The Sports Analogy

By Andy Grove

A manager’s output is the output of the organization under his supervision or influence. This means that management is a team activity. But no matter how well a team is put together, no matter how well it is directed, the team will perform only as well as the individuals on it. The members of the team need continually try to offer the best they can do.

When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated. If the person’s life is depended on doing the work, could he do it? If the answer is yes, that person is not motivated; if the answer is no, he is not capable.

The single most important task of a manager is to elicit peak performance –“personal best”- from his subordinates. So if there are two things that limit high output, a manager has two ways to tackle the issue: through training and motivation.

How a manager motivates his subordinates? Motivation has to come from within somebody. Accordingly, all a manager can do is to create an environment in which motivated people can flourish. My own observation of working life confirm Abraham Maslow’s concept of motivation. A need once satisfied stops being a need and therefore stops being a source of motivation. Simply put, if we are to create and maintain high degree of motivation, we must keep some needs unsatisfied at all times.

Maslow defined a set of needs as below:
· Self actualization
· Esteem/Recognition
· Social/Affiliation
· Safety/Security
· Physiological

Physiological needs
Physiological needs consist of things money can buy, like food, clothing, and other basic necessities of life.

Safety/security needs
These come from a desire to protect oneself from slipping back to a state of being deprived of the basic necessities.

Social/affiliation needs
Social needs are quite powerful. One friend of mine said that going to work means being around of people she likes.

The physiological, safety/security, and social/affiliation needs all can motivate us to show up for work, but other needs - esteem/recognition and self actualization – make us perform once we are there.

Esteem/Recognition
A friend of mine was named a vice president of a corporation. Such a position is a life-long goal. When he had suddenly attained it, he found himself looking for some other way to motivate himself.

All the sources of motivation we’ve talked about so far are self-limiting. That is, when a need is gratified, it can no longer motivate a person. Once a predetermined goal or level of achievement is reached, the need to go further loses urgency.

Self-actualization needs
Self-actualization stems from a personal realization that “what I can be, I must be.” Once someone’s source of motivation is self-actualization, his drive to perform has no limit. Self-actualization continues to motivate people to ever-higher levels of performance. Thus, its most important characteristic is that unlike other source of motivation, which extinguishes themselves after the needs are fulfilled. A need to get better has no limit. Competence- and achievement-oriented people continuously try to test the outer limits of their abilities.

When the need to stretch is not spontaneous, management needs to create an environment to foster it. In an MBO system (management-by-objectives), objectives should be set at a point high enough so that even if the individual (or organization) pushes himself hard, he will still only have a fifty-fifty chance of making them. Output tend to be greater when everybody strives for a level of achievement beyond his immediate grasp, even though trying means failure half of the time. Such goal setting is extremely important if what you want is peak performance.

Moreover, if we want to cultivate achievement-driven motivation, we need to create an environment that values and emphasizes output. My first regular job in a research and integration technology, where a lot of people were very highly motivated but tended to be knowledge-centered. They were driven to know more, but not necessarily to know more in order to produce concrete results. Consequently, relatively little or almost nothing was actually achieved. The value system at Intel is completely reverse. The Ph.D. who knows an answer in the abstract, yet does not apply it to create some tangible output, gets little recognition, but a junior engineer who produces results is highly valued and esteemed. And that is how it should be.

When one is self-actualized, money in itself is no longer a source of motivation but rather a measure of achievement. Now consider a venture capitalist who after making ten million dollars is still very hard at work trying to make another ten. Money in the physiological- and security-driven modes only motivates until the need is satisfied, but money, as measure of achievement will motivate without limit. Thus the second ten millions can be just as important to the venture capitalist as the first, since it is not the utilitarian need for the money that drives him but the achievement that it implies, and the need for achievement is boundless.

If the absolute sum of a raise in salary an individual receives is important to him, he is working mostly within the physiological or safety modes. If, however, what matters to him is how his raise stacks up against what other people got, he is motivated by esteem/recognition or self-actualization, because in this case money is clearly a measure.

Once in self-actualization, a person needs measures to gauge his progress and achievement. The most important type of measure is the feedback on his performance. For the self-actualized person driven to improve his competence, the feedback mechanism lies within the individual himself. Our virtuoso violist knows how the music should sound, knows when it is not right, and will strive tirelessly to get it right.

What are some of the feedback mechanisms or measures in the workplace? The most appropriate measures tie an employee’s performance to the workings of the organization. If performance indicators and milestones in a management-by-objectives system are linked to the performance of the individual, they will gauge his degree of success and will enhance his progress. The most important form of such task relevant feedback is the performance review every subordinate should receive from his superior.

The performance of the organization as a whole depends on how skilled and motivated the people within it. Thus, the rule as managers is, first, to train the individuals and second, to bring them to the point where self-actualization motivates them, because once there, their motivation will be self-sustaining and limitless.

Let’s ask a question. Why does a person who is not terribly interested in work at the office stretch himself to the limit running a marathon? He is trying to beat other people or stopwatch. This is a simple model of self-actualization, wherein people exert themselves to previously undreamed heights, forcing themselves to run faster. What they did get was a racetrack, an arena of competition.

Comparing our work to sports may also teach us how to cope with failure. As noted, one of the big impediments to a fully committed, highly motivated state of mind is preoccupation of failure. Yet we know that in any competitive sport, at least 50 percent of all matches are lost.

The rule of manager here is also clear: it is that of the coach:
First, an ideal coach takes no personal credit for the success of his team, and because of that his players trust him.
Second, he is tough on his team. By being critical, he tries to get the best performance his team members can provide.
Third, a good coach was likely a good player himself at once. And having played the game well, he understands it well.

Turning the workplace into a playing field can turn subordinates into “athletes” dedicated to performing at the limit of their capabilities – the key to making our team consistent winners.