Enforcement Mechanisms
We’ve all cringed at the cliché of the United Nations sending a country breaking international laws “a very sternly written letter.” The power of enforcement mechanisms is particularly evident in most governing structures that exist above the level of the state and suffer from notoriously weak mechanisms for ensuring compliance and punishing detraction.
At the state level, enforcement mechanisms typically involve punishments like fines and jail whereas at the level of family offices, enforcement often entails withholding financial contributions. A family office incapable of using capital to reward certain life paths has very little power.
Options for enforcement mechanisms typically include:
- Rewards
- Augmented status, wealth, time, pleasure, power, or freedom
- Punishments
- Reduced status, wealth, time, power, or freedom
- Pain
- Death
Maintaining Motivation
While enforcement is often thought of in terms of coercion, it may be more effectively wielded by encouraging intrinsic motivational states. While only some governments need to optimize for high overall morale among stakeholders, any government will care about motivation—whether that motivation comes from belief in that government’s inspiring vision or the barrel of a gun.
Motivation attained through force is not effective in the long term as it naturally engenders those being forced to perform a task to look for alternatives to escape the system. Either coerced individuals flee, robbing the group of productive participants, or they get caught and are punished—often meaning they are either killed or seriously injured, which also removes productive participants from the mix. Such systems always have a “workforce bleed” making them intrinsically less effective than those focusing on internal motivation (not to mention that studies generally show motivation with violence leads to less creativity and other forms of cognitive impairment, making it poor for high-cognitive-load tasks).
How can you motivate people without violence? An interesting study on this came from Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile, who demonstrated that communicating small wins to employees significantly improved their mood. In addition, creating the perception that colleagues liked them and were willing to provide resources and advice helped to maintain motivation and increase creative problem solving and engagement.[[34]](#_ftn34)
These tactics can largely be simulated. An individual need not actually be appreciated or liked by their employees as long as there are systems in place to make them believe they are—or mechanisms that regularly remind them of the few that do.[[35]](#_ftn35) You could also map positive relationships within the company by analyzing the text of personal communications between company members and engineer opportunities for additional productive collaboration.
An area that is less clear in the research is whether self management improves motivation. We would love to say self-managed teams are always best, but the research is not clear. In our experience, top performers are more productive when self managed whereas average and below-average players perform dramatically worse when left to manage their own workloads.