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OPINION
Motivate employees for success
With a clear purpose, empowered professionals, and a drive for ongoing development, design firms can motivate all of their employees to row together.
I am here to sing the praises of PEDs. First, a clarification: Anyone with even a passing awareness of the world of sports likely is familiar with the acronym “PED.” It seems every sport from cycling to curling and from horse racing to dogsledding has been tinged by at least one scandal involving performance enhancing drugs. That’s not the kind of PED I’m talking about – although the kind I’m highlighting could have a performance-enhancing impact on your firm.
Tim Spence
The PED idea I’m talking about emerged from reading the book Drive , in which author Daniel Pink writes about three motivators he sees driving human beings: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Converting Pink’s concepts into my firm’s lexicon resulted in their being rephrased as empowerment, development, and purpose. Rearranging them to reflect our dedication to always leading with purpose gave me the combination that I was amused to discover can be abbreviated as “PED.” Before I dive into these concepts, I want to talk about motivation, which is the topic at the heart of Pink’s book. As service-based organizations, design firms are driven by people, and their long-term success
depends on their ability to motivate their teams. My guess is that most leaders feel their organizations are pretty good at that. Unfortunately, recent Gallup research suggests that isn’t true: In most organizations, only about 31.5 percent of employees are actively engaged at their jobs. In other words, if your organization were one of those ancient battleships propelled by rowers, only 31.5 percent of the people in your ship would be facing the right direction and actively pulling on their oars. But wait, that’s not all. The Gallup study results
See TIM SPENCE , page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER AUGUST 15, 2022, ISSUE 1453
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