Motivating Modern Intelligence Analysts
Start with Why (10 mins)
Leading Intelligence Professionals
Presented by Shannon Armstrong at the AIPIO International Conference Melbourne 2022
I want you all to take a moment and think about your current job. The role you do every single day.
And I then want you to imagine that you have just won the lottery and have decided to retire from your current role.
Your final task, being the authentic, caring leaders that you are, is to prepare a handover for the person that will be taking over from you.
I want you to take a moment and think about what you would include in that handover. What things you would ensure that the next person absolutely needs to know to be able to perform that job at least as well as you did it – if not better.
(Give the group a few minutes to think about it and to jot down some thoughts)
What I want you to do now is talk to the person next to you for 2 or 3 minutes – the folks online can enter their info into the chat if you would like to.
Please discuss what you would actually include in that handover.
Now for most of you, I am sure that the majority of what you would cover in this handover is the What – what specifically your job entails. The tasks you need to do, the priority elements that need to be completed first.
For some of you, having done this job for a period of time, I am sure you have worked out a few short cuts along the way and perhaps learnt from some of your previous mistakes, so the handover will likely also include some elements relating to HOW those tasks are best performed.
But my question really – is how many of you thought about including the WHY. Why is this job important? Why does it exist? Why should the incoming manager care about it?
Because from a motivational perspective the WHY is critically important. So much more important than the what or the how.
I remember a few years ago, I was running a leadership training program for one of our intelligence community agencies and I asked the attending leaders about their WHY. Why did they do what they did? And the resounding majority of the responses I got, kind of related to the why – but were in fact just a broader version of the WHAT.
I was repeatedly told they kept Australians safe. Now don’t get me wrong, this is a very noble driver. But it was still WHAT they did – they kept people safe. We had to dig deeper and get to a more personal level to really understand the why.
It was not until we played with the language and unpacked that statement that we were able to fully appreciate their why. They are keeping Australian families safe because the men, women and children of Australia are worth keeping safe and more-so, they are relying on us to do it.
See how much more profound the motivation becomes when you can create a personal connection to the why.
I do what I do because Australian families are worthy of being kept safe. They rely on me to keep them safe.
As a leader of intelligence professionals – before you even consider how you can better understand what drivers and motivates your start – you need to understand your own WHY.
Why do you do what you do?
This is not a new concept. Simon Sinek, and other thought leaders have been discussing the importance of WHY for years. If you want to learn more I highly recommend Simon’s Book and podcasts “Start with Why” and The Golden Circle.
To help you examine your own intrinsic motivational drivers, let’s look at what the literature tells us about motivation – specifically intrinsic motivation.
From the field of Psychology, the intrinsic drivers of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose have long been studied and used to explain why we do what we do.
I first learnt about these motivators when I was developing a series of leadership programs for St John Ambulance NSW, to deliver to leaders of volunteers. This is specifically interesting to me because when I talk about motivation, so many people focus on the extrinsic drivers – most notably – money. But there is no money even on the table. If this was such a strong driver, then why do we have over 6 million Australians – over 1/3 of the over population over the age of 15 freely give up their precious time – the one commodity that you NEVER EVER get to use again – for zero financial return?
It all comes down to these intrinsic motivators.
Autonomy
Autonomy is the need to direct your own life and work. To be fully motivated, you must have an amount of control over what you do, when you do it, and who you do it with.
Autonomy motivates us to think creatively, without needing to conform to strict workplace rules. By rethinking traditional ideas of control – regular office hours, dress codes, numerical targets, and so on – organisations can increase staff autonomy, build trust, and improve innovation and creativity.
Motivation by autonomy is often used by software companies, many of which give their engineers time to work on their own development projects. This gives them the freedom to try out and test new ideas, which can deliver benefits to the organization, such as improved processes or innovative solutions.
Mastery
Mastery is the desire to improve. If you are motivated by mastery, you’ll likely see your potential as being unlimited, and you’ll constantly seek to improve your skills through learning and practice. Someone who seeks mastery needs to attain it for its own sake.
For example, an athlete who is motivated by mastery might want to run as fast as she possibly can. Any medals that she receives are less important than the process of continuous improvement.
Purpose
People may become disengaged and demotivated at work if they don’t understand, or can’t invest in, the “bigger picture.”
But those who believe that they are working toward something larger and more important than themselves are often the most hard-working, productive and engaged. So, encouraging them to find purpose in their work – for instance, by connecting their personal goals to organisational targets – can win not only their minds, but also their hearts.
These ideas of intrinsic motivation are founded in the 1971 work of Psychologist Edward Deci and his associates. There have been a number of more recent studies on intrinsic motivation vs extrinsic reward.
If you are interested in this type of research, and want to learn more about it – I would also recommend you read read Drive by Daniel Pink or watch his Ted Talk on “The surprising truth about what motivates people”.
OK so MIT conducted a study in the early 2000s into the common thought that if you reward something you get more of the behaviour you want and if you punish something you get less of that behaviour.
So they ran this experiment with a whole series of students where they set them a range of challenges. Things like memorising strings of digits, solving word puzzles and other spatial puzzles as well as a range of physical activities like throwing a ball through a hoop.
To incentive performance, they were given 3 levels of reward:
- A small increase in performance = small monetary reward.
- A medium increase in performance resulted in a larger cash prize and
- The highest level of performance increase received a large cash prize. (It was about $100 – we are not talking thousands of dollars here.)
So what do you think happened?
Here is what they discovered…
As long as the task only involved mechanical skills, the reward structure worked perfectly. People were able to perform higher to get the reward.
BUT – once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skills, a larger reward lead to poorer performance.
Let’s stop and think about this for a moment from the perspective of the people we are trying to motivate. Our intelligence professionals. Their roles are specifically cognitive heavy – so if it is not monetary or external reward that is driving their motivation – then what is it?
Back to the story.
So when these results were reported there were some critics to the theory who claimed the monetary rewards were less impactful with the already wealthy MIT students and so the researchers took the tests to rural India.
This time the monetary rewards equalled something like 1 week’s salary for a small performance increase, a month’s salary for a moderate increase and almost a year’s salary for a significant increase in performance.
What did you think they found?
Well – in this study, those that were offered the middle tier reward performed exactly the same as those offered the small reward. There was no net increase in performance. Most interestingly however was the fact that the worst performing group were those offered the largest incentive.
The study concluded that for straight forward “if-then” repetitive tasks this incentive system is great. BUT when a task gets more complicated, when it requires conceptual and creative thinking, those kinds of motivators demonstrably don’t work.
Motivation for these types of tasks is INTRINSIC.
Improving Motivation
So how do you improve motivation?
Well, the first step is really easy. Start talking about it. Find out from your staff what motivates them. Start asking questions about how they feel about the work they do. Do they understand the purpose and impact of the team’s work? Are they keen to learn more, get more training, be better at their roles? DO they like to have control over HOW they do their work?
In these conversations take a genuine interest in them, their responses and importantly their feelings about these issues. Share with them the things that drive and motivate you. Share your Why and find out theirs. They have chosen the intelligence profession for a reason. They have chosen your organisation for a reason. Take a genuine interest in their WHY.
When it comes to rewards and benefits, if you are able to align these with the intrinsic drivers they will be so much more impactful. Offering the overseas training trip to the staff member driven by Mastery. Giving the staff members who are driven by autonomy the option to choose their next project. And ALWAYS – Always reinforce the bigger picture.
Now no one likes mundane repetition in the workplace so think creatively about how you can reduce or remove monotony in their roles. Even if it is only for a short break away to do something different – this can be hugely impactful.
Finally, whilst we cant make all working conditions fully flexible, providing choice where it is possible is critically important.
Conclusion
So I will leave you now with 2 challenges
The first – take the time to reflect and truly think about why you do what you do. What elements of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose motivate you.
Once you have your why, I challenge you all to find out what truly drives your staff to do what they do each and every day. The answers might just surprise you.
Thankyou.