The Number One Trait You Should be Hiring For, Why and How. A Guide to Hiring for Intrinsic Motivation.
"It's the same motivation semi-pro athletes draw on to reach peak performance and participate in competition, Stoic philosophy links to happiness, and high performers draw on to consistently achieve outsized results."
I left my office early the night before Thanksgiving. At home, it was just the three of us; My everything Barbara, and our dog Brown. We had implicitly agreed to do nothing the next day. That evening I found myself on my whiteboard, trying to draw multi-touch attribution for Groundbreaker, experiencing the pleasure of doing something because I just wanted to. That’s when it hit me that intrinsic motivation was the trait I had been trying to put a finger on when recruiting. You might have thought I was solving a puzzle for fun, just like the monkeys cited in Daniel Pink’s book “Drive. The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.” Drive gets in-depth on intrinsic motivation and how it is one of three major pillars of motivation.
We all know people who are absolutely crushing it in their fields. Many of the ones I know are definitely intrinsically motivated. They joyfully invest time to hone their craft, and complete projects because they are seeking mastery. The way intrinsic motivation manifests itself in employment is different for each individual, but the overall idea is that they are (in addition to being motivated by fair compensation) significantly motivated by the pleasure that is to become better in their areas of interest. It's the same motivation that underfunded semi-professional athletes draw on to reach peak performance and participate in competition. It’s the motivation to seek mastery that Stoic philosophy links to happiness, and it’s the motivation that drives high performers to consistently achieve outsized results.
Adding intrinsically motivated people to your team will have cascading effects on business goals. It will give you more of the people that stand on the productive side of the 80/20 Pareto principle. If you combine recruiting for this attitude, with fostering intrinsic motivation for your entire team, it’ll create a rising tide that lifts all boats, and a formidable competitive advantage at that!
We had tried to put a finger on it for some time. When discussing recruiting, we often described a high performer we knew as “self-motivated.” We got close to an answer when we started looking for candidates with a history of entrepreneurship and initiative, but we still didn’t quite have it.
That night as I scribbled on the whiteboard I realized; intrinsic motivation needed to be named in our recruiting and hiring processes immediately. Not only that, it undoubtedly needed to be it into the top 3 characteristics we humbly attempt to assess on candidates
The need for this article and argument exists because most businesses aren’t acting on this motivation knowledge surfaced by psychologists many times over in the last decades. We aren’t doing it on the hiring side, nor on the team engagement side.
A Gallup poll showed that employee engagement in the U.S. was at 34% in 2018, the highest it has been in the 18 years covered in the study; a tragedy. As a leader, there should be few, if any, higher priority than maximizing employee engagement. So hiring for and cultivating intrinsic motivation is a big, juicy low-hanging-fruit that could change this engagement reality and the World itself. Not only that, if we are to solve the challenges ahead it is urgent that humans tap into this source of motivation in the workplace.
If you’re nodding your head, let’s talk about how to actually interview for it.
We evaluate each characteristic we are looking for and score them from 1 to 10, and multiply the score by a weight. The weights were chosen based on our best guess of how much each trait would predict success in the role. The weighted-average is the final score. Before adding intrinsic motivation as a trait, the top 5 we looked for in sales roles, and their assigned weights were:
Coachability - 9
Curiosity - 8
Work Ethic - 8