A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

HOW TO MOTIVATE THE KNOWLEDGE WORKER ■ 223
■ The workers receive no money and little material compensation for
their services.
■ The work is dangerous and workers are frequently injured on the job.
■ The work is strictly voluntary.
■ The workers usually have very high morale.
■ The organization always has more workers than can be fully employed.
■ The workers are highly motivated to achieve the organization’s goals.
Very few people are able to come up <strong>with</strong> the correct answer. How
about a high school football team? “Ah,” you say. “But that’s not work—
football is a game. That’s play.” Exactly right. And that’s part of the secret
of motivating your knowledge workers: we need to make work more like
a volunteer game, more like play.
<strong>Work</strong> Needs to Be Interesting
Peter recognized that money by itself is not a good motivator. He referred
to Frederick Herzberg, who had developed the concept of job enrichment
in his book The Motivation to <strong>Work</strong> (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1959).
The idea was to improve and restructure work processes and their environments
to make them more satisfying to workers. While workers could
feel less than satisfied for many reasons, less than interesting work was an
important element. This is probably the reason that it was ranked number
two in the results cited in the survey in Re-inventing the Corporation.
Can you provide interesting work, or can you make the work that
your workers must do interesting in some way? There are many opportunities
to do this, if you think about it. This is why a competitive activity
like football, even though dangerous and “hard work,” can exhibit such
positive motivational qualities.
Treating People <strong>with</strong> Respect Gains Respect
Isn’t it <strong>with</strong>in your power to treat people <strong>with</strong> respect and insure that others
who work for you do the same? Certainly every human being deserves
to be treated <strong>with</strong> respect. Many outstanding leaders maintain that you
should treat those who work for you <strong>with</strong> even more than respect. Mary
Kay Ash, the amazing woman who built a billion-dollar corporation, Mary