How Will You Measure Your Life?. Clayton Christensen
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lives to serving their country. But they are not doing it for financial compensation. In fact, it’s almost the opposite—working in the military is far from the best-paid job you can take. Yet in many countries, including the United States, the military is considered a highly effective organization. And a lot of people who work in the military get a deep sense of satisfaction from their work.
How, then, do we explain what is motivating them if it’s not money?
Well, there is a second school of thought—often called two-factor theory, or motivation theory—that turns the incentive theory on its head. It acknowledges that you can pay people to want what you want—over and over again. But incentives are not the same as motivation. True motivation is getting people to do something because they want to do it. This type of motivation continues, in good times and in bad.
Frederick Herzberg, probably one of the most incisive writers on the topic of motivation theory, published a breakthrough article in the Harvard Business Review, focusing on exactly this. He was writing for a business audience, but what he discovered about motivation applies equally to us all.
Herzberg notes the common assumption that job satisfaction is one big continuous spectrum—starting with very happy on one end and reaching all the way down to absolutely miserable on the other—is not actually the way the mind works. Instead, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are separate, independent measures. This means, for example, that it’s possible to love your job and hate it at the same time.
Let me explain. This theory distinguishes between two different types of factors: hygiene factors and motivation factors.
On one side of the equation, there are the elements of work that, if not done right, will cause us to be dissatisfied. These are called hygiene factors. Hygiene factors are things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices. It matters, for example, that you don’t have a manager who manipulates you for his own purposes—or who doesn’t hold you accountable for things over which you don’t have responsibility. Bad hygiene causes dissatisfaction. You have to address and fix bad hygiene to ensure that you are not dissatisfied in your work.
Interestingly, Herzberg asserts that compensation is a hygiene factor, not a motivator. As Owen Robbins, a successful CFO and the board member who chaired our compensation committee at CPS Technologies, once counseled me, “Compensation is a death trap. The most you can hope for (as CEO) is to be able to post a list of every employee’s name and salary on the bulletin board, and hear every employee say, ‘I sure wish I were paid more, but darn it, this list is fair.’ Clayton, you might feel like it is easy to manage this company by giving incentives or rewards to people. But if anyone believes that he is working harder but is being paid less than another person, it would be like transplanting cancer into this company.” Compensation is a hygiene factor. You need to get it right. But all you can aspire to is that employees will not be mad at each other and the company because of compensation.
This is an important insight from Herzberg’s research: if you instantly improve the hygiene factors of your job, you’re not going to suddenly love it. At best, you just won’t hate it anymore. The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction. They’re not the same thing at all. It is important to address hygiene factors such as a safe and comfortable working environment, relationship with managers and colleagues, enough money to look after your family—if you don’t have these things, you’ll experience dissatisfaction with your work. But these alone won’t do anything to make you love your job—they will just stop you from hating it.
The Balance of Motivators and Hygiene Factors
So, what are the things that will truly, deeply satisfy us, the factors that will cause us to love our jobs? These are what Herzberg’s research calls motivators. Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. Feelings that you are making a meaningful contribution to work arise from intrinsic conditions of the work itself. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work.
Hopefully, you’ve had experiences in your life that have satisfied Herzberg’s motivators. If you have, you’ll recognize the difference between that and an experience that merely provides hygiene factors. It might have been a job that emphasized doing work that was truly meaningful to you, that was interesting and challenging, that allowed you to grow professionally, or that provided opportunities to increase your responsibility. Those are the factors that will motivate you—to cause you to love what you’re doing. It’s what I hope my students hold out for, because I know it can make the difference between dreading or being excited to go to work every day.
The lens of Herzberg’s theory gave me real insight into the choices that some of my classmates made in their careers after we graduated. While many of them did find themselves in careers that were highly motivating, my sense was that an unsettling number did not. How is it that people who seem to have the world at their feet end up making deliberate choices that leave them feeling unfulfilled?
Herzberg’s work sheds some light on this. Many of my peers had chosen careers using hygiene factors as the primary criteria; income was often the most important of these. On the surface, they had lots of good reasons to do exactly that. Many people view their education as an investment. You give up good years of your working life, years you would otherwise be making a salary. Compounding that is often the need to take out big loans to finance your time at school, sometimes while supporting young families—as I did. You know exactly how much debt you’ll have the minute you graduate.
Yet it was not lost on me that many of my classmates had initially come to school for very different reasons. They’d written their entrance essays on their hopes for using their education to tackle some of the world’s most vexing social problems or their dreams of becoming entrepreneurs and creating their own businesses.
Periodically, as we were all considering our postgraduation plans, we’d try to keep ourselves honest, challenging each other: “What about doing something important, or something you really love? Isn’t that why you came here?” “Don’t worry,” came back the answer. “This is just for a couple of years. I’ll pay off my loans, get myself in a good financial position, then I’ll go chase my real dreams.”
It was not an unreasonable argument. The pressures we all face—providing for our families, meeting our own expectations and those of our parents and friends, and, for some of us, keeping up with our neighbors—are tough. In the case of my classmates (and many graduating classes since), this manifested itself in taking jobs as bankers, fund managers, consultants, and plenty of other well-regarded positions. For some people, it was a choice of passion—they genuinely loved what they did and those jobs worked out well for them. But for others, it was a choice based on getting a good financial return on their expensive degree.
By taking these jobs, they managed to pay back their student loans. Then they got their mortgages under control and their families in comfortable financial positions. But somehow that early pledge to return to their real passion after a couple of years kept getting deferred. “Just one more year …” or “I’m not sure what else I would do now.” All the while, their incomes continued to swell.
It wasn’t too long, however, before some of them privately admitted that they had actually begun to resent the jobs they’d taken—for what they now realized were the wrong reasons. Worse still, they found themselves stuck. They’d managed to expand their lifestyle to fit the salaries they were bringing in, and it was really difficult to wind that back. They’d made choices early on because of the hygiene factors, not true motivators, and they couldn’t find their way out of that trap.
The point isn’t that money is the root cause of professional unhappiness. It’s not. The problems start occurring when it becomes the priority over all else, when hygiene factors are satisfied but the quest remains only to make more money. Even those engaged in careers that seem to specifically focus on money, like salespeople and traders, are subject to these rules of motivation—it’s just that in these professions, money acts as a highly accurate yardstick of success. Traders, for example, feel success