What we really value is out of sync with how we live our lives. — Arianna Huffington
Why do you work? There are many ways that each of us, as leaders, could answer that question. And for most of us there are several answers. The role of work in our lives usually cannot be reduced to just one thing.
Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, made the above observation after collapsing due to sleep deprivation, which resulted in a broken cheekbone and an injury to her eye. In the aftermath of her injuries, she proposed The Third Metric — one to balance out traditional American success metrics of money and power. Huffington’s Third Metric includes well-being, wisdom, wonder and giving.
Some of us may object that she overly simplifies traditional measures of success to just money and power. That may be a fair criticism, but questioning our motivations presents a helpful challenge for leaders to carefully examine why we do what we do.
As Daniel Goleman notes in his work on emotional intelligence, “Self-aware leaders … understand their values, goals and dreams. They know where they’re headed and why.” As good leaders know, our personal motivations bleed into the way we lead our organizations.
Motivations for working
As an exercise in understanding the practical nature of acknowledging our constellation of motivations, let’s break down basic motivations for work into two broad categories.
We’ll call the first category Working for Me. In this category we find work motivations such as working for the weekend, paying the bills, status, position, fame and personal fulfillment.
There are other variants of this category, but you get the idea. These are our utilitarian reasons for working, which benefit us personally and those directly affected (e.g. our family) by the rewards — tangible and intangible — of our work.
The second category is Working for Others. In this category we find motivations such as helping people, changing the world, fighting injustice and solving intractable problems.
Again, this is not comprehensive and these motivations are intertwined (e.g., changing the world usually involves solving intractable problems).
How leaders respond
So, how does this affect our leadership? These motivations work themselves into the way we attempt to motivate others, the strategy we choose for our companies and the reasons we give for change initiatives. And many times, in our rush for a good argument, we forget that different things motivate other people. The rationale we use is driven by our own values rather than customized to those of others.
There is a growing emphasis on the need to go beyond maximizing profit as the primary metric for leading a business. Whether one calls it conscious capitalism or benefit corporations, this movement is reinforced by the experiences of Huffington and others.
There is a need for the continuous alignment of the interests of multiple stakeholders. Because whether it is leadership, front-line employees, suppliers, customers, financial investors or local communities, we all have a vested interest in ensuring that businesses deliver value to all stakeholders.
