What do Sean Peyton, Rex Ryan, Jim Caldwell and Brad Childress have in common? They are the four coaches whose teams will be playing this weekend in the NFC and AFC championships. Know what else? Each of them has a coaching style that is very 21st century: They don't yell, shout or demean their players. They would never, as one coach did, end practice only when the players became ill. Look at Childress,the coach for the Minnesota Vikings. His team had two weeks off before they played the Dallas Cowboys. Childress gave them the first week off, telling them that he trusted them to be ready to give it their all in week No. 2 before the Cowboys game (and we know how that turned out). These coaches do not micromanage. They lead. They are motivators, not deciders. They understand that most players are motivated intrinsically, not extrinsically, by the satisfaction of a job well done. This fits in with the idea behind Daniel Pink's insightful new book, “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.” Pink calls the old style of motivation (the carrot and the stick) Motivation 2.0. He says those days are over, replaced by what he calls Motivation 3.0:
Motivation 2.0 assumed that if people had freedom, they would shirk — and that autonomy was a way to bypass accountability. Motivation 3.0 begins with a different assumption. It presumes that people want to be accountable — and that making sure they have control over their task, their time, their technique and their team is a pathway to that destination.
Pink applies this idea to law firms, arguing that the billable hour is a relic of Motivation 2.0. Listen:
[The] billable hour has little place in Motivation 3.0. For nonrountine tasks, including law, the link between how much time somebody spends and what that person produces is irregular and unpredictable. . . . If we begin with an alternative, and more accurate, presumption — that people want to do good work — then we ought to let them focus on the work itself rather than the time it takes to do it.
Different times call for different assumptions. This weekend of championship-caliber football is a reminder.