“Wondering Wednesdays”
by Brian Pageau
I coached boys high school basketball at the Varsity level for 11 years. If you’ve coached youth sports at a competitive level, then you’ll almost certainly resonate with the frustration that comes with kids who want to win the game, but don’t engage or compete during practice.
This isn’t rocket science; the more you compete and engage in practice, the higher the likelihood is that you will perform well during games. 1 + 1 = 2, right?!
And yet, despite how obvious this connection was to us as coaches, and no matter how many motivational gimmicks, tricks, carrots, and sticks we attempted in order to make this connection come to life for our players, it was painfully difficult to get kids to consistently engage and compete in practice.
And then I read Drive by Daniel Pink. From that moment on, we rarely had issues with engagement and competitiveness at practice.
Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation
I’ll save you the full book report (here is the Ted Talk), but what changed our basketball program (and has since influenced nearly every decision I’ve made in the workplace) is rooted in understanding the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.
Extrinsic motivation is performing an activity to gain a reward or avoid punishment. Examples include:
• Fear of failure
• Awards, Bonuses, Accolades
• Fear of Punishment
Intrinsic motivation is performing an activity for its own sake and personal rewards. Examples include:
• Autonomy
• Belonging
• Curiosity
• Learning
• Love
• Mastery
• Meaning
Great leadership has long been associated with “top-down” decision-making. If you are in charge, you make the decisions, and everyone else follows your orders and direction… or else! Daniel Pink articulates that most high-performing individuals and teams were not operating in “top-down” cultures where extrinsic motivation was used, but instead were cultures organized around cultivating intrinsic motivation.
So, how did learning about intrinsic motivation change our basketball team’s practice culture?
Simple. We let the players participate in and often dictate the practice plan. The coaches would list 20-ish potential drills for that day’s practice, then let the players pick which 10 drills they wanted to do and what order they wanted to do them. Sometimes they would even add new drills to our list of potential drills for the day.
We gave players autonomy over some of the practice, increased their feeling of belonging and engagement, and they became more curious about why some drills were on the list while others were not. Ultimately they took ownership of the practice plan. Upon doing this, we rarely had to “yell at” or “reward” (extrinsic motivators) anymore. They competed and were engaged because practice was theirs and not ours.
It was a humbling lesson for us coaches; we had to give up control and ultimately trust our players in order to get the best out of our team.
Creating Space for Civil Discourse
A number of weeks ago, a few of our teammates at Foresight came to the full team and said,
“You know what is missing in today’s society? Civil discourse. There doesn’t seem to be any place in today’s world for having reasonable conversations about tough topics. How are people supposed to learn about other perspectives if everyone is always trying to win arguments, yell over each other, and demonize each other? Since Vulnerability and Curiosity are two of our core values here at Foresight, we think we should practice our values by practicing civil discourse. We want to pick a ‘hot button’ topic every two weeks and invite everyone in the company to a discussion over the lunch hour. It’s not mandatory, but we want to invite everyone. We want to call it ‘Wondering Wednesdays’.”
“What outcomes are you hoping for?” we asked.
“To learn from people who believe different things than we do. To learn new perspectives. To learn what questions and issues people have with our positions and thoughts. And to practice disagreeing without being disagreeable.”
“Set it up!” we enthusiastically responded.
Intrinsic motivation for the win.
Trusting your team for the win.
Courageous and vulnerable teammates for the win.
P.S. Despite this post being about company culture and human flourishing, we are not “thought leaders” in this space. Although we do fancy ourselves to be quite adept at getting inspired by good ideas. For the real thought leaders, we humbly bow and point you towards some of our favorites below. Our recommendation would be to consume everything they create!
Brene Brown, Adam Grant, Simon Sinek, Daniel Pink, Seth Godin, Susan David, Daniel Coyle, Martin Seligman, Barry Schwartz, Susan Cain