From “How Will You Measure Your Life?” by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon
Frederick Herzberg, probably one of the most incisive writers on the topic of motivation theory, published a breakthrough article in the HBR…
The theory distinguishes between two different types of factors: hygiene factors and motivation factors… Hygiene factors are things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices…
The theory of motivation – along with its descriptions of the roles and incentives and hygiene factors will play – has given me better understanding of how people become successful and happy in their careers. I used to think that if cared for other people, you need to study sociology or something like it. But when I compared what I imagined was happening in Diana’s home after the different days in our labs, I concluded, if you want to help other people, be a manager. If done well, management is among the most noble professions. You are in a position where you have eight or ten hours every day from every person who works for you. You have the opportunity to frame each person’s work so that, at the end of every day, your employees will go home feeling like Diana felt on her good day: living a life filled with motivators. I realized that if the theory of motivation applies to me, then I need to be sure that those who work for me have the motivators too.
The second realization I had is that the pursuit of money can, at best, mitigate the frustrations in your career – yet the siren song of riches has confused and confounded some of the best in our society. In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new thing, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder. There’s an old saying: find a job that you live and you’ll never work a day in your life. People who truly love what they do and who think their work is meaningful have a distinct advantage when they arrive at work every day. They throw their best effort into their jobs, and it makes them very good at what they do.
This, in turn, can mean they get paid well; careers that are filled with motivators are often correlated with financial rewards. But sometimes the reverse is true, too – financial rewards can be present without the motivators. In my assessment, it is frightfully easy for us to lose our sense of the difference between what brings money and what causes happiness. You must be careful not to confuse correlation with causality in assessing the happiness we can find in different jobs.
Thankfully, however, these motivators are stable across professions and over time – giving us a sense of “true north” against which we can recalibrate the trajectories of our careers. We should always remember that beyond a certain point, hygiene factors such as money, status, compensation, and job security are much more a by-product of being happy with a job rather than the cause of it. Realizing this frees us to focus on the things that really matter.