Over the past couple of weeks, Dave has been making most of the contributions to WorkPuzzle, as I have been working remotely in the Midwest.  Now, he is off to Europe for a few weeks to visit his daughter who is working in London, and I’ll be writing the WorkPuzzle entries.  Hopefully, you’ll enjoy the extended focus each of us have/will put toward WorkPuzzle during the weeks in July.

The reason for my trip to the Midwest is a music tour I decided to embark on with my family.  Some of you know this already, but my family started a bluegrass band a few years ago.  We normally perform in the Northwest a few times per month, but this summer we decided to do a cross country trip from Seattle to Indianapolis.  By the time we’re done, we’ll have performed 12 times in various communities across the country.  (If you have an interest in reading more about the band, you can visit the band website at www.noteasilybrokenmusic.com.)  Since we perform during the evenings and weekends, I’ve been able to work remotely. 

The trip has been a lot of fun, and we’ve created some great memories along the way.  But, as we conceptualized the journey, I knew there would also be some challenges. One of those challenges was going to be getting my six kids to ride in the car for 7,000 miles without killing each other.  My wife, Sally, suspected it would be similar to those experiments she read about in her psychology classes where they put rats in very confined spaces and they eventually start eating each other!

To keep this from happening, Sally started planning months ahead of time.  Of course, we had all the normal tricks such as books on tape, videos, games, crafts, etc.  But, when boredom sets in, we knew it would still be tempting to take a little bite out of a sibling.  To head this off, she put a request out to her network for ideas to keep kids occupied and civil during long car rides.

While she received many ideas, one in particular caught her attention.  It was provided by a mom who has eight kids and regularly takes trips across the country.  This woman had devised an incentive system whereby her kids could earn quarters for good behavior in the car.  Here’s how it worked:  Each child was presented with two rolls of quarters ($20), but they could not claim their quarters until the midpoint of the trip.  During the trip, if relational offenses (rudeness, disrespect, physical harm, etc.) were committed, one or more quarters would be deducted from their account.  So, at the halfway point in the trip, they could potentially earn $20 for good behavior.  The process would then be repeated for the return trip.

Now this all sounded good and we’ll try almost anything when it comes to parenting, but I did notice that this incentive system was at odds with what I had recently learned about motivation from Daniel Pink’s work (see previous blogs 1,2,3).  Research demonstrates that “carrot and stick” incentive systems are not effective.  In addition to having a little peace in the car, I was curious to see if we could defy the research.  Do those researchers really know what they’re talking about anyway?

Unfortunately, for my wife and I, they do.  We’ve now crossed the midpoint in the trip, so we held a “results ceremony” at lunch with our extended family last Sunday.  The results were not good.  Of the 480 quarters available, only 248 were claimed by our kids.  This means that there were 232 offenses committed over 3,500 miles.  I bet you’re glad that you were not in the car with us over the last three weeks!

If you dig into the data a little bit further, it’s even worse than it appears.  For three of the kids (I won’t name names), 124 out of 180 quarters were lost due to poor behavior.  Of course, these were the particular kids who we were hoping the incentive system would have the most impact on.  Where we needed behavior modification most, we had a failure rate of nearly 70%.  I knew we were in trouble when one of my boys said, “Dad, nice try on this quarter system.  The way I see it, this is just a way for me to be able to commit 80 free offenses.  I don’t really need the money.”  He said this about three hours into the trip!

So, science again triumphs over the well-intentioned schemes of desperate parents.  So…if “carrot and stick” incentive systems don’t work, what does?  The researchers are right on this account as well.  Inspiring individuals to personally buy into a meaningful purpose is what produces outstanding behaviors.  When it came to the band performances, there was a single event to which the entire family could focus.  With this goal, the negative behaviors generally disappeared.  Interestingly, the more important and difficult gigs were, the higher the level of focus and good behavior.

Hopefully, you can see how these principles could apply to the team you manage.  As for producing good behavior in the car, I’m still working on that…