Nine Minutes on Monday by James Robbins

Author:James Robbins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2013-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

Give Choices When Possible

After recently relocating to a new city, my wife asked me what I thought.

“It’s nice,” I told her.

Unconvinced, she said, “But …?”

“Well, I just wish there was a professional hockey team here. I can’t go to any games,” I confessed.

“But you never went to any games in our old city,” she remarked.

“I know, but I could have gone to a game if I wanted to,” I said.

I was suffering from a minor loss of one of the choices I had enjoyed in my previous home.

Choice and autonomy go hand in hand. If you want to foster employees’ autonomy, then find ways to give them a greater degree of choice or flexibility in how they carry out their role. While this may be impossible in some jobs, for most roles there are a surprising number of options. Every mountain may have only one summit and there are usually time parameters that must be adhered to, but beyond that the choices of which routes to take to the top are limitless. Giving people a chance to think on their own and providing them with as much choice as the limits will allow will increase their intrinsic motivation. It is easy to believe that we know the best way to do the job, but that doesn’t mean it is the best way for our employees to do the job. Try to find even small ways to give your employees some choice in how they do their job.

When choice is not an option, try to provide a rationale for why they need to perform a certain task a certain way. A person who hears why is more likely to internalize and voluntarily accept the externally imposed restrictions. Once internalized, people exert more voluntary effort, even in uninteresting activities.

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