Here’s how the two elements come together. In the short run, if a task is undesirable but not impossible, we can crank up the pressure and get the job done. Over the long run, we want to find a way to remove some of the factors that make the job undesirable, or we’ll constantly be looking for ways to motivate people to do what they hate doing. And that’s never fun.
Motivation and Ability Can Be Confused
Here’s another concept to keep in mind. When diagnosing the cause, we have to be dead certain that we haven’t confused motivation and ability. As completely different as the two things are, people don’t always make it easy for us to tell whether they don’t want to do what’s been asked or can’t do it. In fact, we pretty much assume that if we ask nicely enough, people will tell us straight out whether they couldn’t complete an assignment, they wouldn’t, or both.
For instance, Wanda, a service-repair technician who works for you, doesn’t show up at a client’s office. You ask what happened, and she comes back with “I went there, but the doors were locked. I used my cell phone to check what was going on and got voice mail.”
It was a clear-cut ability problem. When you’re lucky, people come right out and tell you if a problem was due to motivation or ability.
Ambiguous Cause
But you’re not always that lucky. More often than you’d like, the other person (in this case, Wanda) comes back with something such as “You know; stuff came up.”
This response is just ambiguous enough to be dangerous. You need to probe for can’t or won’t. With this in mind, you ask, “Are you saying that you ran into a problem or that you didn’t want to do it?”
Wanda continues to baffle you by saying, “You know how it is. I just never got around to it.”
You probe one more time: “I’m not sure what you’re saying. Did you choose not to do it, or were you unable to do it?”
Complicated Cause
Finally Wanda fesses up. She tells you why, and as is often the case, it’s complicated: “I hate working for those guys. They look over my shoulder and complain the whole time. They give me the creeps. I was hoping if I didn’t show up, you’d schedule someone else.”
There you have it: she didn’t want to do it (for understandable reasons), shirked the job, didn’t let you know, left the client hanging, and was hoping that you’d reward her by sending someone else to the tough client. She chose not to do it (motivation), and as is often the case, she was not all that motivated because she was not all that able. She didn’t know how to deal with a tough client.
You’d probably start this conversation with the fact that she chose not to do the job, left the client high and dry, and hoped you’d somehow look the other way. That’s a serious infraction. You might eventually work with Wanda to help her get better at dealing with tough clients, but you’re not likely to start there. In any case, this problem, like most, is fairly complicated and requires a detailed diagnosis and multiple solutions. Without going into all the sources, you’re only going to be able to deal with a subset of the underlying causes.
Masked Cause
Believe it or not, sometimes people purposely hide the genuine source of a problem. If they fear that they’ll get in trouble for not being able or not wanting to do what’s been asked, they may stretch the truth to avoid new problems. For example, an attending physician asks a medical student to insert an intravenous line into the chest of a 75-year-old patient. The student isn’t quite sure how to do it, but when the doctor is called away to work on a cardiac arrest, the student says nothing. Instead, he attempts to insert the line and punctures the sac around the woman’s lung, and the patient later dies of related complications. A woman dies because the student is uncomfortable saying that he just might be unable to do what he’s been asked. (This actually happened.)
Perhaps the most common ability problem that people try to hide is their illiteracy (23 percent of the population is illiterate). Employees fear they’ll lose their jobs if they admit that they can’t read or do basic math. You ask, “John, how come you didn’t set up the new equipment?” John couldn’t read the directions, tried his best, and failed. He thinks he’ll be fired if you find out that he can’t read, and so he answers, “I hate doing that kind of stuff. It has all those fancy numbers and charts and things — not that I couldn’t do it if I wanted to.”
If you interpret this response to mean that John doesn’t like doing the task, you’ll want to explain the natural consequences: “John, we have two clients waiting on the job, and the longer you take getting the equipment up, the longer they’ll have to wait.”
This, of course, is a doomed conversation, because no matter how many consequences you explain, John is still stuck.
As strange as this may sound, it’s not uncommon to discover that employees who are being disciplined for excessive resistance or even insubordination are hiding the fact that they couldn’t do what they had been asked to do. They chose discipline over shame or, worse, what they believe is the possibility of being fired.
Probably the most common form of masking takes place when people cover up their lack of motivation with a bogus ability problem. This often occurs when a person figures the boss doesn’t really care what happens but then the boss shows up wanting to know why the job wasn’t done. Suddenly an ability block sounds better than saying, “I didn’t make it a priority.” Thus, people come up with whoppers like these:
“I would have been here for the early meeting, but my alarm didn’t go off.”
“I would have mowed the yard before your lawn party but was wondering if maybe I should cut it shorter than usual.”
It’s important to listen carefully to the answers to your diagnostic questions. When John states, “It’s got all those fancy numbers and charts and things — not that I couldn’t do it if I wanted to,” a careful person might continue probing about difficulty, making it safe for John to say that he has trouble with the directions.
In responding to bogus motivation problems, it’s common to give the person the benefit of the doubt the first time: “So what are you going to do to ensure that your alarm goes off next time?”
If excuses keep cropping up, you have to deal with the pattern as in this example:
“This is the third time you’ve run into some kind of problem. We’ve been patient, but the fact is, you have to make those early meetings.”
“The last five times I asked you to do a chore around the house, you agreed, I left on an errand, and then you came up with questions and didn’t do the job.”
Let’s say you’ve diagnosed the cause and the other person can complete the task, but it’s really horrible and tedious. Now what? It’s your job to help remove the barrier. It’s your job to help make it easy. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees with this. In fact, some people take pride in their ability to inspire others to complete noxious or tedious tasks. In truth:
There is no great honor in being a leader or parent who is able to encourage people to continually achieve the nearly impossible. It can be gratifying to be an effective motivator, but the best leaders don’t simply inspire people to continue to do the gut-wrenching, mind-boggling, and noxious. They help people find ways to ease the gut-wrenching, simplify the mind-boggling, and nullify the noxious.