Why Pride Matters More Than Money The Power of the World's Greatest Motivational Force

CHAPTER 1 PERFORMANCE, SUCCESS, AND PRIDE Pride is the emotional high that follows performance and success. The more interesting proposition, however, is that simple recollections of past "wins" and an empathy for the pride we sense in others (e.g., watching a sibling receive a special award) produce an anticipation of future "successes" that motivates performance. Moreover, success is in the eye of the beholder; people view and calibrate success in different ways. Those who recognize these different connections often develop the ability to motivate people to higher levels of performance, both by the way they define "success" and by how they instill pride along the way. Unfortunately, instilling pride in others is easier to do in some environments than in others. I first uncovered the power of the "closed loop of emotional energy" in an obvious place: high-performing workforces at Southwest Airlines, Marriott, the U.S. Marine Corps, and Microsoft. Pride is a natural by-product of the successes of those organizations. It is fairly common for their managers and leaders to draw upon pride as an ongoing source of motivation; those feelings are easy to come by. Yet what about companies that have historically not been remarkably successful? Can pride precipitate higher performance in those environments as well? Certainly, the answer is yes--but it happens less frequently and is more difficult than in the perennial achievers. Not surprisingly, therefore, prospective "pride-builders" can usually learn more about how to instill the pride that leads to higher performance from the proven pride-builders in more traditional environments than from those in peak-performing environments. The difference, of course, is that in companies that experience perennial successes, pride follows naturally; in other organizations, pride-builders have to apply their ingenuity to instill pride during periods of low or sporadic business success. PRIDE GENERATES HIGHER PERFORMANCE We know that pride is a primary source of energy and emotional commitment in enterprises that consistently outperform their competition.1 While it is less obvious perhaps, we find clear evidence in traditional large companies that those managers who excel at instilling pride in their workers also deliver higher levels of both economic and market performance over time than their peers. For example, we asked the Manufacturing Managers Council at General Motors to identify twenty of the best "pride-builders" in GM's North American Manufacturing organization. Our case studies of these plant managers confirmed their reliance on pride as a primary source of motivation (described in more detail in chapter 6). General Motors regularly measures its plants on five basic elements of performance: safety, people satisfaction, product quality, responsiveness to customers, and cost. When we compared the performance of the twenty plants of those managers along each of these important metrics, their results consistently exceeded that of their peers. Specifically, the pride-builders outscored other plants on an index comparison by 83 to 65 on safety, 79 to 69 on people satisfaction, 53 to 47 on quality, and 69 to 65 on cost. Only on responsiveness did the pride-builder index fall short, and that was caused by a model changeover at one plant plus the start-up of another during this period. While it is always difficult to separate the "chicken and egg" aspects of performance results and feelings of pride, the best motivators believe that instilling pride is what enables them to get higher levels of performance from their people. Of the over fifty pride-builders we have studied during the last two years, all deliver superior performance results for their enterprise--and all attribute their success to an ability to instill pride among their people before the fact, i.e., before buKatzenbach, Jon R. is the author of 'Why Pride Matters More Than Money The Power of the World's Greatest Motivational Force', published 2003 under ISBN 9780609610657 and ISBN 0609610651.