MANAGEMENT PSYCHOLOGY
To Motivate Your Employee, Ask Her For Advice
Research: Giving Advice Motivates Us To Solve Our Problems
That’s why people can break down and start underperforming, be it in academics or at work. Sometimes, those inevitable breakdowns drag a little longer till we get stuck in the rut.
When an employee’s motivation hits rock bottom, that’s where managers begin to panic.
Why are they performing this way? Why are they not hitting their numbers? What’s the problem that’s causing them to be like this?
Is it to do with me?
Is it to do with the work environment?
For an intrinsic value like motivation, only a shift within themselves can bring it back. External motivators like bonuses and rewards are only going to be temporary.
When the effect fades off, the employee is typically more demotivated.
Does this mean that there is nothing the leader can do to permanently motivate their employees?
What a leader can do is ask the employee for advice.
In 2018, Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and her team conducted a large-scale field experiment, tracking more than 1900 high school students on their academic performance.
Within that group of high school students, the team of researchers hailing from different faculties in the University of Pennsylvania split them into two sub-groups: advice-givers and advice receivers.
Like their literal terms, they were taking actions that center around their given roles.
For instance, advice-givers were prompted to advise younger students. They complete 14 open-ended and multiple-choice questions in which they gave their tips on where to find optimal study locations and what kind of study strategies to adopt.
In the end, they each wrote a motivational letter to an anonymous younger student who was “hoping to do better in school”.
After the advice-giving activity, they were completed a set of self-report measures as well as one behavioral task. This occurred during the start of their third academic quarter, which was January 2018.
The team then analyzed their academic performance at the end of the school year.
The results were surprising: a single 8-min advice-giving activity boosted their academic achievement across the board; students who gave advice earned higher third-quarter grades in their target class.
Even after the researchers did a secondary analysis, giving advice is still shown to give a marginally significant increase in math grades. There was even a minor increase in target grades as well.
This advice-giving activity benefited every student, regardless of gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, grade level and prior level of achievement.
Need Advice? Give Advice First
By extension, the person giving advice would see an increase in their performance at work.
When we face a problem, conventional wisdom tells us to seek guidance — which is why this method is unorthodox. Hence, we seek mentors, senior leaders, peers and other people around us for help: we want answers to our problems.
When the unmotivated employee gives advice, it does not confer new information to the recipient — rather, it creates long-lasting psychological benefits for the advice giver, which are internal motivators to push the employee to start taking action.
We Reinforce Success Cases In Our Minds
When we give advice, our brains run a biased search for positive memories surrounding the problem; we try to recall times when similar problems were solved to give our advice.
We reinforce those examples within ourselves when we talk about it repeatedly. By constantly thinking about it, we can easily recall the positive emotions, which can create long-lasting mental effects.
When we visualize success cases and start putting ourselves in those situations, we are much likely to succeed in the near future.
For instance, when the employee is asked to advise about a bug in the software, memories of successful debugging and searching for the right documentation will be visualized. As that is being cemented in the employee’s mind, there’s a much bigger likelihood of the employee being able to solve the current problem he/she is facing after giving the advice.
We Feel Confident About Ourselves
Confidence is a huge influence on our mental well-being. When we have confidence, we take things in our stride. We are less fazed by huge problems.
In sports, psychological interventions are designed to keep an athlete’s confidence up to ensure that they feel confident as well during their competition preparation phases.
Be it sports or in another facet of life, it is clear that performing well requires confidence. When we lack confidence, we undermine our self-esteem, affecting our performance and at some point, lose motivation to solve our problems.
Being bogged down by problems drains our confidence and for employees, it is especially so. Because our unique blend of personality traits, external and internal pressures all come to play, finding the confidence that is lost can take a long time.
By placing the struggling employee at a ‘higher position’ — in this case, being the advisor — the employee will naturally feel more confident, even if that feeling is unconscious. When he/she feels confident, the problem they are facing will seem smaller in their minds. Thus, they are much likelier to solve their problems after giving advice.
We Feel Powerful when We Give — which Motivates Us
In a study led by Michael Schaerer at the Singapore Management of University, they found that giving advice enhances our sense of power as it gives us the perceived influence over others’ actions.
When we give advice, we believe we can change what people are doing and thinking — that allows us to feel powerful, be it consciously or unconsciously so.
Feelings of power shape our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. For unmotivated individuals, feeling powerful allows them to feel optimistic.
When we feel optimistic, we can influence our mental well-being, pulling ourselves out of the trenches and becoming adaptive.
By having a subtle shift in our emotions, we can motivate ourselves to take action simply because we feel unconsciously powerful — especially over ourselves.
In the case of an employee, creating that sense of ‘power’ in an employee will result in them feeling more in control of their own life. In turn, this allows them to control their emotions and thoughts around the problems they’re facing, thereby contributing to the likelihood of solving their problems.
Giving advice is a great intervention that creates long-lasting behavioral change. When we start painting success cases and feeling motivated, we begin the process of problem-solving.
From this unorthodox method, leaders must understand that simple actions can go a long way: in this case, advising a long-lasting psychological intervention.
Leaders must also understand how they can frame a situation where the employee’s advice is needed or wanted — having an authentic problem will be more effective.
Rather than judging the underperforming, unmotivated employee harshly, leaders must deploy empathy and think of psychological interventions rather than external motivators; money and perks can only go so far, as many research studies have proven.
Flipping the situation around also creates trust in the leader: the employee is placed in a position of trust and authority. The leader is exposing some vulnerability.
Regardless of what kind of advice is given, fundamentally, asking the employee for advice is always going to be a win-win situation.