Empathetic Management

March 2020 White Paper

At the ripe old age of 22, I was given my first opportunity to be a team lead. I was your typical A-type management consultant, looking to quickly climb the ranks. If you’ve read “Teaching Smart People How To Learn,” by Chris Argyris (HBR May-June 1991), you know this breed of management consultant well. I was a “problem-solver” who came from a prestigious academic background where “single-loop” learning — finding the right answer as if it were a fixed solution — was the path to achievement. Just like in high school and college, attendance, participation, and quality output would result in great grades, or in the case of the workplace, performance evaluations. There was a formula, I followed it, and I did well.

So, less than six months after my first promotion, gunning for the next, I sought out a team lead role. I had an undergraduate degree in management and had been working since the age of 16. I felt confident I would excel as team lead, because I was one of two standouts in my class. Clearly, I had what it took to run a team.

I was wrong. What I learned was that management is all about people, and no one in school — or in any of my first four jobs — had taught me that. In hindsight (this is 2020 after all), there were three things that I did very wrong.

First, I assumed that my title entitled me to take certain actions. I was responsible for the final deliverable, so I stuck my nose in the business of team members, asking about their work, as I had been told (and shown) to do. Before that project, some of those team members had been my peers; two had been in the organization longer than I had been. One in particular was outwardly resentful. Believing (even stating!) that his turn had been taken from him, he complained repeatedly to my manager that I lacked the qualifications. He even went so far as to sabotage his own work, accusing me of having given him conflicting information that caused errors and bugs in his code. Yet looking at it now, I know I was wrong. Respect is earned, not given, and I hadn’t earned it with him — or with others on the team. I needed to see things from his perspective.

Second, I was too rigid in an effort to establish my integrity. Having oversight over these team members, it was my responsibility to write their performance evaluations. At the time, at that organization, associates filled in a self-assessment showing how they demonstrated each of the required skills for a role. Just like students in college, associates want to make sure they answer every question with enough examples to prove they are worthy of a promotion. With my integrity hat on, I noticed two associates claiming to do the same work and immediately raised a red flag: one seemed to be asking for credit for the work of another. So, rigidly, I asked about it. To them, I’m sure it came across as an interrogation. In the end, I determined only one of them had the evidence to back up their claim. Again, I was wrong — or at least basing my decision on a very narrow, single-loop mindset. In truth, the two analysts often collaborated and asked each other questions to help one another learn. Instead of getting to understand the dynamics at play on my team and giving both of them credit, I put one team member at a disadvantage. Worst of all, I damaged a relationship with a high-performing associate who likely added more value than I gave him credit for. If the other associate didn’t take issue with it, why should I?

My third mistake was me. I wasn’t ready to be a team lead. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the skills on paper. In fact, most of my superiors told me that they supported the way I handled those situations. But with maturity, experience and hindsight, I know that I didn’t have the empathy or the adaptability that I needed to be a good manager and leader.  

I have now been managing people for over 15 years, and I have been a student of managerial psychology for just as long — a field most undergrad business and MBA programs still do not teach. I’ve devoured textbooks across disciplines in psychology and neuroscience. I’ve read dozens if not hundreds of books on related topics, like Bob Cialdini’s “Influence”; Daniel Goleman’s “Emotional Intelligence” and “Social Intelligence”; Scott Plous’ “The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making”; and Max Bazerman’s “Judgment in Managerial Decision Making.” I undertook a self-study program in grad school and wrote a paper on behavioral decision-making and leadership. More recently, I have taken an interest in research on human and animal behavior and neuroscience, including the work of Robert Sapolsky, Jaak Panksepp, Robert Greene and others. What I’ve found is simple: We don’t know how to manage well because we don’t apply what these disciplines have come to understand about people. So, I developed a framework to change that.

Empathetic Management: The MAGpie.

There are a lot of theories of motivation, and many good books. As I have tried to read and absorb them, I have striven to become what Argyris calls a “double-loop” learner — someone who adapts their efforts based on new knowledge and experience. (Fans of Carol Dweck’s book “Mindset” will see similarities with the growth mindset as well.) When I have struggled, or seen team members struggling, I have sought out expertise to re-shape my thinking along the way. It’s been a test-and-learn approach, and while that may not be scientific in the academic sense, it is an approach that is rooted in the books and academic journals I have read.

Which brings me to the MAGpie. The acronym stands for three factors that drive motivation: mastery, acceptance, and gratification.  

I’ll briefly define each of these, explore how various academics, researchers, writers and thinkers frame them, and then dig deeper into what they mean and how a better understanding of each can help managers excel.

Mastery is what we all do in the pursuit of a trade or a career. We start out knowing very little about how or what we should be doing. With time, training, our powers of observation and our ability to problem-solve, we start to climb this ladder of mastery and become proficient in whatever it is we choose to do. (And if we fail to develop proficiency, we often suffer consequences.) Many people try to climb even further by delivering “above and beyond” what is asked. They develop subject matter expertise and become authorities for others in need of help or information.

Keep in mind, not all ladders climb in one direction. Some people may approach their jobs like a rock wall, branching out into different functions instead of ascending in one direction. They are generalists by nature and learn to think about problems from different angles. Real masters are able to go wide, showing how their expertise impacts the business across functions, and go deep, generating new insights, challenges and opportunities for a specific function. Eventually, these are the people who become executives because of their expertise, as opposed to their network.

Acceptance is the feeling of belonging we have without having to change who we are. People who feel fully accepted do not fear judgment. They know they are valued for the way they think, feel and act. Acceptance is different from belonging in one important way: People who seek to belong will adjust who they are to fit the needs of the group. In that way, belonging undermines authenticity. If you are fitting in, you aren’t being you. Acceptance, rather, means people have unconditional positive regard for their team members. That does not mean they necessarily like everything about their colleagues or everything they do. But they know they are part of a team, contributing their best, and being assessed only on the value of the work they do. The only way to get as much out of your team as you can is to let them give everything they have to offer.

Gratification is what matters to us and makes us happy. It’s a combination of our intrinsic desires and our related responsibilities, like having a home or spending time with family and friends. Gratification builds on acceptance insofar as it’s about humanity. What interests and drives people? What is their purpose in life? How do they want to spend their time? What needs do they have in and out of work? And, most importantly, what brings them joy? People like to do what makes them happy. Managers can use that to benefit the individual, the team, the organization and themselves.

For “A-types” like me, gratification may be driven by work itself: the challenge of the problem, the prestige of the title, even just the accomplishment of meeting or exceeding expectations. For some of the people I’ve managed or worked with who are not “A-types,” work is a means, not an end. Gratification for them is about time spent with their family and friends. Work, to them, is about getting a paycheck that enables them to live the life they want and support the people they love. All of the things that gratify people are important – and your team members or employees will take notice if you help them make time for what gives them that gratification.

The reason I call it the MAGpie is simple. We are never only one thing, and the nature of each piece of the pie changes over time for individuals as we evolve and grow and our priorities change. When people start a new job, are they more focused on mastery of the role or acceptance within the group? How does that change as they change roles, teams, or geographic locations? As they age, do their sources of gratification change? Do they have kids and now want to spend more time out of the office? Or could a new opportunity to work on something that excites them encourage them to have even more energy for their work?

The point is, managers who get to know their team members and employees have a better sense of their levels of mastery, acceptance and gratification, and use those tools to help them better manage. Better management means better performance: greater productivity, lowered costs from lack of clarity and excess work, better outputs from teams who push each other to raise the bar, and significant reductions in employee distress and turnover.

When everyone has a tree, it’s hard to see the forest.

For all the skeptics and critics out there who are ready to tear me apart, I have two things to say: First, thank you! Let’s do it. If we can create something better, everyone wins — especially the managers and the managed who are tired of being treated like pawns and puzzle pieces today. Second, let’s be transparent. Table 1 below summarizes 10 of the sources that influenced the MAGpie. Many academics, researchers and even popular writers are circling around the same ideas, but missing the forest for their own trees. (And, yes, I realize that I am planting my own as well.)

As you can see in the table, these authors can find at least some agreement on the fundamental components of motivation — and I would submit that the intersection of that agreement is the MAGpie.

Let’s start with Maslow, whose core foundational need is safety (after basic physiological needs are met). In the workplace, I equate his notion of safety with mastery for one reason: the easiest way to feel safe in your job is to feel competent. If you can do your job and continue to do so as you learn and grow, you begin to feel comfortable in your role, or safe. Of course, external factors can always play a role; downsizing, for instance, means even people who are competent at their jobs are at risk. But from an individual perspective, the fundamental job contract is simple: perform what is asked of you and you are safe. Where Maslow sees love and belonging, I see acceptance. If you have a sense of belonging at work without changing who you are, you feel accepted. Once externally-driven needs are met, Maslow argues, people can focus on their personal needs for self-esteem and self-actualization. I call this gratification — what makes you feel good about yourself. (One note: Whereas Maslow views these determinants as part of a hierarchy, a sense of hierarchy does not apply with the MAGpie.)

McClelland’s three needs theory aligns with the MAGpie because, as he proposed it, these needs reflect differences in individual motivations. Through mastery, we earn power, one of these three needs. Power can also be thought of as our desire to influence and control, but that is a management style or mindset choice. Individuals can still earn power through mastery as subject matter experts or generalists using an empathetic approach. The empathetic approach earns followership instead of assigning control and responsibility, which also makes it more effective for earning and maintaining power.

McClelland’s second need is our need to belong, what he called affiliation. Desire for affiliation with a certain group is enhanced when we feel accepted by that group. When we have to try and belong, we change ourselves in some way – often in ways that we are not aware of. It may be a slight change in our sense of humor or posture. It may also mean that someone becomes more reserved to meet a social norm, in which case you never benefit from hearing their perspective. Acceptance addresses that issue.

The third need, his primary focus, is achievement, an intrinsic driver of our behavior: we want to achieve and fear to fail. But, not everyone feels that sense of achievement at work – for example, bureaucrats that process information all day and seek job security to provide for a family over career growth may equate achievement with being a good provider. Gratification therefore broadens the definition to address the reality that work is not what defines everyone.

Alderfer’s ERG theory combines the six components of Maslow’s hierarchy, so the same comparison I used above applies. Existence is where our physiological needs and our need for safety are met. In the workplace, this would be mastery, or at least competence. Relatedness is love and belonging, or what I call acceptance. Growth requires self-esteem and is what we seek on our way toward self-actualization. The pursuit of both I call gratification. Like McClelland, Alderfer defines growth as driven by internal esteem, not external validation, which is why it is about gratification and not limited to the professional growth encompassed in mastery.

There is little difference between the MAGpie and Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory (SDT) at first blush — at least as seen in the table. Deci and Ryan’s work began in the 1970s by comparing both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations in life, not specifically the workplace. That is where MAGpie and SDT begin to complement each other, in large part because I have never seen SDT expressly applied in a workplace. In the workplace, extrinsic motivations are defined and constrained for the most part to factors such as responsibilities, title and compensation. Gratification, of course, does not have to be derived from the workplace, so the notion of motivation in the context of work may be different from the intrinsic needs and desires evaluated by Deci and Ryan.

As we go down the list, the pattern continues. Lawrence and Nohria saw the drive to acquire and the drive to defend as components of gratification. The drive to acquire is about our relative status versus others. If keeping up with the Joneses is what makes you happy, go for it. The drive to defend, by contrast, is about protecting ourselves and our loved ones from harm. Notice the similarities with gratification in the MAGpie. If employees are on the job only because working allows them to keep their homes and put food on the table for their families, they get their sense of gratification from knowing they are providing for their loved ones.

David Rock, founder of the Neuroleadership Institute, developed his SCARF model (status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness) by looking at a variety of neuroscience studies and applying what they taught him to the workplace. While some may say I have done the same with psychology, his model is largely based on one underlying assumption: motivation is the avoidance of pain. This conclusion is based, at least in part, on research conducted by Matthew Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberger at UCLA, which has shown that the emotional pain of rejection (even by people you haven’t met and don’t know) and physical pain essentially activate the same mechanisms in the brain. I don’t dispute that – in fact, it’s incredibly valuable for managers to know and, as I will discuss, support the need for empathetic management.

Rock, however, uses the threat and response system as the foundation for a fear-based model of motivation: essentially the neuroscience of the carrot and the stick. I disagree, which is why the MAGpie focuses on positive neural mechanisms and psychological motivators instead. But his model still aligns. Mastery encompasses the desire for status and the need for certainty. Acceptance requires both relatedness (what he defines as how safe we feel with others) and the fairness we feel in our exchanges with them (what some might think of as social norms). I believe autonomy, which he looks at as a sense of control, is the fear-based version of gratification. If we are doing what makes us happy, we are likely in control. I’d say we’re much more than that.  

Dan Pink’s book focuses primarily on the idea of intrinsic motivation. I include it here to point out only that I don’t disagree with his assessment – mastery, purpose and autonomy all drive us intrinsically. I do believe that extrinsic motivators play a role as well. The people around you — and their level of acceptance or rejection of your work or your ideas — clearly impact your motivation positively and negatively. Without fitting in, no matter how driven you are, you may or may not be professionally successful. Moreover, if you don’t feel accepted, you are more likely to take that intrinsic motivation (and resulting hard work) somewhere else.

David Kantor took a different approach to understanding interpersonal dynamics. He and his colleagues recorded and observed people in their homes, and his work focuses on communication and interpersonal dynamics. While not specifically related to motivation, his three “domains of communication” — affect, power and meaning — are worth examining because they suggest we each have a tendency to overvalue a different piece of the MAGpie. Let me explain. According to Kantor’s theory we skew toward one of the domains over the others based on our childhood experiences and development. Some people are affect-driven, meaning they care most about feelings. As seen through the MAGpie, these are people who prioritize acceptance over mastery or gratification. They want to know that everyone feels good, or they get stressed. They may focus on building social connections before mastering their work; they may even prefer to work at places where their friends are already employed over better opportunities. People who skew toward power are like those who prize mastery. Just as McClelland noted with his focus on achievement, power-seekers are going to climb the ladder of mastery as fast as they can. Lastly, people who skew toward meaning can be more challenging to manage from a motivational perspective. They crave gratification. If you’ve ever been asked by a team member, “Why are we doing this?” you know that “because I said so” won’t prove to be a satisfying response for people who value meaning. They need to feel like what they are doing is part of their purpose. It has to gratify them or they can’t get motivated to give it their best.  

In “Hardwiring Happiness,” Rick Hanson lays out three basic needs as if there is no discussion: safety, connection and satisfaction. As we’ve discussed, safety can be achieved through mastery, connection through acceptance, and satisfaction through gratification. Mastery, acceptance and gratification, however, speak to motivations that go beyond basic core needs. According to the MAGpie, those factors are how we meet those needs (or exceed those expectations!) within the constraints of a work environment.

More recently, and perhaps most interestingly, Stanford’s Carol Dweck started to put forward what she calls the “foundations for a unified theory of motivation, personality and development.” In her 2017 paper, “From needs to goals and representations,” Dweck outlines three basic needs that exist in infants from birth: acceptance, optimal predictability and competence. She defines acceptance as the need for “positive social engagement,” optimal predictability as an understanding of cause and effect, and competence as “building the skills” that allow an infant to perform according to those “predictable” rules. She adds to that model four compound needs: control, trust, self-esteem and status. That’s where it gets complicated.

Control is the state we achieve when we have optimal predictability and competence. In the workplace, I argue that those three pieces amount to mastery. If you learn the rules of the job and demonstrate your ability to do them, you have a sense of control: I can do this job. As you climb the ladder of mastery, that sense of control builds. Trust, Dweck writes, occurs at the intersection of acceptance and optimal predictability. This is the motivational factor I also call acceptance. If you are accepted by a group, and the group agrees on and abides by the norms, you build trust. Dweck’s last two compound needs, self-esteem and status, require a feeling of both acceptance and competence. That makes sense and may be why Maslow had those needs at the top of his hierarchy. But how do they relate to gratification? As discussed above, self-esteem and status are the needs that make us feel good about ourselves. Status may come from mastery but it may also come from being the coach of your child’s soccer team. Alone, self-esteem and status are not gratification, but they are certainly part of it. Without them, it would be hard to feel it.

Dweck’s work, in the context of the other views on motivation, is what convinces me that mastery, acceptance and gratification are not separate components, but rather part of a pie. All three, in different ways, in different forms are needed. Which is why, together, they motivate us.

The MAGpie Advantage: What Neurochemicals can teach us about why MAGpie works.

There is a lot of buzz these days about neuroscience in management and leadership. While we all like the bright shiny objects, it’s important to understand what neuroscience is and is not as it applies to management and leadership. Neuroscience is the study of the brain and the nervous system. It helps us understand why our bodies have certain physical sensations, like pain and pleasure. It also helps us understand how and when we are using our brains effectively.

Neuroscience is not management science and I do not advocate using what we can learn about the brain to manipulate, coerce or otherwise influence others with any negative intent. Instead, I think neuroscience can help explain why certain management approaches work or don’t work. And I believe it can help explain why MAGpie, in particular, helps managers use some of the positive discoveries from neuroscience while helping avoid things that may have negative repercussions. It all comes down to four key neurochemicals: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and cortisol.

Dopamine facilitates mastery

If you’ve read anything about dopamine you’ve probably heard it referred to as the chemical messenger involved in our reward system. Every time we achieve something, we get a little burst of dopamine. This is why mastery matters and can help motivate us. Do you ever feel a little happier when you have a breakthrough? Gain some insight? Learn something new? Solve a problem? Thank you, dopamine. Now let’s keep at it!

Oxytocin releases with acceptance

Oxcytocin is most associated with social bonding and is often attributed to the feelings of love and commitment. According to research by Claremont Graduate University’s Paul Zak, oxytocin is the neurochemical responsible for two important pieces of acceptance: trust and the desire to help. He calls it “the biological basis for the Golden Rule” and claims it is the “neurochemical substrate of empathy” (Zak, 2018). Oxytocin is at work when we feel like we are part of something. In the workplace, when we are accepted by a team, we bond. As leaders and managers, we create teams that trust each other, that collaborate and that build on each others’ strengths. Teams that perform better are usually teams with higher levels of oxytocin.

Serotonin is part of what’s behind gratification

Serotonin is commonly thought of as a chemical that plays a role in our happiness and well-being. That’s why so many people with depression and anxiety are prescribed medications to help regulate their serotonin levels. As we understand it, people who have higher levels of serotonin in their bodies are generally happier. At work, if you feel gratified, serotonin may be working the way it should.

Cortisol destroys it all

Cortisol is one of our stress hormones. Whenever you have a sense of panic, initially, adrenaline spikes and you move into “fight, flight or freeze” mode. After that jolt, cortisol starts building up to keep you going. The reason we focus on cortisol is that it stays in the body longer, and, as you have more adrenaline spikes, cortisol levels continue to increase. For example, say there’s an important meeting in a few hours and your boss just decided he wants an analysis for it that wasn’t quite ready. His initial, panicked request spikes your adrenaline, then cortisol rises as you work furiously to get the job done. When he calls, emails, or instant messages you an hour later asking for the analysis again, adrenaline spikes again, and, shortly thereafter, we pile on more cortisol.

You feel overwhelmed by what you are asked to do; you are too stressed to think, you are under attack by cortisol. That’s why the carrot-and-stick approach to management is outdated and doesn’t work. Yes, threats and fear do motivate. But just because those tactics may drive action in the short term doesn’t mean they are effective; especially over the long haul. Managers who motivate through fear may get the job done, but they build fear and resentment among their teams. Team members feel beaten down and feel no gratification; some look for new jobs. And, because they are so focused on survival, their threat response systems are doing the work instead of the part of their brain that was designed for higher-order thinking.

Why is that? In high-level terms, our brains are constantly predicting and assessing the world around us. When information comes in, our amygdala receives the information and begins to coordinate our response. Like a quarterback. If the amygdala senses a threat, it engages the hypothalamus, and we go into a protective response mode: fight, flight, or freeze. As part of that stress response system, the adrenal gland is stimulated, and cortisol is released. In general, because we are reacting (not proactively thinking), we respond using past information in very fixed ways to see if we can manage our way through a situation. It’s not where we do our best thinking, but it works well when it needs to. We survive.

Is that what we, as managers, want? Employees who survive? I prefer employees who thrive. If it’s not a threat, the information can make its way calmly to the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is unique to humans and apes. That’s where we do our strategic, executive thinking. When it works best, so do we.

Using the MAGpie to Manage

As any consultant, manager or businessperson knows, tools and frameworks are great, but so what? How do I use them? With MAGpie, the answer, thankfully, is simple, though it does require quite a change for many.

I call managing with the MAGpie “empathetic management” because, really, that is all it is. People want to be seen, heard and validated. They want to be treated with respect and thought of as human. While many management theorists and practitioners, from Henry Mintzberg to Steven Covey to Lee Iacocca, tout the importance of control by a manager, I argue the opposite. You can’t control anything. Ask any parent — or any manager. People are going to do what they want. So let’s put an end to this fallacy, reduce anxiety levels and rid ourselves of some of that cortisol. Instead, let’s listen, trust and empower.

Empathetic managers spend their time on the positives. They get to know their teams personally. They learn about an individual’s goals — in and out of the office. That doesn’t mean they have to see the members of their team outside of the office. It means that the time they spend with them is about getting to know what makes them tick, then using that knowledge to make the most of what their team can do. Let me explain.

Drive mastery through supportive coaching that challenges

Remember the first time you started a job? Did you have any idea what you were doing? Maybe a little. Probably not as much as you did after six months or a year. How did you learn? Will that approach work for everyone? Keep those questions in mind when you are talking to people on your team. Some may be afraid to speak up or ask for help — especially if they want to appear competent or if their managers degrade them for asking “stupid” questions. When managers are frustrated, unhappy or condescending, they increase cortisol, not dopamine, among their team members and do more harm than good.

Mastery requires support and investment. It’s why companies spend so much on training, learning and development. It’s also why so much of that money is wasted — mastery doesn’t happen in a classroom. It happens on the job, with a manager or coach that can help employees see what they are doing right or wrong and then course correct. As a manager, your employees will perform better if they think you are in their corner, not their opponent.

Try these five things instead:

1.     Observe without judgment. As a manager, of course part of your role is to assess your employees’ performance. It’s easy to see where an employee is performing well and performing poorly by looking at the output. It’s harder to figure out whether or not the process that employee is using is working or not. The more you can build your awareness around how employees work, learn and interact with others, the more you begin to understand how best to coach and relate to them. For students of mindfulness, being present in all of your interactions and observations is key. This step is all about building your awareness.

2.     Use active listening. Whether in person, over the phone or on a video call, people know when they have your full attention and when you are distracted. If your team members don’t feel like they have your full attention, you’re telling them they don’t warrant it. Trust and positivity begin to erode. Active listening is about leaning in, being present and engaging. It’s asking questions that show genuine interest in what their challenges are and taking as much interest in their successes: how they were able to do something in a new way. It’s mirroring back to them what they say, with a mix of your words and theirs, so that they know they’ve been heard and understood. That goes a long way toward making them feel supported and invested in, even in difficult conversations, such as providing developmental feedback.

3.     Connect and relate. While this may seem like a part of acceptance (and it is!), connecting and relating is about being authentic. Yes, it helps build trust. It also helps to boost confidence while individuals are climbing that ladder from competence to mastery. Sharing how you faced similar challenges or took advantage of similar opportunities lets your team members know you care. You, too, are human. And, believe it or not, it makes them want to work harder for you to show you they can do it, too.

4.     Provide actionable feedback in manageable doses. No one likes being torn apart —even if it is done empathetically. Giving someone a ton of development feedback at once is overwhelming. Giving them one thing to work on at a time is empowering. As a manager, I start the year asking my team members to set five new goals for themselves. We focus on one at a time, but balance them based on the work. Every month, we look at which goals we are making progress on and which ones we aren’t. Some goals may go away if business needs change. A new goal may be added if the employee is ready to be stretched further. Taking it step by step gives them regular shots of dopamine while avoiding the overwhelming cortisol.

5.     Regularly praise and support. External validation and recognition can go a long way in supporting mastery. I don’t think anyone would argue that genuine positivity and encouragement can keep morale up when people are working through challenges. A compassionate, empathetic approach to management that regularly (and authentically!) praises and supports people encourages them to keep at it until they get it — the whole goal of mastery (and, again, you are aided by dopamine).

Encourage acceptance by creating a supportive team subculture

Team culture may start with the tone set by the leader, but it’s really driven by the connections among team members. When people are trusted, empowered and collaborate, they build stronger connections with each other. And oxytocin doesn’t hurt! As a manager, the more you can do to foster empathy, compassion and patience among team members, the more likely they are to start to want to collaborate and teach each other, taking some of the burden of mastery off the manager. Give team members the space to demonstrate their knowledge, to share their work with each other and solicit feedback from their peers. The more opportunities you can create for team members to collaborate, the faster they will build that trust and rapport and the better the outputs they produce will become.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the Achilles heel of acceptance: gossip. It’s human nature to talk about each other. People love to complain and blame. Those are the culture killers. It’s also why empathy and compassion are so important. As a manager, when you hear negativity or gossip, if you can guide the gossiper or naysayer to be more open-minded and see how there could be other contributing factors that they might not see, you can help stop the gossip and change the tone of the relationships that form between team members.

Understand gratification and use it to re-align work

Having regular check-ins with employees has become the status quo in many organizations. Unfortunately, that’s not the case everywhere. Yet even when regular check-ins or “1:1’s” are part of the culture, it’s easy for managers to use all of that time talking about the work that needs to get done or the performance of the employee. Often not enough time is spent listening or bonding.

Carving out time to get to know your team members and what gratifies them is much more valuable. Finding out what matters to a person and then finding ways to give them more of it will help them thrive and make them want to do more for you.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. When I started to build the data analytics team for one of the world’s largest financial institutions, I was given a list of a dozen available candidates for the four roles I had and told I was unable to hire from any other group. I could observe the candidates during the day to determine which ones would be best for my team. I had to try and assess their skill levels, but, more importantly, I had to figure out who they were as people. And I had only about two hours with each person. Part of that time was spent seeing what they did and how they explained their work. Could they perform? Could they communicate? Were they interested in learning, growing and changing? Or did they just want their paychecks?

There was one question that I asked that let me know who I wanted on my team and who I didn’t. I asked each candidate: Tell me about a time you got home from work and shared something you were excited about with a friend or family member. The answers I got, for the most part, were appalling. The worst answer went something like this: I have four kids. They play lots of sports. So, if I ever talk to my wife about work, it’s usually to complain about something someone did to me.

Yikes! The issue for me wasn’t that his gratification came from outside the office (assuming time with his kids was gratifying for him!). It was only that he had no gratification in the office, did not feel accepted, and likely wouldn’t have the energy to master new challenges.

Here was the best answer (and again, I am paraphrasing): Well, my day job doesn’t keep me as busy as I would like. I’m a mom with two kids and I’m going to school at night for my bachelor’s, so when I’m here I don’t like when I don’t feel productive. I made sure it was okay with my manager, but when I do have downtime or there’s nothing to be worked in my queue, I try to help out some of the people around me. I’ve gotten to work on some interesting problems because of one woman who sits near me. I like to go home and tell my husband when I get to work on something different, but I’m really more passionate about what I’m studying in school. I’m getting my degree in business intelligence. My grades are pretty good and my advisor is encouraging me to go into the master’s program in data analytics. That’s part of why I like working here. They’ll pay my tuition so I can keep learning what I like. Then I can figure out if I can get a job in it when I get my degrees.

What? Here was an associate who was screaming for mastery and not getting the opportunity to develop. She didn’t really feel like part of any team and was looking for a place to feel accepted. She admittedly had one foot out the door, if not for tuition reimbursement (what a waste of corporate learning and development dollars!). Moreover, gratification for her was exactly what the team I was going to build was aiming to do. Jackpot!

When I requested her for my team, her prior manager thought I was crazy. She had none of the skills we needed and, to use an analogy from my boss at the time, our job was to change the tires on the car while it was barreling down the highway. Why would I want to take this on? But I knew she had what we needed.

Three months into her role, she was a different person. She had begun to master a client-facing reporting tool that frustrated most of her colleagues. She was climbing the ladder of mastery more quickly and eagerly than she thought she could. As word got out and she started helping others address their challenges with the tool, she transformed from the woman in the corner that few people knew to one of the most sought-out people on the floor. Senior leaders knew her name and began trying to poach her for other opportunities. If that’s not acceptance, I’m not sure what is. Most importantly, she was loving the work. She was learning from team members that had better skills and driving her own development. Every time we spoke, she had a huge smile. Work was gratifying now.

Six months into her role, word had spread outside the company as well and she was poached by another financial institution into a role that paid her significantly more than what she had been making. It was enough of an incentive to switch and I was sorry to see her go, but supportive of her decision. I don’t think she lasted more than a month before calling asking for her job back. The other place wasn’t a fit, she said. The job was too hard. She had no support. She didn’t feel like she belonged. She wasn’t happy.

They didn’t use the MAGpie.

 

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