it would be pretty boring after a while, right? We want that challenge. We want that we need to feel like we're learning and we're growing in those different pieces of it. And then the last one is define and defend. And this one's a little bit harder to kind of wrap our heads around but the author's talked about this as being we used to be tribal. We lived in these tribes and we would defend the tribe We don't have tribes today. But you know, organizations can be a surrogate tribe. And so what we end up doing is we, if we align with our purpose, our definition of who we are and what we are, along with the vision and values of the organization and those align, then that's, that becomes our tribe. And so we're going to defend that tribe against outward threats. And so those are some of the things that allow us to really increase and engage people and motivate them much more holistically and fully than if we're just looking at a single attribute, whether that be pay or bonus or promotion.

John Ryan
That's fantastic. And one, I'm so glad it's alphabetical order. That's brilliant. And it makes it really easy to remember. And I'm also wondering, when you say the promotion aspect, the external thing, the carrot of the salary bump, as an external motivator, and I've heard this a long time ago, and I want to see if there's any truth to it. This idea that people will stay at a job where there's more recognition versus pay. And I'm wondering if that's true and or do these other four drives supersede that idea?

Kurt Nelson
No, I think it's the they're all in combination. So recognition is huge. And there is lots of really good research out there that shows that organizations that don't recognize their employees well have higher turnover, that they do have significant lower aspects of engagement. And recognition can be a number, it can be a formal recognition program, it can be, you know, your rep of the month you are, you know, whatever that would be, but mostly what we're talking about when we think about recognition is this concept of, Hey, you know, I really think that you, john, I saw what you did last week, and that was fantastic. Thank you so much for that either in a handwritten note or just in front of the team, but it's that that positive acknowledgement for work well done. And then with that recognition, you talking about promotion promotion is a big piece of it. And it is in the research that in the companies that I work with, we do a lot of interviews with employees and surveys and various different pieces. promotion is always one of the big things. I'm working with a company right now. And part of this Coronavirus aspect that we're doing. We're looking at their incentive plans and the recognition programs that they have going on. And we're trying to figure out how to make those fair given the various aspects of everything Coronavirus in some areas opening up sooner than others. But one of the biggest concerns that the field has is that from a promotion perspective, they need to win one of these awards in order to be eligible for promotion. And so this idea of how are they going to make sure that this recognition still happens in a fair manner isn't just about the recognition and they get some pretty nice rewards along with the recognition but that's not what people are concerned about. What they're concerned about is this will impact my ability to be promoted. And so it has a very strong correlation to how people and to the retention aspects of a company. There's a career progression. That career ladder is one of the things that we also talk with companies about all the time because if if people don't feel like they can move forward, there's an aspect in behavioral science called the progress principle. Teresa, MLA is the one of the researchers on this. And it says that while we are really motivated when we see that we're progressing, and that can be on a project, it can be daily, and we get really demotivated when we feel like we're stalled or we actually move backwards a little bit. And it's very disheartening for those employees when working on a project and you're working really hard and it's moving forward and all of a sudden, you know, for no reason the project gets stalled or gets, you know, put on hiatus. All of those things. Links can be really disheartening and demotivating for people.

John Ryan
I saw some research on passwords when you're signing up for a website. And they found that if they give you that progress bar, like if your password is weak, strong or excellent that people actually have longer passwords, if you gave them that encouragement along the way, and I can see that in career that if you really take a step back, that this is all going to go back into the identity of who you are, and the intrinsic motivations that you're talking about. So if a leader is not engaging in the formal as well as the informal recognition systems, in the context of the four drive model that you identified, what is the real cost of having a disengaged workforce?

Kurt Nelson
Yeah, it's really interesting, because you go Alright, so what doesn't matter that if my employees are engaged or not engaged, that you know, they're still doing their job, right, but there's this element of cycle Being psychologically unattached to the company. And what that means is a number that impacts a number of different factors. One of those factors is, as we kind of mentioned before, retention, right? So are you more likely to leave the company and we know how much that cost, right? Somebody's leaving, particularly if they're a decent employee about how they do their job can cost a lot in order to get somebody new and, and train them and all of the aspects that go along with that. But I think even more importantly, with that is there are a number of times where, you know, as as employees, we go above and beyond if we are psychologically engaged, then we are more likely to, you know, go above and beyond work those extra hours on that Friday night because I gotta get you know what it's expected to get this done, versus cutting out maybe a little bit early on Friday to just go because I'm not really engaged and I don't really care. I did the bare necessity. For what had to do. And I don't need to do any more because my job is, you know, just my job and I don't feel an engagement with it. So there are a number of those productivity measures that really can be impacted by how we are engaged or not engaged. You know, just thinking back to what you said about the four drive model, the D and the four drive model, is that one of the bigger ones I know, they're all important, but when you identify with a tribe, and this is who I am, it seems like that would be potentially the most important one. Is that right? Yeah, so the research that they've shown on this is that you know, you can't look at these in isolation, really, I mean, any 1% kind of improvement on a rating score. So if you were rating each of these on a one to 100 scale and as overall as a company, we rate 70 to acquire and achieve 68, etc. Any 1% improvement from a company on on any one single individual piece gets about a three to 4% increase in productivity. Okay, so not bad right there, you still, that's a pretty good return. However, if you get a 1% increase across all four of them, the research has shown that you get about a 30 to 35% increase. So it's, it's really a multiple creative aspect. And part of that, and this is, I don't necessarily have the research to back this up. But my hypothesis on that is that we tend to focus in on the things that we feel are lacking, we're missing, right? So if all of a sudden were doing really the company's doing really well, overall, on on, acquire and achieve. Now what becomes more salient to me is this sense of bonding or belonging or the sense that I don't feel like I'm, I'm aligned with my purpose. And so whatever is the lowest one of those ratings is the one that is going to get the most focus from people. So to that Though, I will say that I think the D drive is often one that companies don't focus in on that they don't understand the connection. And so they're not doing the things that can help people feel like that drive is being satisfied. So for instance, making sure you communicate what how your vision is, and really working at understanding. So how is you know, Joe in accounting, aligning his or her job with, you know, what our overall corporate strategy is, it's kind of that making sure that you're looking at that bigger picture and making sure that people understand how they fit into that picture. And again, you can go back if it's who knows if this is true, but it's that old john kennedy when he went to Cape Canaveral and he talked to the, you know, the janitor and ask the janitor what his job was, and he goes, I'm getting a man to the moon. You know, he was a janitor. But he had bought into this idea that he was part of this team that was getting a man to land on the moon. And that's at a janitor level. And if you can get the entire organization to be having that same kind of commitment, that same ideal of what they're doing, you think about what that can do for an organization in the long run.

John Ryan
So that's awesome. And this is really exciting because it sounds like the tools to help facilitate and create engagement and shape that culture are really plentiful. And there's lots of choices out there. What do you think, is the barrier to people using that? Is it an awareness issue?

Kurt Nelson
Yeah, I think awareness is a big aspect of it. I think.

It's just an uncomfortable ness to have of leaders because some of the stuff is it's more of the softer side of things, right? It's saying, Yes, we need to feel like we can bond and belong at work, which means Sometimes it's like, you know, allowing chitchat and just kind of, you know, talking around the watercooler kind of things or creating these opportunities for people to engage. And that's not necessarily why people have gotten promoted. Right? You get promoted for other aspects of being, you know, focus on productive productivity, all those other aspects. And so the people that tend to rise up in an organization, just personality wise, this isn't always true. I don't want to paint up too broad of a picture here, right? Everybody doesn't matter. You're not just a type A personality are the only types that get into, you know, a senior leadership position, but oftentimes, they're more prevalent in those types of situations. So it's not necessarily a natural tendency for people to do that. It's also given the short term focus of things. Some of these are long term type implications, right. That's how we do it. And then I just think that even though we have a lot of tools, you know, one of the things that we don't understand this is the thing. I think that behavioral science that I kind of focus in on is this concept that we're humans and as humans, we're emotional creatures. And, you know, we put programs and processes in place that are very rational. We think about it from our prefrontal cortex this system to thinking Daniel Kahneman talks about system one thinking versus system two thinking system one is really quick, your gut kind of reaction system two is your more rational thinking through when you think of a math problem. It's a it's a system to thinking when you think about if you how you look at a picture or painting and how you feel that's usually system one. And we in business, we tend to put processes and programs in place based on our system to thinking, rational system thinking. But as humans, the vast majority of our response in the way that we show up is based on system one, that emotional gut feel that initial response, and so they don't always not saying that they're contradictory and they overlap a lot. But sometimes it would put those those more cognitive programs in place. And we don't take into account that we're humans and we have this emotional response. And so they fall short, they fall flat. And we need to better understand why people do what they do, why they think how they think. And if we can better understand that, then we can, hopefully make systems and processes and programs that are going to be more relevant and more engaging for employees.

John Ryan
So if they're doing that kind of work, they're developing the awareness and the skills and really paying attention because this is going to take a lot of time and energy to implement these ideas.

Kurt Nelson
Exactly, you know,

John Ryan
assuming they put that energy in, how do they know if it's a corporate culture issue versus a leadership issue, per se?

Kurt Nelson
That's a big question. Right? That's a

really good question. And this gets into you know,

some of this is an art versus a science and some of this is just really being aware of, of how we're showing up either ourselves. So, if you're saying is it is it a cultural issue or is it a leadership as a leader Am I the one who is really doing this culture is is an interesting thing, because culture kind of has this this helps guide you know, the way that a company thinks and the behaviors that the employees what they view as this is, this is the norm for this company, this is this is allowed or this is encouraged, and this is discouraged, this is this is are not allowed, those are those cultural norms that that we have within an organization and those are driven a lot by senior leaders and how they talk and how they convey their messages. Are they are they talking about a potential future? Are they talking about what could be in the possibilities or are they talking about we need to cut you know, numbers or expenses now, and The language that is used, and so a lot of that culture, and those individual aspects that you say are intertwined. And so you end up, you know, can you can you disassociate culture from an individual level perspective, sometimes you can, sometimes they're really inter inter woven together. So it makes that more difficult. But, you know, there's not really a steadfast, you know, this is 80% culture 20% individual ability that you can just run a test to be able to do that. It's more of being able to go in there and understand the holistic aspect of the organization and say, you know, here are some of the actions that you're doing that are probably driving some of this lack of engagement or whatever else that it is, and that are that's influencing your culture as a whole. And if we can change those things, we can change this culture, but then some of the other underlying cultural things that are probably influencing how You're doing things. And so it's like the yin yang aspect

John Ryan
of it, I would have to say the art of it. I love it. And coming from a scientist, that's really awesome to hear. Can you talk? Can you talk a little bit about what you refer to in terms of friction, and how that impacts accompany?

Kurt Nelson
Yeah, so we use the term friction. Roger Dooley wrote a book actually just recently called friction. He's a neuroscience marketer. And he talks about friction in a number of different ways about it's these little things that impede us from being as efficient or as effective as we could. And he talks a lot about, you know, websites and you know, if you have to click twice versus just one click the number of people that drop off after that, that's a point of friction. When when we talk about friction, though, inside of an organization, what we're talking about is both these procedural pieces, so if I have a job and I have to do eight steps, when really three of those steps are You know, they were put in place at one point for some reason, but they no longer really have any value. That's That's some friction, right? It's adding time it's adding effort. Those have an emotional as well as a productivity gain for people. But there's also some social friction. So it goes back to some of the cultural aspects right there under, there are unwritten rules of behavior and how we do things. And sometimes those social aspects of, of work can impede not only, you know, our productivity, but how we think about things, you know, and I'll use the most common kind of aspect that people talk about all the time. It's like, well, we can't we can't we tried that before, right. And it didn't work well. Alright, that's a mindset. But it's a frictional mindset because it causes people to not be able to really look at And think creatively about aspects or to be so stuck in the status quo. And the way that we're currently doing things to break out of that box. And so we go in and we'll do a diagnostic within organizations to look both at some of the procedural aspects, but also some of those social aspects to try to ascertain. What are some of those mindsets that are coming in place that can impede a company from trying to achieve the strict strategy or the the vision that they have in place for themselves?

John Ryan
The unwritten rules of the culture? That's brilliantly said, you know, that's exactly what it is. No one talks about it. It's now in the manual, but that's the way it's done. So is social pressure and social proof? How did those ideas come into play?

Kurt Nelson
So actually, if I'm gonna get a little geeky on you hear, I apologize, I get my research scientist hat on. So in associate They talk about social norms and and there's two different types. Actually, there's more than that. But two main types of social norms, there's, there's normative norms, which are the things that as a society that we think we ought to be doing or that people, you know, this is the element of you should not smoke, right? That's a maybe could be that's a norm that maybe your culture or whatever has, and then there's descriptive norms and descriptive norms are, are, yeah, we know we're not supposed to smoke. But you know, what, I believe that most people are, there's a lot of people that do smoke, right. And so what we see is that from a behavior change perspective, descriptive norms actually are more impactful on people's behavior than normative norms. So those things that you should be doing are great, and they do help but it is the descriptive norms that are actually driving kind of this aspect. So, social proof is this aspect of saying, What are most people doing and when we see within a company, Alright, so, and I'll use a an example of, wow, you know, most people are cheating a little bit on their expense reports, right? Okay. So if, if most people know the norm, or the the normative aspect of that is we should not cheat at all right? But hey, you know, I don't have I forgot that one receipt. And I'm just going to add, you know, $3 tip to this, that I didn't really give a $3 tip to I'm not going too far above, but I'm not, you know, I'm not really, you know, in your head, you can rationalize that away and you can, you can do that. And that's a descriptive because you're going, I believe everybody else is doing that. And you don't even have to see it, but you can believe that and that's a that's a, that's an aspect of it. And so those are the things that are driving a lot of the behaviors within an organization. So when you think about those, those types of norms, that's what can be influence, corporate culture, corporate, you know, ways of responding, all those types of things.

John Ryan
What would you want leaders to understand in terms of the power of social proof? And really, how to use it?

Kurt Nelson
Well, one of the things that Yeah, no, it's a really great, great question because we often have unintended leaders, particularly, there are unintended consequences to the way that they talk about something. And I will use this example it's not mine and I actually don't even remember where I heard this from. So if if anybody out there if I'm sitting there your your story, I apologize and contact me and I'll make sure I attribute it to you moving forward. But there was a company that was working on trying to get more people to sign up for their 401k plan, right. They it was it was a video positive aspects that are going, Hey, look, let's get more people, you know, because the company offered a nice match. And from a savings perspective, they wanted their their employees to have a long term benefit of a nice retirement and various different pieces. And so they were putting this whole thing together, and they had they, they rebranded things, they redid all of this. And then they had the president of the company come up on stage in front of everybody and talk about this. And the President started off and he went off speech, or off off script, and he started talking about, and there's only 20 some percent of you who are actually, you know, maximizing out your 401k plan. And that's just not acceptable. We need to make sure that you are, you know, you're doing this and we got all this stuff in here. And while he probably thought that that was a really good message, they were really smart. And afterwards, they kind of started asking and talking in the the unintended consequence of that is people go, Wow, only 20% of the people are actually doing it. match. That means 80% of people aren't Well, I don't feel so bad. Now I'm, I don't have a full match. But you know, most people don't as well. So it's those unintended consequences of the language that we use can really influence how people perceive those social norms. And that's social proof. So you have to be intentional and you have to understand how your language can impact that. And so again, you asked about leaders and what they need to know. One is just utilize it appropriately. So you know, if you are seeing positive things that most people are doing, but you have a smaller percentage of the people that aren't that are just aren't on the bandwagon. Use social proof to help and convince those people to get them moving forward. But then also be really concerned and cautious when you're using things were just like the example that I use that if you're trying To get many people to do something, you might want to use more of a normative descriptor as opposed to a normative message as opposed to a descriptive message on that. So

John Ryan
that was a great example of the normative versus descriptive and the backfiring that can occur. Yeah. And I love this idea. And the application is immediately applicable everywhere. And it also brings us to framing. Yes, how you frame things in your one on one in your one to many conversations that you have. Is there anything that you want to share about framing and how a leader should communicate things to be able to bring in motivation, and intrinsic desire and those types of things?

Kurt Nelson
I'm going to bring in a couple different pieces here. Yes. Although I will have to say that all of this right is is very nuanced and contextually based. And so I might say an example here, and then then somebody might go Oh, so we should always use a loss of frame as opposed to a game frame. And that's not what I'm saying at all. But But let me use one example. And it's an example of use for years. There was some research done, they are trying to get college students to register for a class early by August 1, right? And so they put in a 15% discount if you registered before, before August 1, but what they did is a really interesting study. So half the people got an email that said, If you register before August 1, you get a 15% discount on your tuition. And then for half of the other group, they had the if you register after August 1, you'll have a 15% penalty for registering same exact costs should make absolutely no difference in the number of people right from classical economic perspective, if you did the math doesn't matter. However, when they found out what they found is that and don't quote me on the actual numbers here, but about 92% of the people that got the penalty message registered early versus 66 67%, who got the discount message. So that that last message this which goes back to loss aversion, which is a behavioral science principle says we tend to feel the pain of a loss twice as much as an equivalent game. So if I lose $100, that is twice as painful as if I found $100 on, you know, the, the street. And so you can use that from a framing perspective. But I will say that, and then, you know, again, you go back and you go well, alright, so I should always use a negative loss message when I'm trying to convince people to do something. And that's not always the case, because depending upon the culture, within the organization of negative messaging can double down on people's fears and you can get into analysis paralysis within that and so then they don't move. So I wish there As an easy answer on framing, but framing is very important. That's the one message I will have is making sure that you very consciously think about how you're framing something, and take that into account and do some research on framing and understand what framing the different ways that you can frame something and how that can impact how people are responding to it. So the behavior that you get, can be very different just on the way that you structure. And I've heard for a long time, this idea of loss aversion that people will do more to avoid pain than to experience pleasure. And this carrot and stick metaphor that comes from psychology. Is that appropriate, or is it antiquated? Or are we really that simple pain and pleasure? Well, there there is that I will say that the the element of, of pain though, like, you know, if you you have these threats, they're very they can be very powerful. motivators, right? If you don't do this, you're going to get fired. Well, I will do that, right. But that is a very extrinsic

tool to use. And as soon as you take that penalty away, it does not tend to the research that I've seen at shows shows that once you take that penalty away, that behavior immediately goes back to the old ways. And so you constantly have to have those threats in place. And it we talked about culture earlier, and these thoughts of engagement, right, it does not engender engagement and it does not create a positive culture within the way it actually lends itself to when you have those penalties. You feel like you're being controlled. And as humans we don't like that our sense of autonomy that our sense of control is being dictated by others. And so we will, we will push back we have a thing called reality. It's where when our personal freedom is being challenged, we will push back on it. And I always use the it's a silly example. But I had some dental work done a long time ago. And as part of that, for like two weeks, I couldn't eat caramels and popcorn and different things like that. And I'm not really big popcorn or caramel person to begin with. But because I knew I couldn't, oh my gosh, I wanted to eat that caramel and the popcorn. That was like the big craving for me. But that was really reactance is because I couldn't, therefore I wanted to do it. And so it's those things of like, people will go above and beyond then to kind of find ways around the system and to the game the system when you're trying to restrict them from doing things. So it's a long winded answer to say carrot and stick. Yes, the the stick does work, but you better be really careful in how you use it because of all the unintended consequences that they can bring.

John Ryan
Well, one of the things that I'm getting right now is certainly like you mentioned earlier, it's nuanced. It's not going to be a one size fits all. It's going to be subtleties based on the culture, the relationship, the individual, the larger mission of the company. So to kind of try to put it all together here, at least on the elements we've talked about so far, so we know that the stick can work in the short term, of course, we also need to bring in the carrot, we need to consider the four drive model, the ABCD model, as well as utilize social proof to highlight positive behaviors within an overall corporate culture and context. This is gonna be really fun for you what is the favorite thing that you get to do or favorite aspect of what you do as a consultant?

Kurt Nelson
Yeah, I mean, that no two quiets, no two engagements are ever the same. And I think that is really, so I'll go back to the four drive model, the ABCD model, right and I am driven. Again, we all have different personality aspects. And so we all have different motivational profiles as well. I know for me, part of that is challenge, right. And so it's this idea of being challenged and being able to figure something out and to be able to do that. So when I get a client, and they have a unique challenge, and we're given the opportunity to come in, and really dig in and come up with some solutions that may not be just the standard solution, and really pushing us to go above and beyond I love those may may be crazy in the moment. But you know, when you get it and you go, Oh, we can do this. And if we do this, this will actually impact this broader scale. And wow, if we actually make these changes over here, we can really impact not just this team, but the entire company. And those are fantastic when you do that, and you get to see the result. It's just a wonderful feeling.

John Ryan
So the C part of the for drive model the challenge as well as Being part of something bigger than yourself it sounds like that's a pretty big drive for you. So that's your motivation. Are there any mistakes that you commonly see with leaders that they try to do when they're trying to motivate their team that actually backfires.

Kurt Nelson
You know, where I see again is that they they only use one or two motivational levers. So, and most of the time those have to deal with PE or some sort of award or something along that line, some extrinsic motivational piece, and they they just forego this idea of all the intrinsic motivational levers right? And, and I'm not saying to, to not use extrinsic motivation, those are those are key, they're part of this mix, but it is a mix and you should be thinking about, you know, how do you create jobs that provide a challenge that pride, maybe some some novelty, some unique aspect where you get to learn something new. Even when you know one of the hardest work, things that we had to do we work with a manufacturing company, and their plant and the guys on the on the plant floor. You know, one ran this press and basically his his job all day was pulling a lever down and piece of metal taking the lever metal and moving on to the next pot putting new piece of lever pulling press. I mean, that's what he did for eight hours a day without his brakes. And so how do you add some challenge into that? Well, we talked to them, and they started doing job rotation. And they started doing various different things. So the press operator got to train somebody new in that and then he got trained on another aspect. And so not only did that help in keeping people kind of, hey, new stuff is and learning, but it also allowed them to when somebody was sick, they now had people trained in on all of these different aspects and you go on Well, that seems a pretty simple fix. And in reality it was and why weren't they already doing that? But they weren't. And so those are some of those simple things that you can think about in just doing that around creating bonds and belonging, connecting back to that purpose in that vision and creating some of those aspects.

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