Hidden Mojo

When I was at ESPN.com, everyone on my team took turns carrying a pager for a week every two months. The pager would beep if there was a “website emergency” (a phrase my pharmaceutical sales rep girlfriend and her doctor clients chuckled at) such as a broken data feed, or if an editor had problems publishing a story to the site. We were the first line of defense in making sure the website a) stayed up, and b) ran smoothly.

One weekend during the Final Four in New Orleans, I was on call. I turned in on Saturday night after watching the games, but was jarred awake by the shrieking pager at around 4am. I groaned, hopped on email, and helped the editor in New Orleans solve his problem. No big deal–just doing my job, as all of my co-workers did when they were on call.

On Monday morning, the gregarious editor-in-chief was strolling down the aisle cubes, said hi to me, and then said something like:

“Hey, thanks a million for solving that problem on Saturday night. I was on the email chain and I really appreciate you helping my editor out.”

Never having been thanked so genuinely in the workplace before, I stammered something about just doing my job. The editor walked off, jovially cracking jokes, as I sat there with a big smile on my face and wondered why I felt like a million bucks.

This happened over four years ago. It was so out of the blue, and (unfortunately) such a unique incident, that it’s stayed with me this long.

My co-founder at Education Revolution, Jon, recently told me a similar story. When he sold his last company, he sent a hand-written thank-you note to each member of his his team, which was distributed all over the world. In the note, he enclosed a small amount of cash ($50 or so.) His team loved the gesture, but told him that the note was 100x more important to them than the money.

Here’s a story about how most of corporate America thinks about motivation. Earlier on at ESPN, a senior exec was telling all the employees the results of the employee satisfaction survey. He said that people were generally unhappy with the money they made, but also said that should be expected: “if you aren’t here to make more money for yourself, you’re probably in the wrong job.” I had a visceral response to that phrase. I had taken a $17k paycut to come to ESPN to build kick-ass sports technology products, not to maximize my income.

So there’s the challenge: we live in a culture where money is assumed to be the be-all and end-all, but often the more motivating and appropriate reward is genuine recognition and thanks.

So how do you solve this problem?

Dig Alfie Kohn’s well-researched perspective on how compensation relates to motivating your people:

• Pay people well.
• Pay people fairly.
• Then do everything possible to take money off people’s minds.

In other words, if your compensation is equitable, the best reward is NOT more money.

The small, simple act of saying “thank you” can make everybody at your organization feel great about themselves, and want to run through walls for you. And as long as you’re also paying your people fairly, and are creating work that’s meaningful to the people doing it, you’ll be well on your way to creating an amazing place to work.