A Job Description for the Business Owner

Increased profits and growth of gross income can be wonderful mid-level goals and important milestones in a company’s growth, but they are never main goals that can lead you to victory. Only a person who has completely lost his or her ideals sees personal needs as the only reason for owning a business and can accept making money as its main goal. Such an viewpoint is acceptable for an unskilled worker, but is not acceptable for someone who has started a company.

Chapter 6. Motivation

You have probably noticed that people have various levels of motivation with respect to their work. Some begin work with enthusiasm, but for others, it takes a great deal of effort to make them work, even under the constant supervision of a superior. Some are really interested in their jobs, yet others see their job simply as a harsh necessity. It is all about motivation. In modern society, motivation can mean a person’s desire to work, the actions a manager performs to achieve results, or even a company's wage system. In its simplest terms, the word motivation is defined as an impulse that propels a person toward some activity. Motivation comes from the word motive, which means “an incentive, purpose, or reason for some action.” Motive, in turn, comes from the Latin word move?re, which means “to move.” Thus motivation is something that makes people move in some area of activity.

While managing companies, I noticed that there are those who are dedicated to their jobs, and those who are free riders, who are willing to go along for the ride as long as someone else does the driving. It is pretty easy to deal with the first type of person. She is loyal to the company and produces, to the extent of her competency, good results. To put it simply, these are people you can rely on. When there is a need to solve urgent problems, you call upon these individuals to obtain the needed support. L. Ron Hubbard provided a good classification of different levels of motivation.[4 - L. Ron Hubbard “Promotion and Motivation”, in The Organization Executive Course: Public Division, vol. 6 (Los Angeles: Bridge Publications, 1991), 158.] He described four main levels of motivation, from highest to lowest:

Duty

Personal Conviction

Personal Gain

Money

Duty

The highest motivation level is duty. On this level, people consider a company they work for to be part of their lives. They are loyal to the company and its interests. They are reliable and give support to managers. There may be many people working for a company, but rarely are the majority those with a duty level of motivation.

Personal Conviction

People who are not company patriots but consider themselves professionals and try to do their jobs well according to their personal standards of professionalism are people on the personal conviction level of motivation. For example, this could be an accountant who does not care what the company does or how well it succeeds, but by virtue of personal conviction, thinks it is important to ensure that the accounting department is run properly.

Personal Gain

The next level of motivation is personal gain. People on this level do their jobs just to get some benefits from the company. These benefits range from the intangible, such as experience, knowledge, and networking, to the tangible, such as the company’s convenient location, compensation, and other benefits. These people often tell you that they are ready to deliver fantastic results if you provide higher pay and better benefits. Sometimes they sound very convincing. If you have ever gone along with this kind of person’s plea, then you know it does not work. Their level of production does not increase in proportion to their appetite.

Money

The last level of motivation is money, and it is actually pretty rare to find a person at this level, as this is a level of motivation in which, strictly speaking, a person does not even care what he does as long as he makes more money doing it. Although many people say they are interested only in money, this is not actually true. Just try offering an engineer who constantly complains about being underpaid a better-paying job as sales manager. Typically, he would tell you that he wants to work in his specialty. This means that his level of motivation is not money, but personal conviction. People who are on the money level of motivation usually have some serious money troubles and are ready to do anything possible to solve them.

It should be noted that the higher levels of motivation are accompanied by the lower ones. Thus a person on the level of duty is also motivated by the personal conviction, personal gain, and money levels. The fact that he has a duty level of motivation does not mean he would not be interested in money. Money is just not the first priority. When he acts, he thinks first about the company, and only then does he consider the reward he might get. This is why you should be careful not to stigmatize somebody who asks for a raise. Such a request does not necessarily mean that money is the person's main motivation. In order to determine the person’s true motivation, you should look at what drives him when he does his job, not concentrate on whether he asks for more money.

A person on the personal conviction level of motivation acts according to his or her own beliefs about what is right and wrong. Of course, he also operates on the personal gain and money motivation levels, but not on the level of duty motivation. With this type of person, as long as his or her principles and views correspond with the company’s goals, there are no problems. However, if in order to achieve the company’s goals you have to ask for something from him that does not agree with his beliefs about what is right and wrong, you will face problems in managing this kind of person. For example, say that you hired a new chief accountant who is functioning on the personal conviction level of motivation, and his conviction is that the accounting department should be perfectly in order. He has his own idea about what “perfectly in order” means. You are happy about finding such a great person because your idea about how an accounting department should function means not having any problems with the IRS. As time goes by and your company becomes more structured, you notice that the accounting department slows down the company’s work flow. For example, it takes too long to get some orders written and to account for financial transactions. You decide to change the work procedures in the accounting department and find that your chief accountant, who completely supported all of your ideas before and seemed very professional to you, all of a sudden starts working against your ideas and creating problems. The reason for this is simple. He operates on the personal conviction level of motivation and is not motivated to work in the company’s best interest, but, rather, in accordance with his own principles.

In the middle of this incentive scale, one can arbitrarily draw a line between the personal conviction and personal gain levels. Above this line are people who try to do their jobs well because of their own personal desire. They are the most dedicated to their jobs. Below the line are people who, upon receiving their position in the company, focus not on how to get the job done, but on what they need to do, if anything, to receive their desired benefits. It is pretty easy to manage the two types above the arbitrary line, as they are focused on getting the job done. It is more difficult to manage the two types below the line because you have to deal with their constant calculations regarding their personal gain. When it comes to salaries, different approaches are required here. Any fair pay system suits people with a high motivation level, as they work without thinking about money. For people with a low motivation level, the pay system should be such that it encourages and rewards every correct action and penalizes every wrong one.

Interestingly, people have different levels of motivation in different areas of their lives. For example, there are many who have a duty level of motivation toward their family, and a personal gain level toward their job. You hire such a person and think, If he is so proud of his kids and takes such good care of his family, he will definitely be a good employee! But, in reality, there is no connection between the two. I have met several fathers who were loyal to their families but who could not be forced to work, even with a stick. This becomes clear when you understand how to gauge a persons level of motivation correctly.

Consider a very large group, such as the population of a country. If you traced how the average level of motivation of the Soviet people changed over time, you would find that the highest increase in motivation was during and right after World War II. According to statistics, during the war it was unusual for soldiers to get sick from common diseases, even though the living conditions were deplorable. The highest level of patriotism was also during and immediately following the war. The lowest level of motivation was right after the collapse of the USSR. The reason for this was the motivation itself. If a person accepts the goals of a group as his own, he is at the level of duty. The goals of the country during and after the war were clear and important to the majority of the people. Due to explicit threats and efficient propaganda, almost everyone understood that there was a simple goal during the war: to defeat the enemy; after the war, it was to restore the economy. After the collapse of the USSR, all the goals that the ruling party had directed people toward for decades through the use of propaganda were destroyed, but new ones had not yet been established. This is why the country experienced a period of the lowest motivation in the entire history of the Soviet Union. The country was effectively pulled to pieces. Do not think that I sympathize with the Communists. I do not. However, their use of management tools—namely, setting goals, then skillfully and persistently promoting those goals of unifying the Soviet Union in the face of mortal threat—has to be commended. During Soviet times, goal-oriented propaganda penetrated so deeply into all aspects of society that even a university thesis on mechanical engineering could not be successfully defended without discussing the role of the next Party Congress in the manufacturing of hubs and cogwheels.