The clip of Mihaly C’s talk is very interesting. I am fascinated by what some people do. Mihaly C has been trying to figure out what makes people happy. What a contrast with what I do for a living: figure out how to make structures stand up!
Mihaly C’s chart of skills vs. challenges is quite consistent with my experience. I have always been very happy (experienced flow) doing projects that appeared beyond my skill levels (I was aroused by the challenge). For such projects I spent a lot of time to do research, study new theories, and learn new techniques. The time I spent on such projects usually far exceeded what I could fairly charge my clients. The balance of the payment was the “fun” I had doing the job.
On the other hand, I have to do a lot of routine work that requires very little expertise and presents no challenge for me. Such work is boring, but I have to do such boring work just to pay the bills. I wish I always worked on challenging projects, but that is not always possible in the real world.
Transforming these ideas to motivating others, it becomes clear that a manager must have a good knowledge of the skill levels of people who work for him. He also must understand the personality of these people. I think Mihaly C’s chart applies to most people, but there are some exceptions. While most people may be aroused by challenges and enjoy improving their skills, some people are very happy doing the minimum work they have to in order to meet the requirements. I imagine, in a well run high-technology company, the latter people would not survive too long. For the former people, the challenge for the manager would be to choose the workers’ assignments so that the skill level required by the job is at or slightly above the workers’ skills. Of course, he would also have to make sure that the workers get support for increasing their skills, such as in-house training, mentoring, attendance to courses and conferences, etc.
As I mentioned in the class a while ago, in a company I worked for a project manager had to “recruit” the people to work on his project. An employee could turn down an offer to work on a specific project for any reason, including that he just did not like to work on such projects. The result was that almost all employees were happy with what they were doing. They were also continuously improving their skills, since they worked on projects that they liked (or have fun with) and part of the fun came from being challenged. That was one company that did very little routine work; most projects involved solving problems that other engineers in town could not.
I never worked in a manufacturing company or a similar organization, where people would do routine, repetitive work. So, I do not have first-hand experience with using fear or screaming at people in order to get more work out of them. However, I am very sure that these would not work in organizations where highly skilled people do creative work.
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