Motivating Your R&D Staff

Ten basic tenets form a body of practical knowledge for generating excitement that is essence of for technical people. In response to requests that reprint articles that have drawn unusual reader response, we continue here a new feature entitled RTM Classic. The first classic, Lucky Alva, appeared in our July-August 1995 issue (pp. 28-30). Its author, Vladimir Haensel, imagined how Edison would have fared in trying to obtain funding for his electric light bulb idea in modern corporate environment.-The Editor. Over years, we have found that research managers list motivation as most perplexing requirement of managerial role. This observation is true in many management situations. Motivation is one of most critical ingredients in work performance as well as most difficult to understand. There is a voluminous amount of literature on topic, some of it quite valuable to manager. However, this enormity of information lacks focus and, shall we say, a common body of practical knowledge. We conceive of simply as excitement-an energizer that is reflected as excitement or arousal. This definition makes concept of more understandable and applicable. Most managers tend to conceive of as a complex set of dimensions that in fact are not encompassed in our definition. Thus, performance is not motivation. Satisfaction is not motivation. Behaviors are not motivation. Results are not motivation. Too often these are in some confusing and ambiguous fashion encompassed in concept of when discussed by managers. Another point: Because people are excited about work and are exhibiting lots of activity does not mean they are productively active. That is, group could be highly motivated and running amuck because they are not managed to optimize motivational spirit. While presence of does not guarantee performance, absence of guarantees longterm performance problems. Obviously, a lack of arousal begets no effort and precursor to effort is excitement or arousal. Edison's famous quote about genius being 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration is essence of what in our conception yields. Thus, as long as one does not over-define motivation, we think that a focus-or common body of knowledge-is available to practicing manager. This focus is contained in ten basic tenets which yield useful insight into how to generate work-group excitement without requiring vocabulary of a clinical psychologist. A tenet is an opinion which is held to be true-our opinion. These opinions, however, have been slowly articulated over a ten-year period by carefully observing successful motivational practices through our interactions with industrial and government R&D laboratories. We have come to view these tenets as fundamental truths of work excitement. We have found that extent to which these tenets-and their prescriptions for managerial action-are understood by practicing manager is extent to which capacity to motivate is understood. Some of these tenets may be viewed as simple platitudes, some not. Taken as a whole, however, they do form a common body of practical knowledge. The tenets are as follows: Difficulty-The first tenet of is, quite simply, that generating incremental excitement about work is very difficult. On other hand, most managers have observed that destroying excitement is relatively easy. Many young project managers find that old excitement created by technical interactions while on bench no longer works when they assume power. Or, they agonize over how to rekindle work excitement in a bench scientist many years their elder. It is interesting how many of these befuddled research managers blame the corporation for their motivational difficulties. Meanwhile, effective motivators understand a fact of managerial existence: Do not expect much help from larger organization. …