Conventional management is based around the idea of coercion. When people don’t naturally enjoy their work, conventional management makes sense. Motivation (or fear?) has to be induced in order to achieve higher levels of performance. Methods may include introducing incentives and bonuses, creating competition, enforcing KPIs, setting tough goals, managing by objectives (MBO), and the like.

But what if someone is already motivated by their work? A case that is common amongst knowledge workers. If someone already enjoys doing what they do, then the need to coerce goes away. We must instead, as managers, shift our focus from attempting to induce motivation to getting anything out of the way that distracts them from doing work they already like to do.

Removing distractions that get in the way of work, i.e. removing the obstacles to flow, is one of the objectives of “Systems Thinking”, an idea pioneered by the likes of Deming and Goldratt. Applying conventional management techniques to knowledge work is akin to adding distractions and obstacles to a system, thus not only degrading the performance of the system, but also demotivating people who are already motivated.

Scholtes says:

How can managers motivate their people? They can’t. Frederick Herzberg established this thirty years ago (1966, 1968). It is the ultimate management conceit to believe that we can motivate people. Motivation is not some substance we can infuse from the outside, like a bone marrow transplant.

All of our efforts to motivate our people are based on commonly shared myths. Managers can, it is true, demotivate.