LINDSAY MCGREGOR: Good
morning, everybody.
Thank you for coming.
My name is Lindsay.
NEEL DOSHI: My name is Neel.
LINDSAY MCGREGOR: And we're the
authors of "Primed to Perform,"
and we're here to
talk to you today
about what creates a
high performing culture.
But before we talk about what
creates a high performing
culture, we have to
talk about what creates
a high performing individual.
So I'm going to ask the
audience, do any of you
have kids?
Anyone have high
performing kids?
Who has a kid who's 18
months old or older?
What are they like?
Can they walk?
Can they talk?
Can you describe
them a little bit?
Active-- what else?
Other people with kids, or
people who have recently
seen an 18-month-old?
Yep, what are they like?
Rebellious, yes.
What's that?
Is there something else?
So they don't follow your
directions all the time, right?
They don't do exactly
what you tell them to do.
So I'm going to tell you about
an experiment in which they
looked at toddlers to see
how helpful they wear.
How helpful you are, or
your level of citizenship,
is one type of
performance that's
really important
for an organization.
I'm sure you all
want teammates who
will help you out
when you're overworked
or need an extra little help.
I'm sure you all
have teammates, who
you want to help out the
team rather than just do
things for themselves.
So here was the experiment.
They set up the
toddlers in a room.
The room went from
about me to the podium.
And in the middle of the floor
was a toddler with the toy--
a really fun toy that lit up
and made music and sounds.
And over here in the corner
was a research assistant.
She was sitting behind a
table doing an activity, when
occasionally she
would drop something
off the edge of the
table by "mistake."
The [INAUDIBLE] wanted to see
if when she dropped that thing,
the toddler would
leave his toy way
and go help a stranger
by picking up the object.
So I'm going to ask
you guys to vote.
How many of you think that
more than 50% of these toddlers
helped the stranger?
How many think less than
50% helped the stranger?
We've got a mixed room--
child lovers and child haters.
Let's see what
actually happened.
What's that?
Realistic-- realists
and idealists, exactly.
Here's the experiment.
Let's take a look.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
LINDSAY MCGREGOR: The
researcher is folding papers.
-Half.
Oh!
-Oh!
-Thank you.
LINDSAY MCGREGOR:
It's adorable, right?
This little kid just
gets up, goes over
and helps this stranger.
[END PLAYBACK]
Now, it turns out that half
of you were of course right.
Over 90% of toddlers
actually helped-- over 90%.
That's huge.
But that wasn't actually
the point of the experiment.
The point was to see if we
could make toddlers even more
helpful.
So how do we make
people more helpful?
How do we encourage a behavior?
There was the
control group, where
they went through an exercise,
like this or one very
similar to this,
over and over again.
The next group was praised.
Praise is a really
good way to show
that you value an activity.
The third group received
electric shocks.
No, I'm just kidding.
But you kind of looked like
you would enjoy watching that.
The third group was
rewarded with a toy.
That's like a little
bonus for a toddler.
This is a great way to reinforce
an activity that you really
like.
This is what we do
in organizations.
So think in your head,
how much more helpful
was the praise group,
and how much more helpful
was the reward group
than the control?
How much of a difference
did these things make?
Let's take a look.
The control group-- 89%
of them kept helping again
and again and again when the
researcher dropped an object
over the table.
Praise group-- 81%
of them kept helping.
That's the reverse of what
many of us would expect.
The reward group-- 53% of them
kept topping-- a dramatic drop
from something that we think is
going to increase performance.
We're all with our families
and our organizations
to use things like
praise and reward
to reinforce and encourage
the type of performance
that we like.
This is doesn't work
exactly the way we expect.
NEEL DOSHI: This should come
as a surprise to many people
because when we've
seen organizations,
hundreds of organizations,
praise and reward
are the dominant
strategies of how
they try to drive performance.
Just for fun, I'm
going to show you
what a child looked like
who was in the reward group.
Now, keep in mind,
this kid looked
like just the other one-- popped
up, helped out the stranger.
But this is what
it looks like when
he was trained with rewards.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
-Uh-- oh!
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] Oh.
NEEL DOSHI: What I love
is as adults if you're not
going to help somebody,
you look away.
This kid just keeps
staring at her.
And it goes on for an
uncomfortably long period
of time.
-[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]
NEEL DOSHI: That's
child language
for, "you're on your own."
There you go.
[END PLAYBACK]
What we learn from
this experiment
and, at this point, thousands of
others, especially with regard
to our core question, how do
we build a high performing
culture, what we learned
is that we actually
have to answer three different
questions to get there.
The first question we have to
answer is, what is performance?
In the case of this
experiment, they
looked at citizenship, something
that few people would actually
treat as part of performance.
The second question we
have to ask ourselves
is, what drives performance?
What is that psychology
that drives the highest
levels of performance?
And the third question
we have to answer
was, how does culture
play a role in that?
So we're going to do that in
the course this conversation.
We're going to answer
these three questions.
Well, let's start with
what is performance.
To answer that question I'm gong
to share with you an anecdote
that we pulled out of history.
We love this anecdote
because it really shares
the nuance of performance.
This story takes place in 1805.
It's 1805.
We're in continental Europe.
During that time, Napoleon
had amassed the dominant army
of the day, and with his army he
more or less conquered Europe.
But while Napoleon had the
dominant army of the day,
anyone guess what
the British had?
They had the dominant
navy of the day.
And as long as the British
had the dominant navy,
Napoleon could never
land troops on the island
and never conquer it.
So Napoleon just
conquered Spain.
He set his eyes on England.
He created an armada,
where he combined
the Spanish and French fleets.
What we're about to talk about
is the battle of Trafalgar.
So Jeopardy question
of today, anyone
guess who the commander
of the British fleet
was during the
battle of Trafalgar?
Nelson, that's absolutely right.
So during the battle
of Trafalgar, 1805,
stakes were high.
The battle takes place
off the coast of Spain,
so Nelson and his is fleet
are not in home territory.
Nelson's fleet of 33 ships,
a total of 2,318 cannon.
The Spanish and French--
40 ships, 2,868 cannon.
So Nelson is outgunned
and outnumbered.
At the time, typically
naval warfare
was a sign of strength
against strength.
The two fleets would float
up against each other
in parallel lines.
They'd shoot at each other
till somebody got tired of it.
Then they'd go limping off.
There's a reason for that.
It sounds silly, but
there's reasons for that.
One was concentration
of firepower.
All your cannon are
facing sideways,
so it makes sense
to line them up.
You want to avoid friendly fire.
The other reason
was more subtle.
So imagine this;
you're an admiral.
You're commanding 33 ships.
You're in the
middle of a battle.
You want to issue commands
to the other ships.
How do you do that?
Any guesses?
Yeah, flags-- that's
why the admiral's ship
was called the flagship.
And so in order to make
sure your whole fleet had
line of sight to
your flagship, it
was just easiest to line them.
That way you knew that
everyone could actually
see your command structure.
Nelson, going into
this battle, knew
if he was fighting
strength against strength,
he would lose.
Maybe at the best he
could squeak out a draw.
More likely, he'd lose.
So here's what we did.
In the weeks leading
up to the battle,
he had all the
captains of the ships
meet on his flagship
for dinner every night.
In that dinner, part
of it was celebrating
the camaraderie, The
Brotherhood, he called them,
his band of brothers.
But part of it was explaining
the two halves of his strategy.
The first half was he was
going to instead of lining up
in parallel to the enemy line,
his fleet, the Red Ships,
were going to approach the enemy
in two perpendicular columns.
His thought process
was, if I do this,
I can cut out the bottom
third of the enemy's line,
and by the time they swing
back around, it'll be too late.
The other thought
process was he was
going to point one of the lines
straight at the enemy flagship.
If he takes out the
enemy's command structure,
they'll just crumble.
And this is a high
risk maneuver.
While those two lines are
approaching the enemy line,
they're taking fire
that they can't return.
So Nelson puts his
too strongest ships
at the very front
of those columns.
One of them was his own ship.
Nelson was at the front
of one of these columns.
That was the tactics
of this plan.
However, he also said to his
captains, after we do this,
I can't possibly predict
what's going to happen.
Who knows?
Who knows how this is going
to play out once we execute
this side of the strategy?
So once we do, you have it
within your degrees of freedom
to figure out what to do next.
Essentially, find the enemy ship
nearest you and figure it out.
That's what he
told his captains.
Those were the two
halves of his plan.
So the morning of the battle it
looks more or less like this.
The tactical side of his plan
works exactly like planned.
He takes out the enemy
flagship in the beginning,
cuts the enemy line into three.
Now, he told his troops
before the battle,
don't even look at my
flagship because I'm not
going to issue commands
during the battle.
It's a good thing he said
that because in the opening
minutes of the battle he dies.
He was on one of the
lead ships, after all.
By the time the smoke settles,
the British sink or capture
over 20 of the Spanish
and French fleet.
The British didn't
lose a single ship.
The victory was so lopsided,
at a time when people actually
thought that the defeat would be
lopsided, that this battle was
studied ad nauseum
because they realized
there was more to performance
than we really understand.
LINDSAY MCGREGOR:
So this scenario,
and many, many others, have
taught us that there's actually
two types of performance.
The first one is what we
call tactical performance,
and this is how effectively
you execute the plan.
The other type of
performance however
is adaptive performance,
and this is how well
you diverge from the plan.
One is how well you stick to it.
The other is how well
you diverge from it.
One is how well you do it.
The other is how
well you don't do it.
And these two things
are actually opposites.
So take three short examples.
First, Nelson, what
we've just been
talking about-- in the beginning
of the battle, all of the ships
followed the plan.
They have high
tactical performance.
Once the battle
becomes unpredictable,
all of the captains adapt.
Think about another
example-- a business example.
Imagine that we were all going
to run a customer service
center, a call center.
And all of us would probably do
a pretty good job of setting up
the tactical performance.
We'd estimate how
many calls were
going to come in,
how long each service
rep should spend on the phone.
We'd probably put metrics
and dashboards everywhere.
But if you start to hammer
down on tactical performance
too much, you start
to kill the adaptive.
Have you ever been
on the phone where
you're talking to a
customer service you
can tell that they're
reading a script to you?
And it's really irritating
because your problem isn't
in their script, and
you need them to adapt.
That's the service center
that has doubled down
on tactical performance
so much, but they've
killed adaptive performance.
Imagine if we were all
the board of trustees,
and we were helping
the CEO to do his job.
A CEO with good
tactical performance
would have a strategy and a
work plan and goals and metrics.
He'd have an estimate of
how much earnings per share
he would want per quarter.
But a CEO that had doubled down
on the tactical performance
too much would be
the type who would
be hitting those
tactical performance
metrics, like earnings
per share every quarter,
to such an extent that
he was missing out
on the adaptive opportunities.
When researchers measure
executives, most of them
say that they would forego
value-creating activities
if it was going on their
earnings per share numbers
because those
organizations are so
focused on the tactical
and not the adaptive.
NEEL DOSHI: Now, my
guess is everyone
in this room would do a great
job of tactical performance.
We all know how to do this.
This is machinery
and knowledge that
has been built over
the last 100 years
on how to manage a business.
But most of that is around
tackle performance; how do we
drive for predictability?
So if that machinery,
when overused,
destroys adaptive performance,
then the next question becomes,
what drives adaptive
performance?
Looking at experiments
like the toddlers
that you saw earlier
and thousands of others,
we are actually able to draw
a very simple conclusion.
Why we work determines
how well we work.
A person's "why" is the driver
of their adaptive performance.
Now, I'm not going to ask
you to take my word for it.
We're going to
prove this to you.
But before we prove
it to you, I've
got to give you a
language and a framework
to understand the reasons why
people do just about anything.
This framework we call
the motive spectrum.
In this framework, it first
starts with the realization
that a person's motive, the
reason for doing something,
can come from one
to three places.
There's the work itself.
There's their own identity,
their values, their beliefs,
and then they are
external forces,
like your mother-in-law.
Lindsay's my wife, so
this is our inside joke.
When you look at
the motives that
can be combined with
these three ingredients,
the first motive you get is
what we call the play motive.
The play motive,
the motive itself,
is symbolized by the circle.
But with the play motive, the
motive is the work itself.
The work is its own reward.
Think of a hobby
that you do, a hobby
like a woodworking or
photography or a sport.
Nobody pays you to do it.
You're not doing it for
any particular reason.
You just enjoy doing it.
Think about why kids
play, that notion
of self-directed learning,
curiosity, experimentation,
exploration.
That's the play motive.
One step removed
from play is what
we call the purpose motive.
Purpose motive--
now the circle's
a little further to the
right because unlike play,
which is the work
itself, purpose
is when you identify
with or believe
in the outcome of the work.
Play is the work itself.
Purpose is the
outcome of the work
that you actually identify with.
The next one's what we
call potential-- circle's
a little further
over to the right.
Because with potential,
you found that the work
enhances your potential.
So a second or third
order outcome of the work
actually benefits your
own identity, your values,
and beliefs.
That's why the circle's a
little further to the right.
So a teacher at play enjoys
creating lesson plans,
tending to the classroom,
engaging with students.
A teacher with purpose does
it because he feels like he
believes in educating children.
A teacher with
potential might say,
I want to be a school
administrator one day,
and this is a stepping
stone to getting there.
These three motives are all
connected to the work itself,
so we call them
the direct motives.
They're directly connected
to the work itself.
The next, we call them
emotional pressure.
The circle is now disconnected
from the work itself, so
think about guilt.
Show of hands here,
anyone ever use guilt to get
a loved one to do something?
Show of hands-- guilt.
We've all done it.
If you think about that,
let's say I guilt Lindsay
into taking out the trash.
She might take out the
trash, but she's not
doing it for play
purpose or potential
having to do it that activity.
She's doing it to
alleviate the guilt.
The motive is now separate
from the activity itself.
Peer pressure, FOMO,
sense a disappointment--
these are all versions
of emotional pressure.
The next is what we
call economic pressure.
It's when you're doing
something to gain a reward
or avoid a punishment that's now
separate from the work itself.
And then lastly,
you get inertia.
This is my favorite one.
This is when you ask
somebody, why are you
doing what you're doing?
And they say, I don't know.
I'm doing it because
I did it yesterday,
because I did it the day
before, because I did it
the day before that.
I'm doing it because
I'm doing it.
You'd be amazed by how
much inertia there actually
is in the workplace.
These three we call
the indirect motors.
When we've studied
performance through this lens,
we've been able to
conclude two things.
The first is the direct motives
increase adaptive performance,
and the indirect
ones destroy it.
The second thing we
were able to conclude
is the closer the
motive is to the work
itself, the more powerful.
Play the most powerful, then
purpose, then potential,
inertia the most destructive,
then economic pressure, then
emotional pressure.
Those two findings
are so consistent,
we can boil them into a
single concept called TOMO.
TOMO, short for
Total Motivation,
occurs when your culture
maximizes play, purpose,
potential and minimizes
emotional pressure,
economic pressure, and inertia.
A low TO MO culture
does the opposite.
It makes people's motives
emotional pressure,
economic pressure, and
inertia, and actually, it
reduces play, purpose,
and potential.
LINDSAY MCGREGOR: So
we're going to take a look
at these motives in action.
So I don't know about
you guys, but I've always
loved doing math problems.
I was the nerd in
elementary school
who would stay and play with
the bricks and the math puzzles
during recess, instead of
go out and play sports.
I think these guys were, too.
So I'm going to ask you
guys to do a little math
problem in your seats.
I'm not going to call on you.
It's just for yourself.
I'm going to show up
a grid of numbers,
and there's going to be two
numbers that add up to 10,
and I want you to find
those two numbers.
So here we go.
The two numbers
that add up to 10.
I think some people have.
Who's got it?
Yep, the back row.
Bottom left and bottom
right, that's correct.
Now, back row person, everybody
on the end of every row,
can you please stand up.
Unfortunately, I'm going
to interrupt some hes.
Not going to volunteer?
OK.
You, you're taking his place.
All right.
So now I'm going to have this
row do the same activity,
except I want all of you
to not look at the screen.
I want you to look
at these guys.
I want you to watch them.
I want you to see
who does it fastest.
I want to see if they turn.
As you can see, getting nervous.
You guys, when you get the
problem, you can sit down.
We're going to see who's
the last one standing.
On your marks, get set, go.
We usually have people
write down their answers
because we often find people
cheat just to sit down.
All right, I'm going
to let you sit down.
NEEL DOSHI: It's worth
noting that this guy-- sorry,
I don't know your name--
was one of the first people
to solve it the first time.
LINDSAY MCGREGOR: So
what happened here?
I was shifting their motives.
Did any of you feel different
the second time around?
Were you paying attention--
what felt different?
More pressure?
You're paying attention to
the audience a little bit more
than the puzzle.
You're paying attention to
when your neighbor sits down.
NEEL DOSHI: You're
asking yourself,
why did I come here today?
LINDSAY MCGREGOR: Exactly,
your mind's distracted.
You're in two places at once.
What we did was we
shifted your motives.
There's the answer, by the
way, if you're interested.
We shifted your motives.
The first time we
did this exercise,
I told you about
how I loved math,
and that it was going
to be in your seats,
and you wouldn't
have to be called on.
So I was really
trying to encourage
that play motive
with this is math.
You do math for fun.
The second time around
I really ramped up
that emotional pressure
and that economic pressure
by making everybody watch you.
That was the emotional pressure.
The economic pressure is
I forced you to do it.
You didn't have a choice.
You weren't volunteers.
Changing why you're
doing something
changes your performance.
They've done experiments
like this with MIT students,
where at least 25% of the class
has a perfect math SAT score.
And by changing the
TOMO of those students,
they've changed their ability
to do simple addition.
The success of this group of MIT
students on simple math puzzles
changed by 32%, just with
simple changes in their motives.
That's huge.
Imagine a 30% difference
in your team's performance.
NEEL DOSHI: What
you see here is what
we call a distraction effect.
If you take just about
any job, any job that
exists there's a component
of that job that's
tactical performance, where
you want consistency, scale.
There's a component that is
adaptive performance, where
you want creativity,
problem solving, resilience,
citizenship.
Every job has these two pieces.
You have somebody with
high TOMO, you get both.
But in this case,
your poor colleagues
that we tortured
for a few minutes,
we reduced their TOMO for the
activity, and what you got
was a distraction effect.
When you ask people who
are doing this problem,
are you trying to do it?
They'd say usually, I'm
trying harder the second time.
But they're trying
to do the problem,
but their ability
to actually put
their minds to a problem
solving activity decreases.
The funny thing
is we can actually
do worse to people than
the distraction effect.
So I'm going to ask these
folks to stand up again.
I'm just kidding.
I'm not going to do that.
They're about to walk out.
To illustrate what's worse
than distraction effect,
I'll share with
you an experiment.
The experiment was done
by a Harvard professor.
She gathered a group of poets
in her laboratory-- professional
poets.
She was going to have them
write a haiku, a very short poem
all on the topic of laughter.
So they have the same
topic, the same word count.
However, before they were
to write their poems,
she had one group of them read
a list of indirect reasons
for why they're a
poet, so reasons like,
I continue to write poetry
because I don't want
to disappoint a
mentor of mine, or I
continue to write
poetry because I once
heard of another poet who made
a lot of money after publishing.
She had another group read
a list of direct reasons,
for instance, I enjoy
playing with words.
So these two groups read their
two lists, two-minute exercise,
then they wrote their poems,
which were independently
evaluated for their creativity.
Now, creativity, a form
of adaptive performance,
highly prized in
organizations, and when
she did this experiment,
there was a 28% difference
in the creativity scores
of the group who's
TOMO was lowered versus the
group who's TOMO was raised.
Now, think about if two
minutes of reading a list
can cause this kind of
difference in creativity,
imagine what the whole
culture of an organization
does-- one that makes you
think about the play, purpose,
and potential of
your work, versus one
that makes you think about
the emotional pressure,
economic pressure, and
inertia of your work.
Two minutes of reading
a list does that.
Imagine what a
whole culture, what
you're experiencing every
day of your work life,
imagine what that does.
Now what you have here is
what we call the cancellation
effect.
When somebody's TOMO
is reduced even lower,
they're still trying to
tactical performance,
but the adaptive more
or less disappears.
You ever think to
yourself, maybe
about your own
performance, maybe
about a colleague's,
and you say, you know,
that person's just
checking the boxes.
They're just checking the boxes.
What do we mean by that?
That's actually the
cancellation effect.
They're doing everything
that's measured,
everything's that's
managed, everything
that's actively asked of them.
But all of the adaptive
performance has disappeared.
They've been canceled out.
LINDSAY MCGREGOR: We can
actually do even worse.
So I'm going to go back
to the 1800s for a story
to demonstrate it to colonial
India, the city of Delhi.
The city was overrun
with cobras-- snakes.
This is not a
British garden snake.
When it can stand up, it's
a whole new level of scary.
And the British government
wanted to reduce the cobras.
So what did they do?
They did what any
logical person would do.
They put a bounty on
the head of every cobra.
Every time you brought
in a dead cobra,
you would get some money.
Now, cobras were coming
in by the bucket load.
It looked like a great success.
Until they discovered that some
enterprising locals had started
cobra farms.
They were breeding
cobras in order
to bring them in for the bouncy.
Now, reportedly when the British
government learned of this,
they canceled the bounty,
and all the farmers
let their snakes go.
It wasn't even
worth killing them.
And the cobra
population of Delhi
was higher at the end of this
than it was at the beginning.
So what's happening here?
This cobra affect, an unintended
consequence, looks like this.
Tactical performance
still look high.
You've got dead snakes
coming in by the bucketful.
Adaptive performance
is low, and you've
got a whole new
type of performance,
maladaptive performance,
which is high.
The people in the system
are doing everything
they can to meet the target
that you've set for them,
but they'll take any shortcut
or any short way of doing that.
They're going to
alleviate the pressure
as quickly as possible.
So this happens all
the time in business.
For example, have any of you
been on hold in a call center
and you hear the phone connect,
and then the line goes dead?
Have you heard that?
It's not actually usually
a technical glitch.
We can get people to the moon.
We can route a call these days.
What's usually happening
in the call centers
that we work with is those
call center reps are measured
by the average time they
spend on each phone call,
and they can see their
average handle time going up
and up and up.
And when it gets
too high, they start
to pick up, hang up, pick up,
hang up, pick up, hang up,
immediately until their
call time goes down.
That's the cobra
effect in business.
NEEL DOSHI: Now you guys as a
group have a frame of thinking
that very few managers have.
Most business leaders
we work with only
know tactical performance.
They only know one column.
They don't think about
TOMO, essentially what's
happening the vertical axis.
They don't know
adaptive performance,
what's happening in
this horizontal axis.
And so as a result,
in the spirit,
the well intentioned
spirit of trying
to increase performance,
what they usually do
is double down on
tactical performance
through strategies
that are low TOMO.
So I'll give you an example.
This is a playing out right
now in public education.
Public education-- unhappy with
teacher performance, we say,
let's bring the so-called
best practices from business
to education.
Those so-called best practices
essentially are let's
double down on
tactical performance.
What does that look like?
Teachers teaching to the test.
You're going to have
standardized testing.
The grades in those
tests are actually
going to determine your bonus.
They're going to determine
your career path.
They're going to determine
how much resource you're
going to get for your students.
The grades in those
tests might be shared.
I might rank schools.
I might rank teachers, all in
the spirit of doubling down
on tactical performance.
Sounds good-- in practice
and logic of it sounds good.
It's tempting.
But you guys now as an
audience know, well, what
should happen if I did that?
Well, I'm going to lower TOMO.
I should see distraction
cancellation and cobra effects.
Well, let's take a look
at public education.
The distraction effect-- the
stress levels of teachers
have increased 70% since 1985.
Think about what
the stress levels
did to your colleagues who were
solving a simple math problem.
Imagine if you're
stress levels increased
that much of the course
of your day-to-day work.
How effective are you
going to actually be
from an adaptive performance?
Cancellation effect-- I'm just
going to teach you the test.
I'm essentially just
checking the boxes.
The cobra effect-- this is
from the Atlanta cheating
scandal, where
hundreds of teachers
were implicated in a cheating
scheme, where they were erasing
student answers on test
scores and putting the right
answers in.
And when asked,
when interviewed--
these weren't bad people.
These were predictable
consequences
of a system that was driving
only tactical performance
through strategies
that were low TOMO.
You'll see it
always, and we see it
across organizations--
distraction, cancellation,
in cobra effects.
LINDSAY MCGREGOR:
So you now know
about the two types
of performance,
and you know about TOMO.
But we wanted to see
if TOMO was actually
what was at work out in the
wild in real organizations,
where the top cultures
in the world using TOMO.
We're going take a
look-- we measured TOMO
at 50 major organizations and
20,000 people around the world.
But first, I'm going to show
you how we calculate TOMO so you
can understand the results.
So when we calculate
TOMO, we add up
how much play, purpose, and
potential somebody feels,
and we subtract how
much emotional pressure,
economic pressure, and
inertia somebody feels.
Now, they've got
different weights
because of that principle
we talked about before,
that the closer the
motive is the work itself,
the more powerful it is.
Play is about twice
as powerful when
it relates to performance
compared to purpose, and so on.
The way we measure how
much each of these feel
is using a survey question,
asking people, why do you work?
Why do you continue to
work at your current job?
If people say that they continue
to work at their current job
because the work itself is
fun, for example, that's play.
We do that on a seven-point
scale on the survey.
We can come up with
one number that's TOMO.
So we looked at TOMO
and its connection
to one type of adaptive
the performance,
which is customer experience.
Customer experience,
customer satisfaction,
is an incredibly adaptive
type of performance.
You have to adapt to each
and every customer's needs.
So we're going to look
at customer satisfaction
in an industry that's known
for it, the airline industry.
That's going to be our y-axis.
The x-axis is the TOMO
of the people that
work at these companies--
why they continue
to work, not how happy
they are, not how
engaged they are, not
how satisfied they are,
but why they continue to work?
That's what TOMO represents.
Any guesses on who is
the highest TOMO airline?
Southwest, let's see.
Lowest TOMO airline-- United,
American, Delta, Southwest.
It's almost a
straight-line relationship
between how much
TOMO somebody felt
and the customer experience
that organization produced.
Now, this is amazing given
that this airline industry has
almost the same planes,
the same terminals,
the same type of food.
It was TOMO that was
driving this difference.
Let's take a look at
another industry-- grocers.
Who is the highest TOMO grocer?
Trader Joe's Yep.
So let's take a look--
Albertsons, Safeway, Walgreens,
Kroger, Whole
Foods, Trader Joe's.
Again, almost a
straight-line relationship.
Retail industry-- guesses?
Who's the highest TOMO?
Nordstrom?
Let's take a look-- Walmart,
Sears, Gap, Home Depot,
JC Penney, Macy's, Target,
Loew's, Dillard's, Costco,
and Nordstrom.
Even in an industry where
strategies can be very, very
different-- you have
different price points,
different products,
different store layouts--
the TOMO of the
people in the stores
drove 40% of the variance,
which was this incredibly tight
relationship.
NEEL DOSHI: What's incredible
is in each of these cases,
you guys knew in your gut who
the high TOMO company would be.
But for the longest time,
we'd look at a Nordstrom,
we'd look at Trader Joe's,
we'd look at a Southwest,
and we didn't know
what was happening.
We didn't know how to think
about it, how to measure,
it, what the frame was.
It was very difficult
to take those lessons
and actually bring it to
your own organization.
Now, we know it's TOMO.
TOMO is driving their
adaptive performance.
Now, if we look at
customer satisfaction,
we should see in
customer satisfaction
the importance of balancing
tactical and adaptive,
so TOMO should predict it.
What about salesmanship?
I'd actually argue
great salesmanship
is also the balance of tactical
and adaptive-- tactical
for where do I need consistency,
the adaptive of where
do I want to pivot
around each individual?
So if that's true,
we should, in theory,
see a connection between
TOMO and salesmanship.
So in this particular case,
branch-based financial
institution, we measured the
TOMO of salespeople, divided it
into two groups-- negative
TOMO and positive TOMO,
and we measured their
sales performance.
And we saw was a 28% difference
based on a factor that
not only did this
organization not know existed,
but a factor that when you
actually examine their culture,
they were actively
taking steps to reduce,
all in the spirit of
tactical performance.
Let's do another example.
This one was done
by an academic,
where he looked at telesales.
So this is now call
center based sales,
where he went to a call center,
measured the TOMO of the people
there, divided them
into four groups.
Low TOMO, so low direct, high
indirect, medium, low direct,
low indirect.
There's the other medium,
high direct, high indirect.
Remember, these
are like a seesaw.
And then there's
finally high TOMO.
He's looking at their average
revenue produced per hour now.
At this stage in
this conversation,
you guys should be
able to predict,
at least directionally,
which one's
the worst performer, which
one's the highest performer.
So let's take a look.
Low TOMO at $234 per
hour, 251, 285, 375.
60% difference from
the low TOMO group,
which was by number
the largest group.
All from a factor that they
didn't even know existed.
Now, because of
all this research,
we can actually define culture.
When most people
talk about culture,
what culture is,
they'll say things like,
oh, it's a set of values and
behaviors that a community has.
That's nice if you're an
anthropologist studying
cultures.
But if you were a CEO,
business leader, manager
and you're trying to build
a high performing culture,
there's nothing you can
really do with that.
You can't really engineer that.
What we've concluded
is that culture
is the ecosystem of processes
that affect your people's TOMO.
Culture's the
ecosystem of processes
that affect your people's TOMO.
LINDSAY MCGREGOR: So what are
all of these processes that
affect TOMO?
Let's take a look.
So we're going to put across
the top of this TOMO scores.
TOMO is on a scale of
negative 100 to 100.
So this is a slice
of the spectrum.
And down the left-hand
side I'm going
to put the different processes
and how much it swings TOMO.
When we ask people
what process or what
piece of your organization most
affects TOMO and most affects
culture, people usually
tell us it's your leader.
It's all about the leader.
It turns out it's
actually not true.
Any guesses on what
has the most impact?
Your peers, that's one guess.
Anything else?
Manager-- all right.
I'm not going to make anybody
stand up if they volunteer.
The most important thing was
how your role was designed.
When you have a job
that was well designed,
you would have a TOMO
score all the way
over there on the right.
When your job was
poorly designed,
it would be all the
way on the left.
It was an 87-point swings
in somebody's TOMO.
That's huge-- a huge,
huge swing from the way
your role is designed.
Next came your
organizational identity.
This is not just whether
you have a mission statement
and values painted
up on your wall,
but whether your
people actually lived
and breathed those values.
The next was your
career ladders.
Many organizations design
career ladders so that it
is a fight to the death.
It's a tournament.
For me to win, you have to lose.
That's an example of a low
TOMO career ladder process.
The next is your
sense of community.
Then came workforce planning.
Do you have the time and
resources to actually meet
your objectives?
Leadership was next, still 50
points swing, which is huge,
compensation, governance
processes, and finally
your performance review system.
NEEL DOSHI: What we found
is that all of these
affect homo TOMO
quite materially.
We also found out they
all work together.
You have to actually think
about these as an ecosystem.
Well, we want to wrap
up with leadership.
You guys, as individual
leaders, in your organization,
how do you want to
think about this?
And then see if you have
any questions about that.
When we double click
on just leadership,
like the rest of the
magnets, you can actually
start to say to
yourself, does the leader
actually use direct motivators
or indirect motivators?
Now we looked at leaders based
on what behaviors they had,
and then we measured the
TOMO of their subordinates.
And we found, well, you
can have a leader that
uses or doesn't use direct,
uses or doesn't use indirect.
So one type of leader, we'll
call them quid pro quo.
They don't really focus on
play, purpose, and potential.
Everything is either about
shame, guilt, or sticks
and carrots.
You do this.
I give you this.
What we found is that the
average TOMO that leader
is about a negative one.
It's pretty ineffective leader
when it comes to driving TOMO.
The next type of leader's
the one that does neither.
What's interesting about this
one is this is what I was.
Before we studied this
research, before we actually
analyzed all this, I knew
the quid pro quo was bad.
And so my mindset
was I'm just going
to give my people lots
and lots of space,
let them do what
they need to do,
and I'll only step in
if there's an issue.
That leader is actually not
direct and not indirect.
They're hands-off.
Now, the TOMO of that leader
theoretically should increase.
It does.
The subordinates of
those people have
on average a TOMO of around 11.
Then there's a leader
that does both.
They are trying to drive
play, purpose, and potential,
but they're also using
sticks and carrots
and emotional pressure
and even inertia.
Theory suggests that these two
should wash each other out--
remember the seesaw.
Call this leader the enthusiast.
Their subordinates have an
average TOMO of about 14,
pretty close to the 11.
I'd argue rounding error--
pretty much the same.
Then, of course,
the leader that's
only using the direct
motives, they're
constantly thinking about how
do I make the work itself play?
This isn't about the video
game machine in the break room.
It's not about the
ping pong table.
It's about how do I make
the work itself play?
How do I create purpose
for you in that work?
How do I make it feel potential?
And I'm going to minimize
emotional pressure,
economic pressure, and inertia.
That leader, we call
them the fire starter,
and that subordinate has, on
average a TOMO of about 38,
so a fairly large increase.
Interestingly,
leadership behaviors
drive TOMO as
predicted by theory.
So the first thing that
you guys should think about
as leaders is are
you on the journey
to be that fire starter?
Are you on the journey to say
to yourself, you know what?
I'm going to keep practicing.
I'm going to keep experimenting.
I'm going to keep trying to
reduce the emotional pressure,
economic pressure, and
inertia in my people
and replace it with play,
purpose, and potential.
This is a lifelong journey.
This is something that
we, having study this now
for a long, long time,
are still trying to learn,
still trying to master.
The first question you
should ask yourself
is, are you on that journey?
LINDSAY MCGREGOR: What can
you do in the shorter term?
Three thingss--
first is start to use
the language of adaptive
performance and TOMO
with your team so that
your whole team can
be involved in creating a
high performing culture.
Once you start to
talk about it, you
can start to address
the areas where
your culture might be weak.
The second is to
actually measure
the TOMO of your people.
It's very easy.
It's six very simple questions.
They're in "Primed to
Perform," the book.
They're also on
primedtoperform.com,
where you can send
a quiz to your team,
and it'll come back
with an anonymous report
of which motives are
strong and which are weak
and help you
facilitate a discussion
with your team on how to
increase their performance.
The third thing is to hold
a weekly reflection huddle.
This is a way to kick-start
your conversations about play,
purpose, and potential.
We hold weekly reflection
huddles in our firm
and many of the
organizations we work with,
and it has three questions.
Everybody gets together
and answers those
three questions once a week.
The first question is, what
did you learn this week,
and that's to inspire play.
Remember, play is that learning,
experimentation, curiosity.
So what'd you learn this week?
The second question is, what
impact did you have this week?
The is to inspire
that purpose motive.
And the third is, what do
you want to learn next week?
And that's, again, to inspire
your play for the upcoming
week-- three simple questions.
We're going to turn it over
to questions in a minute.
This is the one-hour
version of a workshop
that we normally
do in four hours,
so there's lots
more science, data,
thoughts about how do you
become a high TOMO leader,
how do you build high
TOMO systems in here.
But for now, I'm going to
turn it over for questions.
I think we've got
about 10, 15 minutes.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: So I have two
closely related questions.
One, you have the
set of questions
that you send out in a survey.
Did you do any form
of experimentation
to figure out what
questions better fit?
And the second
question is, you seem
to have these particular weights
for the different categories
of motivators, and
did you actually
fit this to some data set,
and what data set did you use?
NEEL DOSHI: Let's take the
two question one at a time.
On the actual
questions themselves,
we've done a lot
of research to try
to find questions that work
best in a generic context.
So we kind of tested lots
of different questions
to figure out which ones work
the most generically the best.
However, when we work
with organizations,
we don't want them to be
dogmatic to our language
because every organization's
a little bit unique.
How people respond to different
words is a little bit unique.
So, for instance,
in one project,
we worked with a Middle
Eastern cable company.
And the way we ask the
economic pressure question just
simply did not work
in the Middle East.
And so we had to
derive a new question
and do some research
to figure it out.
Our encouragement is you
could start with what we've,
but don't be dogmatic to it.
In terms of the
weights, similarly,
our goal with the metric
was to create something
that was as predictive
as we could make it
in a general context--
generically predictable-- fit
theory, was easy to calculate,
and result in a scale that
was easy to interpret.
So our scale, the TOMO
scale that we created,
goes from negative
100 to positive 100,
which is similar to
the Net Promoter scale
that a lot of organizations use
to think about their customers.
And so when we
derived those weights,
we essentially did a bunch
of stats around the surveys
that we created and the
performance that we measured.
Those weights were the ones that
were best fitted to those stats
but also met the other
criteria, it that make sense.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
LINDSAY MCGREGOR: Oh,
there's two microphones.
There we go.
We'll swap.
AUDIENCE: Thanks for the talk.
In your slide toward
the end, where
you had different
aspects of culture
and the swing, that first one
about the shape of the role,
can you elaborate more
about the specific
of what it is about role design
that directs that swing to one
side or the other?
It's not just having
a role designed,
but how that design
is structured.
LINDSAY MCGREGOR: The
very simple answer
is we look at whether the
role encourages or inspires
play and purpose.
Those are the two big things
that many jobs are missing.
So imagine a job
that inspires play.
It would enable you to see
whether what you're doing
is working, come up with new
ideas about how to improve it,
test those ideas, and
see the impact of it.
It enables curiosity
and experimentation.
I'm guessing all of us have been
in jobs where we sit in a cube.
We work on a PowerPoint
slide, and we throw it
over the cubicle
wall to our manager,
and we never see it again.
We don't know what worked
we don't have an opportunity
to innovate or experiment.
When you don't have
purpose in your job,
it's usually because you can't
see the impact of your work.
Can you go and see how
it's making a difference
to organizations?
So examples of both-- play,
on the Toyota production
line-- you would think that an
assembly line job manufacturing
cars would have
very little play.
But Toyota enables their
people to actually come up
with new tools or new ways of
doing their job while they're
working on the line.
And they have a
group of folks that
will go and make that tool
when they have an idea
and bring it back
so they can test it.
That's a way of having
play in that job.
Purpose, for example--
at Medtronic,
which creates a lot
of health care tools,
they actually go and see those
tools in action in surgery
so that they can see the
impact of their work,
and also it inspires play.
They can see what's
working, what's not working.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
LINDSAY MCGREGOR: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: What if
you have reports
who just states that
his motivation is
purely a reward-based
or praised-base,
so he cares about whether
managers think he's doing
a good job and whether the
company is paying him enough
and doesn't understand
other people who
are motivated by play?
NEEL DOSHI: And it's
someone that's on your team,
or someone that is
managing a team?
AUDIENCE: Let's
just say that I have
a friend who has
someone on their team
to pretend that's somebody--
NEEL DOSHI: A lot of
people have friends
I notice in these talks.
What we've noticed
in our research
is people are notoriously bad
at self-identifying how motives
drive their own performance.
So what we see a lot is
organizations do the following.
They know there's
something that's
not working with their culture.
They don't know that play,
purpose, potential even exists.
So they asked their
people, what would it
take to make this
culture better?
And their people say,
less work and more money.
That's a very common practice.
We see it play out over
and over and over again.
People are pretty
bad self identifying
their own known motives.
So when our work, we don't
advocate asking your people
what they want, actually.
It's not particularly helpful
because play, purpose,
potential drive
performance consistently.
It is essentially
human instinct.
So even if you're person
says, this is what I want,
this is what people
want, it doesn't actually
change what actually
drives performance.
And when we have
folks like that,
we've often been brought
into organizations
because an executive
will say, you know, Neel,
our CEO is a bit toxic.
Like, this is what he believes.
People just operate
on sticks and carrots.
What we normally do with those
folks is we share with them
the science, the data, the
research, and the language,
the tools, the framework.
And sometimes we'll
make that CEO get up
and do math in front
of his colleagues.
And by the time that's
done, they get it.
They get it.
LINDSAY MCGREGOR:
So, for example,
we've been able to measure
TOMO among hedge fund portfolio
managers and proven that TOMO
is what's driving their highest
performers, not money.
Or there's been research done
in investment banking, where
maybe the reason you go into
that industry is for the money.
But when you look at who is the
highest performing once they're
actually there, it's who's
getting up on Wednesday
morning and doing the best work.
It's the person that's finding
the play and the purpose
and the potential.
AUDIENCE: OK, so your
recommendation to my friend
is show him the data?
NEEL DOSHI: Yeah, and help
them understand that there's
a frame of thinking that's
more nuanced than just poke
and prod your people.
And once people understand
that frame of thinking,
they start to self identify.
They start to see it in
the world around them.
AUDIENCE: Good-- thank you.
AUDIENCE: So my
question is related
to the general corporate
way of managing employees.
So across several companies,
working for more than decade,
now what I've seen is that,
all right, those who do well
are rewarded, but indirect
ones and those who do worse
are actually rewarded with
more specific objectives
that they have to
complete within the time.
If they don't, then
they're thrown out
or something like that.
So typically, both
are doing indirect,
like those who did very
poorly, now have hey,
your job will be turned gone if
you don't do this, this, this.
You have to do exactly that.
So high on tactical.
And those who do well,
oh, you did so well.
Here's your reward.
That's what happens
with the toddlers.
They were probably taught,
it's not playful anymore.
I'm getting something.
Maybe I don't want it.
So what's going on?
Are we-- am I in a company,
which is completely bogus?
Have I been company which
are completely bogus,
and they have no clue
what is going on?
Or why is that like that?
LINDSAY MCGREGOR:
It's a good question.
So money or paying people
is not intrinsically
a bad things or
intrinsically a good thing.
It matter is if your
bonus or those rewards
are changing the reason
why you're working.
So a counterintuitive example
is we measured the sales
commissions and to see how sales
commissions affected somebody's
TOMO.
And before this
talk, you probably
thought, oh, sales
commissions are a great thing.
At this point in time,
you might be saying,
sales commissions are
probably a terrible thing.
But what it turns out, is
that-- excuse me, contact lens.
I think you need to take over.
My contact lens is falling out.
NEEL DOSHI: So what it turns
out-- adaptive performance--
where it turns out is
that-- there you go, right?
LINDSAY MCGREGOR: Yeah, exactly
NEEL DOSHI: --is that when
you have somebody with a sales
commission who very much
believes that their work is
doing the best thing
for their customers,
that sales commission
actually increases their TOMO.
Because they're not doing it
for the commission anymore.
They actually believe
in what they're doing.
The commission is just gravy.
Now your question is, why are
there so few great cultures?
Like, I've kind of flipped
your question around, right?
So many of the organizations
you work with were using
sticks and carrots to motivate
high and low performers.
Well, the problem
is, is that, one,
this research is actually
pretty cutting edge.
The research that
we've come up with,
this frame, this thinking, this
data, is only a few years old.
We both had MBAs.
We both went to big
consulting firms.
The practices that we learned
and executed were low TOMO.
And we try it.
You get a very short
term blip in performance
because tactical
performance is quick.
You don't notice that
what you just did actually
destroyed adaptive performance.
You don't notice it
because you never
had a language for
adaptive performance.
It's harder to measure.
It's harder to see.
And if it did go
down, you didn't even
know what caused that.
And so you kind of throw
your hands up in the air
and you say, oh, it's
just because we're big.
Well, Southwest is big.
Nordstrom is big.
It's not that.
It's that we just simply didn't
understand TOMO and adaptive
performance.
LINDSAY MCGREGOR:
Any other questions?
All right, thank you,
everybody for coming.
We really appreciate it.
NEEL DOSHI: It's a
pleasure to be here.
[APPLAUSE]
