THE LEAFLET

February 08 2024

extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, crossroads, rampant shout-outs

EXTRINSIC & INTRINSIC REWARDS

• Intrinsic rewards: meaning, purpose, satisfaction, affiliation 

• Extrinsic rewards: money, title, status, access to power

Every job includes both. I’ve been grateful to the authors of the Finding Your True North Fieldbook for years because they opened my eyes to this fact, which now seems obvious. They go further though, in prompting you to identify and stack rank these intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for yourself. How much do you care about each of these rewards relative to the others in their category?

As a manager or employer, especially one in a mission-driven endeavor, it’s important to speak clearly to your people (aloud and in written policy, to the extent you have it) about which of these extrinsic rewards are available and how they are attained. De-risk talk about these with your people, who may feel guilty, unworthy, or just weird in conversations about them, especially if they are crossing lines of difference or gaps in power that matter to them to be a part of your endeavor.

Rather than judging folks who have clear and clearly stated extrinsic motivations, appreciate them. They’ve done some self-awareness work that will make them more legible and reliable in negotiations while they’re with you, and more trusting and proactive in conversations with you about when and why they might leave.

Read the rest here.

THE MIGHTY CROSSROADS QUESTION

I’ve written here before about the power of Peter Block’s questions in Community: The Structure of Belonging. One I have found exceptionally versatile is: “Describe the crossroads where you find yourself.” (You can also throw it in the past tense to get the story of an earlier crossroads.)

Something about this question is incisive without being intrusive, intimate without being weird. It lays bare the other’s values - those principles or ideas that set the stakes of the crossroads decision. It wouldn’t be a crossroads, a difficult but decidable matter, if values weren’t in question. This may be the most potent dimension of the question - the facts of a person’s life story can land like a resume, even in “vulnerable” conversations. It brings you right to the challenging precipice of the decision, rather than the safe, sealed result of it.

If you’re stuck with how to get teammates talking to each other in richer, realer ways about their life stories, this question is a good starting point. 

Read the rest here.

A RATIONALE FOR RAMPANT SHOUT-OUTS

Here’s a rough and ready rationale for rampant shout outs of values-aligned choices and behaviors.

1. This is the cheapest, high return way to boost performance all across an organization. Each well-made prop is an example of “how you can be excellent around here” or “what it looks like to embody x operating value.”

2. There’s a cool equity dimension of rampant shout outs - you offer an accessible guide to newbies, self-doubters, and folks “lower” in traditional hierarchies to leader approval, excellent performance, and belonging. Do the values-fueled stuff you see in shout outs. That’s the recipe. Cook it.

3. Generally speaking, a place where folks see and offer positivity all around is a place where people will have more energy in the face of hard problems and painful circumstances.

4. Appreciation is one mode of feedback; it’s not a category that sits outside of or parallel to feedback. A significant increase the in the number of shout outs isn’t dilutive, so long as those shout outs speak to concrete, replicable actions tied to values.

5. Leader attention is an inordinately powerful resource within an organization. When you’re a leader and you shout out something, people pay attention to it, even if the vibe or tone of your shout out makes them eye roll a lil bit. Shouting out is a way to scale the behaviors that you want to see more of.

Often a massive bolus of shout outs is needed to get a pattern and practice in motion. Once that baseline is set, praise can proliferate in many other forms. Leaders can tailor it, keep it off stage, radically distill it.

Some of the most satisfying appreciation I ever got was from a leader who would occasionally reply to emails I sent to the team, ones he liked, with just one word:

“this.”

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Writer Kathryn Schulz on being wrong:

It is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are. To err is to wander, and wandering is the way we discover the world; and, lost in thought, it is also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying, but in the end it is static, a mere statement.

Novelist and essayist Rachel Cusk on motherhood, work, and loneliness:

To have both motherhood and work was to have two lives instead of one, was a stunning refinement of historical female experience, and to the people who complained that having it all meant doing it all I would have said, yes, of course it does. You don’t get ‘all’ for nothing. ‘Having it all’, like any form of success, requires hard work. It requires the adoption of the heroic mode of being. But the hero is solitary forever searching out the holy grail, her belief that she is exceptional perhaps only a disguise of the fact that she is essentially alone.

Poet Anne Carson on her religion:

My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric