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How to inspire people
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Business | Bartleby
How to inspire people
The answer is not another video of Steve Jobs
illustration: paul blow
Dec 5th 2024
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M
otivational quotes. Videos of Steve Jobs saying absolutely anything. Clips of a baby elephant
being rescued from a river. You do not have to scroll for long on LinkedIn, a networking site ostensibly
for people at work, to find “inspirational” content. There may be people who need only to read “We cannot
become what we want by remaining what we are” written in a nice font to feel amped up on a Monday
morning. But there will be just as many who want to snigger or vomit. For bosses interested in how to
motivate the people around them, there are better options than searching for quotes by Paulo Coelho.
At some level, advice on how to inspire employees is silly. It’s usually either blindingly obvious—be good at
your job, be passionate about the work, make the people on your teams feel valued—or jarringly inauthentic.
But much more practical insights can be found in a forthcoming book called “Inspire”, by Adam Galinsky, an
academic at Columbia Business School.
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Take, for example, the importance of vivid imagery as a way of bringing an organisation’s purpose to life.
Lots of firms use a succession of tediously abstract words to convey their goal: “change”, “innovate”,
“connect” and so on. The result is less a mission than a mood board. Mr Galinsky cites an experiment by
Andrew Carton of the University of Pennsylvania and his co-authors that showed the effect of more concrete
language. In it, teams were asked to design toys and given a vision statement to guide their behaviour. Teams
who were handed a statement with more visual language—to create toys that “…make wide-eyed kids laugh
and proud parents smile”—produced more engaging toys than teams who were given something more
generic.
Mr Galinsky also points to the power of counterfactual thinking to inspire a sense of meaning. In research he
conducted with Laura Kray of the University of California, Berkeley and other co-authors, participants were
asked to reflect on important events in their lives, such as their choice of college. Some were also asked to
think about how things would have turned out if this event had not taken place. This group attributed
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https://www.economist.com/business/2024/12/05/how-to-inspire-people?giftId=206ca115-e7fc-46d7-b762-75d0028db046&utm_campaign=gifted_article
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greater meaning to the event in question, whether because they concluded fate had played a part in it or
because it forced them to think through its consequences more explicitly. This type of counterfactual
thinking can also be used to strengthen employees’ ties to firms: prompting people to imagine a world in
which their company does not exist seems to increase a sense of attachment.
Perhaps the most striking idea in Mr Galinsky’s book is that, instead of bosses motivating people from
above, individuals can do it for themselves. One example is a piece of research he conducted with Julian
Pfrombeck from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and other co-authors. In this study some Swiss
citizens who had newly registered with a government employment agency were asked to undertake a 10- to
15-minute exercise in which they reflected on values that mattered to them. They were three times more
likely to find a job than those who did not do the exercise.
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A forthcoming paper, by Nava Ashraf and Oriana Bandiera of the London School of Economics and Virginia
Minni and Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago, finds that this kind of intervention can have dramatic
effects in a business setting. A subset of almost 3,000 employees at a consumer-goods firm were randomly
assigned to take part in a workshop that helped participants to reflect on pivotal moments in their lives, to
articulate what mattered to them and to think about how their current jobs matched their own sense of
purpose.
The academics found that taking part in this exercise substantially increased the probability of exits from
the firm, particularly among lower performers; increased internal job transfers; and improved the
performance of those who stayed in their jobs. A heightened sense of what is meaningful to individuals
provides the best explanation for these outcomes. Those whose jobs do not inspire them decide to leave or
move; those who find that their purpose and their job are in sync put in more effort. Once they accounted for
the productivity of employees who replaced the leavers, the overall impact of this experiment on the firm’s
performance was positive.
Managers play a huge role in motivating their people. But inspiration can be bottom-up as well as top-down.
Don’t just tell your team what Jobs said. Ask why their jobs matter to them. ■
Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our new Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our
leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence.
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Bartleby
Business
https://www.economist.com/business/2024/12/05/how-to-inspire-people?giftId=206ca115-e7fc-46d7-b762-75d0028db046&utm_campaign=gifted_article
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This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “How to inspire people”
Business
December 7th 2024
→ How painful will Trump’s tariffs be for American businesses?
→ Intel’s troubles deepen, as its boss makes an abrupt exit
→ Russian businesses are beginning to bear the cost of war
→ Can teenagers outwit Australia’s social-media ban?
→ Will Europe ease up on big tech?
https://www.economist.com/business/2024/12/05/how-to-inspire-people?giftId=206ca115-e7fc-46d7-b762-75d0028db046&utm_campaign=gifted_article
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→ How to inspire people
→ Not all European business is a profitless wasteland
From the December 7th
2024 edition
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