Of the three keynote speakers at HR Florida, Daniel Pink was definitely my favorite. He shared some phenomenal ideas to motivate employees, and I’m already looking at ways to incorporate those concepts into the workplace.

Quote of the day

Management is an 1850s technology for controlling people at work. -Daniel Pink

Commissioned vs. non-commissioned work

He touched on several pieces of interesting research, but the most interesting was a study of commissioned (someone pays the artist to create it) and non-commissioned (it is created by the artist with no compensation in return) artwork. A random selection of both types was assembled, and the objective judges provided some interesting feedback. While both sets fit the requirements for form and function, the non-commissioned works were judged as more creative nearly every time.

The takeaway for business leaders is that we should look for ways to provide non-c0mmissioned work opportunities for our people. An Australian software company called Atlassian offers what they call “Fedex days” to their employees. Basically the staff has the opportunity to work for 24 hours on projects not directly related to their daily duties. The only requirement for employees during these events is that they have to make a presentation to the company describing what they worked on.

They have had incredible success with this program, and the projects and tools that have been developed during these day-long work marathons have helped to spur innovation and creativity throughout the organization. In short, it works.

Autonomy-it matters

It’s been known for quite some time that autonomy really is a powerful tool to get your people invested in their work. When was the last time you asked someone to describe their best boss ever and they replied, “He/she was always looking over my shoulder and was quick to point out when I was wrong. I love my micromanaging boss!”? I’ll go ahead and state the obvious: that has never, ever been said by anyone!

One of the hard parts after hearing a session like this is to figure out how to apply it to your daily work. Daniel Pink did a great job of offering ideas to put into action (including taking the Fedex Day idea above for a test drive). He called this one the autonomy audit.

How to perform the autonomy audit

Ask employees to rate these four questions on a 0-10 scale (0 being low control, 10 being high control):

1. How much control do you have over your time at work?
2. How much control do you have over your technique at work?
3. How much control do you have over your team at work?
4. How much control do you have over your task at work?

You’ll end up with a score between 0 and 40. Next ask the manager to predict the employee’s score from 0-40. Then (here’s the kicker) share the employee’s score with the manager. Almost always the manager’s prediction will assume the employee has higher control than the employee believes.

Today I get to review the book The 1% Solution for Work and Life by Tom Connellan. I have been doing a lot of reading on working smarter, being more productive, and developing solid work habits lately. With all the balls I juggle, it is often more than a little crazy. When my friend Rebecca reached out to me to see if I wanted to review this book, I couldn’t wait. The last book review I did for them was fantastic, and I hoped this one was on the same level. Lucky for me, it certainly was.

I am a fan of business books written with a narrative story embedded. It helps to put yourself into the situations the character is facing. You can sympathize with the troubles and celebrate with the triumphs. So before I was two pages into the book, it already had that going for it.

The plot

The basic storyline is this: Ken’s life is barely hanging on by a thread in some places. He is sick and tired of just struggling to maintain that level of performance, and that prompts him to start a conversation with a friend who is doing quite well. The friend shares with him an interesting phenomenon illustrated by Olympic athletes. Apparently the best athletes in the entire world are approximately 1% better then those who are just really, really good. It’s not a 50% difference or even 10%. And if they can be the that good by being 1% better, why can’t we be 1% better at lots of little things in life?

That conversation spurs Ken to start meeting with each of the “One Percenters” in his friend’s group to gather bits of information and ideas on how to live his life better. He hits the highs and lows (as most of us do when tackling something challenging), but in the end, he sees how each piece comes together and starts applying them to his own life.

My favorite parts

The picture on the left is one of the best pieces of the book, because it actually stops to list the exact ideas and action steps each character is trying to convey. The little conversations that Ken has with the others in the group and the notes he takes are phenomenal. Because the ideas come from a diverse group of people (salesman, entrepreneur, psychologist, physicist, and athlete), there’s a different feel to each instructional session he undergoes. There are a handful of these in the book that I ended up copying word for word into my list of tasks.

The last word

If you want a book to inspire you and give you some ideas on how you can be 1% better at a lot of things, this is definitely something you will want to read. It’s a quick read (and the narrative/story portion helps with that), but you’ll have to go back and reread the notes portions to fully absorb the ideas the book is conveying.

Anyone else ever read it? I’d love to hear ways you work to be 1% better at a lot of things instead of trying to be 100% better at one big thing.

What do you have to offer the world?

A week or so ago, I was doing some research for a leadership project I’m working on. I came across a moving video that I really think you should check out. It’s longer than most, but the message is worth the wait. Check out The Butterfly Circus video below. (Email/RSS subscribers may need to click through to view.)

Here’s the original link to the video.

My thoughts

What does this mean for your employees?
What does it mean for you as an HR pro?
Are you aligning your staff’s talent with the organization’s needs and motivating them to be the best they can be?