Primed to Perform

How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures

Through the Science of Total Motivation
Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor
PRIMED TO PERFORM: How To Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the
Science of Total Motivation by Neel Doshi & Lindsay McGregor. Copyright 2015 by
Neel Doshi & Lindsay McGregor. Published by arrangement with HarperBusiness, an
imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
368 pages
[@] getab.li/25104
Book:

Rating

9 Applicability
8 Innovation
9 Style

Focus
Leadership & Management
Strategy
Sales & Marketing
Finance
Human Resources
IT, Production & Logistics
Career & Self-Development
Small Business
Economics & Politics
Industries

Take-Aways
Six prime motivators drive human behavior.
Three direct motivators generate high performance. Three indirect motivators
diminish performance.

Organizations mainly use indirect, coercive, carrots and sticks motivators. Few
master the direct motivators: play, purpose and potential.

Play generates the greatest performance.

Give people freedom to experiment, innovate and find ways to do their jobs better.
Infuse purpose and a common mission into every position and task.
Avoid emotional pressure on people to please others or gain status.
Dont rely only on economic pressure to motivate employees. Pay, bonuses, rewards
and recognition disconnect employees from work; they focus on rewards.

Beware of inertia, an all-too-common and insidious motivation. It means that your

employees stay with you only out of apathy.

Build a powerful, resilient and adaptive culture around play, purpose and potential.

Global Business
Concepts & Trends

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What You Will Learn
In this summary, you will learn:r1) How six motivators drive people at work: three that lead to high performance
and three that cause low performance, and 2) How to build a culture of positive motivators while eliminating
negative motivators.
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Review
Consultants Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor bring together just about everything worthwhile about employee
engagement, motivation and workplace performance. They offer data and evidence to support each claim and piece of
advice. Their entertaining case studies inform readers throughout, illustrating the three essential direct motivators
that every company should use to build long-term success and the three indirect motivators that lead to lower
performance. Though this manual can be repetitive, getAbstract recommends it highly. For leaders at every level,
HR professionals, compensation executives, consultants, entrepreneurs and students, this could be todays best work
about motivating performance.
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Summary

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Even though many
organizations rely
on money to drive
performance, most
of us know from our
personal lives that
motivation is much
more complicated.
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A culture that
inspires people to do
their jobs for play,
purpose and potential
creates the highest
and most sustainable
performance.
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Total Motivation
Firms that build a culture of total motivation, fulfill a larger mission and emphasize intrinsic
motivation over salary last longer and outperform their rivals. A deep cultural focus on
purpose generates innovation and creativity, thus engaging both employees and customers.
Staffers respond best to the direct motivators of play, purpose and potential. When their
work stimulates and sparks their creativity, you get play, the most powerful of motivators.
Then, attach meaning and mission to their work to achieve purpose. Give people work that
provides a path to something they want to accomplish potential and their performance
increases. Play ignites the greatest performance boost then purpose, then potential.
Indirect motivators diminish performance. Emotional pressure causes people to do
things for the wrong reasons. If, as a child, you played piano to please a parent, emotional
pressure motivated you. As an adult, you might stay in a job because it confers status.
People motivated by emotional pressure do things they dont really want to do, but they
dont do them well. The second indirect motivator, economic pressure includes salaries,
bonuses, and other incentives or rewards. It also includes fear of punishment. When people
work mainly for money and rewards, or to avoid punishment, they tend not to perform
at their best. Where people strive for recognition only, they underperform. You cant run
a business without economic incentives, recognition and rewards, but you must combine
them with other motivators to drive higher performance. Inertia when workers stay at
a job because they cant muster a reason to move diminishes performance the most.
From Worst to First
By focusing workers on play, purpose and potential, organizations can turn
underperforming or even the worst performing employees into superstars. Consider General
Motors, which operated a plant in Fremont, CA, in the early 1980s. The Fremont plant was
rife with defects, absenteeism, drug abuse, violence and grievances. GM shut it down in
1981. Three years later, Toyota teamed with GM to reopen the plant. Due to union rules,

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The most powerful
and the most
overlooked source
of total motivation
is the design of a
persons role within an
organization.
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To unlock the door to
high performance, the
keys of a culture must
work together. This
requires consistency
and coordination.
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Unfortunately, were
all bad at consistency
and coordination.
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We treat people
according to how we
expect them to perform.
A leader who believes
in a team member
acts in a way that
enhances his or her
total motivation.
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they brought back almost all the workers whom GM had laid off. Toyota turned the plant
into the best in the GM system in under 24 months. The plants productivity rivaled the best
Toyota plant in Japan within three years of its reopening. Toyota applied its culture of total
motivation and emphasized play, purpose and potential.
The ToMo
Apple, Whole Foods and Southwest Airlines appeared on Fortunes most admired
companies list in 2015. They also share high Total Motivation (ToMo) scores. The ToMo
measures your companys culture. Have your workforce take the total motivation factor
survey at the primedtoperform website. The results will fall between 100 and -100. The
more people do their jobs due to the direct motivators work enjoyment and purpose the
higher your score. The more they work due to indirect motivators peer pressure, prestige,
money and tangible rewards the lower your score. The same survey and calculation works
for athletes, students and even marriages. In study after study, the higher an organizations
ToMo, the more likely it is to thrive.
Up to a point, you can persuade people with coercive approaches. Whether your boss offers
you $10,000 to stay all night and stack heavy boxes, or offers no bonus but threatens to fire
you, youll probably do the work. Indirect motivators are effective, but only in the short term
or for rote, repetitive tasks. Most firms now need long-term, inspired, creative performance.
Whether workers are blue- or white-collar, in the call center or the operating room, they
must deal with the unexpected. Adaptive performance matters, and if motivation derives
from rewards or is driven by avoiding shame or punishment, workers falter when things
dont go according to plan.
Money Drives Poor Performance
When researchers offer rewards to subjects to perform simple rote tasks, like typing two
letters on a keyboard repeatedly, they outperform those who get lesser rewards or none.
When subjects perform more complex tasks, like simple addition, the group getting the large
reward significantly underperforms. This influence, the distraction effect, takes peoples
minds off work and focuses them on rewards. Even smart people perform worse when
distracted by a significant reward. In short, they choke. Rewards tamp down your normal
motivations for doing a task well. When researchers offered one group a reward for halting
a stopwatch at exactly five seconds and another group no reward, the no-reward group
stayed engaged even during breaks. The reward group practiced half as much as the noreward group. Similar experiments yield the same results. Under the cancellation effect,
the reward cancels your reasons for performing and negates your interest in the challenge.
When people lose their positive motivation, and work for pay or to avoid a negative, they
focus their creativity and smarts on gaming the system. Most organizations use carrots
and sticks to drive performance. Workers find shortcuts to obtain the reward or avoid the
punishment. They do not focus on the behaviors that the incentive intends to encourage.
For example, in the face of pressure to drive quarterly sales, salespeople may use harmful
tactics such as deep discounts, high-pressure sales tactics, inflated promises, and so on. This
Cobra Effect derives its name from the British governments efforts in Delhi, India, in
the 1800s to eradicate cobras. Indians took to raising the snakes so they could kill them and
get the bounty for presenting a dead snake.
Compensation System Design
In most cases, pay-for-performance schemes damage a workforces total motivation.
Bonuses cause workers to focus on the reward, and they coerce good people into gaming

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We spend weeks
on performance
evaluations, but very
little time on culture
building. We invest all
sorts of energy and
hiring the right people
and then underestimate
the influence of our
culture once they
arrive.
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Not a single moment
in your organization
is predictable. Your
organization needs to
adapt at every level
all the time. Enter
culture.
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When an
organizations objective
intersects with its
employees and
customers values,
the purpose motive
ignites.
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Without a compelling
and convincing identity,
cultures become weak
and organizations
become less adaptive.
Performance weakens
as customers lose
trust.
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the system or sabotaging their colleagues. Before you implement a pay-for-performance

system, consider whether your tasks are routine and repetitive, or complex and changing. If
the latter, you need adaptive performance, which performance-based rewards undermine.
If your firms success relies on teamwork, or if you operate in a media-sensitive
environment in which one transgression might hurt the companys reputation, reconsider
pay-for-performance. If you struggle to measure the behaviors you hope to promote or to
calibrate rewards to reach your desired business goals or to motivate your employees or
customers, rethink pay-for-performance. For far better results, tie pay raises and promotions
to learning and acquiring skills. Try experiential rewards like travel and paid education.
Cash bonuses rarely produce desired results.
Microsoft lost 10 years of market share, innovation and reputation by wielding its process
of performance management as a weapon. Microsoft motivated its people, for example,
by focusing workers attention on forced rankings and bonuses for winners, and shame or
pink slips for losers. Such systems distract people from their work and focus them on the
system. Microsoft managers regularly closed ranks to shut out high performers and kept
low performers on the team to protect themselves and their teammates. Luck and timing
account for many successes and failures. Notice how people achieve their goals or fail.
Share repeatable good practices.
Strategy and Culture
Strategic plans always face setbacks. Organizations with resilient, adaptive cultures prevail.
They encourage people to innovate, create and adapt using play, purpose and potential. They
nurture a sense of citizenship that encourages employees to share ideas freely, devise
better processes, seek help and share common purpose by putting the organizations success
on par with their own. The life cycle of cultures makes organizations slide from openness
to insularity and protectionism which leads to decay. Fight this by having your Chief
Cultural Officer lead a team of fire watchers that continually measures the health of your
culture and makes adjustments.
How Most Organizations and Leaders Fail at Motivation
Managers default to indirect motivators because such tactics require little effort and drive
short-term performance. Even managers who commit to employee engagement and tout
their employees as their most important asset usually revert to indirect motivators at the
first signs of trouble. Leaders succumb to the blame bias, the propensity to hold a person
responsible for incompetence, a character flaw, laziness, and the like in the face of
failure. Consider an Israeli Defense Force experiment. Researchers informed trainers that
some of their trainees were top performers while others were average. The rankings were
fictions, but those whom the experiment randomly tagged as top performers did much better
than average performers. Believing the trainees were top performers, trainers looked to the
system or themselves for faults when a recruit failed. Average performers remained subject
to the blame bias. To combat blame bias, look for flaws in the system, not the person.
Use the ToMo to Improve
Improve your culture by having everyone complete the Total Motivation survey. Your firms
total score gives you a baseline. To raise your teams ToMo, embark on such initiatives
as developing managers skills to drive adaptive performance, designing jobs to maximize
direct motivation and instilling purpose in everyones work. Experiment to see if scores go
up or down or stay the same, depending on your actions. Manage your culture scientifically,
with data, not hunches.

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Youre most likely
to lose weight or
succeed in any other
endeavor when your
motive is play.
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Play at work should
not be confused with
your people playing
Ping Pong or foosball
in the break room. For
your people to feel play
at work, the motive
must be fueled by the
work itself, not the
distraction.
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Play occurs when
youre engaging in an
activity simply because
you enjoy doing it.
The work itself is its
own reward. Scientists
describe this motive as
intrinsic.
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Leaders who attempt to control their teams with carrots and sticks generate negative ToMo
scores. Those who adopt a laissez-faire, hands-off attitude of benign neglect get only
slightly better results. Others who try everything to motivate with all six direct and indirect
motivators equal the performance of laissez-faire managers. Leaders who proactively use
direct motivators to drive adaptive performance see scores that almost triple best scores
gained by other tactics.
High-ToMo leaders give their teams space to experiment as do laissez-faire leaders
but stay highly involved, to coach, sweep away obstacles and give feedback. They remind
team members of their mission while making the organizations purpose part of the shared
purpose of each team member. High-ToMo leaders align work assignments to employees
personal goals and strengths. They earn trust by setting reasonable goals and by practicing
honesty and transparency.
Show Impact, Encourage Creativity and Innovation
In the early 20th century, Frederick Winslow Taylor invented contemporary management.
He broke jobs down into the smallest components and argued that people should specialize
in doing one thing all day. Taylor got it wrong. Whether they are surgeons or assembly line
workers, people perform better when they see the whole picture and understand the impact
of their work.
Most companies promote people through competition. Many co-workers compete for a few
jobs at each rung up the ladder. Instead of focusing on working better, people concentrate
on securing promotions by looking better than their colleagues. This impedes cooperation.
Worse, the career ladder usually promotes through management and executive leadership.
This encourages researchers, scientists, salespeople and others to give up what they do
best in favor of taking on work they may not enjoy or do well. This activates The
Peter Principle, which says that, eventually, everyone climbs to his or her position of
incompetence and stays there.
Internal competition makes people perform defensively and avoid risks. Associated
economic and emotional pressures cause people to work harder to earn notice but not
to work smarter. To combat this, create several career ladders. Allow experts to remain
working as experts by creating prestigious and well-compensated ladders for researchers,
scientists and others. When IBM realized in the 1960s that it was losing scientists to
management positions, it created its Fellows program. Since then, almost 250 of its best
researchers and scientists earned that title, and five won Nobel Prizes. Since the mid-1990s,
IBM filed more patents than any other organization. Define your career ladders so everyone
knows what it takes to ascend. Like IBM Fellows, the pinnacle of each ladder should offer
a job at least as enticing as being CEO.
All of the components of total motivation must come together in your culture. You cant
pick and choose among its tactics; combine them, and continuously monitor and improve
your culture.

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About the Authors

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Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor worked together at McKinsey & Company before launching Vega Factor, a
consulting firm dedicated to total motivation science. Their ToMo survey is available at the primedtoperform website.
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