Copyright ©, Paul E. HerrIs there a Problem? Perhaps corporate America is already optimally productive and perfectly aligned with human nature. In this case, there would be no need to muck around with a messy topic like emotion in the first place. Decades of employee engagement surveys by the Gallup Organization, Towers Perrin and others, suggest otherwise. They indicate an employee engagement crisis of mammoth proportions.
The Gallup Organization has studied employee engagement for over forty years. Gallup defines employee engagement as “employee involvement in and enthusiasm for their work.” Gallup defines its three categories of employee engagement as follows:
Engaged: Employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the company forward.
Disengaged: Employees are essentially “checked out.” They’re sleepwalking through their workday, putting time—but not energy or passion—into their work.
Actively Disengaged: Employees are not just unhappy about their work, they are busy actively acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish.
According to the 2006 Gallup engagement survey, the average percentages in the United States break down as follows: 31 percent engaged, 52 percent disengaged, and 17 percent actively disengaged.[1]
If the Gallup survey were a college exam, what grade would we give corporate America for employee motivation? Considering that only 31 percent of employees care about their work, I’d give traditional hierarchical bureaucratic management a solid “F.”
The financial fallout for failing “Employee Motivation 101” are staggering. Gallup estimates that the actively disengaged workers, alone, cost the U.S. economy 370 billion dollars in lost productivity annually and over 1 trillion if you include indirect costs.[2]
The Gallup research has identified robust statistical relationships between employee engagement and earnings per share, productivity, profitability, reduced employee turnover, and reduced on-the-job accidents.[3] The Gallup Organization concluded, “This research into earnings per share provides powerful proof that employee engagement correlates to crucial business outcomes.”[4]
The engagement research demonstrates a substantial misalignment between corporate policies and human nature. If I were to give it a number, I’d say traditional management policies deviate from nature’s optimal vector by around 70 degrees, resulting in major inefficiencies and lost productivity.
100 Best Places to Work
Companies that work harmoniously with human nature, like the companies on Fortune Magazine’s 100 best places to work list, would presumably harvest more energy from their workforces and therefore perform better than their less enlightened peers.
A recent study by the Wharton finance professor, Alex Edmans, indicates they do. Between 1998 and 2005, companies on the list posted shareholder returns averaging 14 percent compared to returns of only 6 percent per year for the overall market.[5]
What, exactly, do the 100 Best Workplaces do to align themselves with human nature? According to the Great Place to Work Institute, the organization that compiles the Fortune list, the best workplaces excel at creating bonds between employees and management, between employees and their jobs/company, and between the employees themselves. Here is how the Great Place to Work Institute describes the best companies on their list.
…trust between managers and employees is the primary defining characteristic of the very best workplaces.
At the heart of our definition of a great place to work - a place where employees "trust the people they work for, have pride in what they do, and enjoy the people they work with" - is the idea that a great workplace is measured by the quality of the three, interconnected relationships that exist there.[6]
I wholeheartedly agree with the Great Place to Work Institute—trust-based relationships are vitally important. They are the sinew of a corporate superorganism. Creating these relationships is step one on the road to organizational greatness.
Fostering pride is also hugely important. According to my social appetite theory, it is step 2 on the road to sustained excellence. Policies that promote relationships and pride feed, by themselves, two important social appetites—the cooperation appetite (Chapter 4) and the competency appetite (Chapter 5).
The companies on the 100 Best Workplaces list do a great job of aligning themselves with human nature and harvesting the potential energy of their employees. This is not to say, however, that they align perfectly. If a typical corporate hierarchy harvests, say, 30 percent of the available energy of its workforce, a company on the 100 Great Places list might harvest 60 percent. If I’m right, this leaves substantial room for improvement. Imagine what would happen if companies could align perfectly with human nature and capture 100 percent of the energy of their workforces! This may seem like an unrealistic goal, but it is precisely what I am aiming at in Primal Management.
Corporate America is Due for a Lifestyle Change
All the hyperrational business strategies and tactics in the world will not alter employee engagement scores. In fact, hyperrational business policies are the cause of the employee engagement crisis, not the solution. The ceaseless quest for the next increment of efficiency has produced machine-like workplaces that stifle human nature instead of empowering it.
The solution to the employee engagement problem is not another layer or hyperrational business strategy. The solution to the engagement crisis resides deep within the realm of interpersonal relationships, commitment, and leadership. Corporations will not make a dent in the engagement problem until they undergo a fundamental lifestyle shift—until they are born again. 21st century corporations need to reject pure rationalism and learn to work synergistically with the motivational mechanism that energizes human behavior. Cool, emotionless, machine-like workplaces are yesterday’s news because they throw ice water on nature’s elegant motivational mechanism. In addition, such workplaces are not fit for the turbulent global marketplace where innovation and flexibility are top priorities.
Emotion’s Bad Rap
The business community is partly justified in viewing emotions with distain and trepidation. Emotions are often extreme and lead to unfortunate outcomes. I’m sure you’ve had emotional meltdowns or have witnessed friends or loved ones “lose it.” Emotions can also be extreme and overpowering in emergency situations. These flare-ups can send us careening uncontrollably into an emotional pile-up. When business people refer to emotions as irrational, this is what they are talking about—pure passion without rational control.
Emotional pile-ups are just the highly visible tip of the emotional iceberg. They are memorable for their intensity and the damage they can cause to our careers and relationships. This does not diminish, however, the vital role of the larger, submerged part of the iceberg—the subtle, background feelings that ensure our survival by getting us out of bed in the morning and by imperceptibly influencing every decision and every move we make during the course of our workday.
We are not interested in the visible part of the iceberg in this book. Our target is the larger, but poorly explored, mass of ice below the waterline. We are going to strap on scuba tanks, so to speak, and explore this uncharted territory—the subtle emotional incentives that operate on the edge of conscious awareness to motivate day-to-day achievement.
Did You Hear About the Revolution?
We are not alone in our quest to explore nature’s subtle incentives. The scientific community, armed with improved brain imaging technologies and other advanced tools, is energetically exploring the same uncharted territory. The study of emotion has gone from the back burner to the front burner over the past 25 years and it is now one of the hottest fields in science. Recent discoveries in biology and neuroeconomics will greatly assist us in our quest to reverse engineer the motivational mechanism.
The scientific community gave the study of emotion the “cold shoulder” for most of the twentieth century and the business community looked at emotions as soft, irrational, and un-businesslike.[7]
I personally experienced this anti-emotion bias as recently as 1985 when I entered a PhD program in educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. When I informed my advisor that I wanted to do my thesis on the relationship between emotions and academic achievement, he said, “No way, that’s impossible here.” The Ed-Psych Department, he explained, was dominated by cognitive psychologists, some of whom denied that emotions even existed. Cognitive psychologists in the mid eighties viewed the brain as a computer-like mechanism based on pure logic and rational thought. There was no room for emotions in their Spockian formulation. These guys, I thought to myself, epitomized what was wrong with modern education. It denied the very existence of the motivational engine.
The status of emotions changed dramatically in the late 1980s with the development of PET scanners and other advanced brain-imaging technologies. Scientists finally had the quantitative tools necessary to peer into the brain and see emotions in action. The revolution in brain scanning technology sparked a scientific revolution in neurobiology, especially the neurobiology of emotion. Major universities have institutes full of expensive technology dedicated to unraveling the biologic underpinnings of emotion. The resurgence in interest in emotions is not a fad, but a tectonic shift that is going to shake our world. The latest research demonstrates that emotions are intertwined with every thought and every decision we make.
The neurobiologic revolution has, in turn, sparked a revolution in economics. Economists, working in close cooperation with neurobiologists, have designed brain-imaging experiments based upon game theory to explore the brain’s decision-making apparatus. These experiments indicate that all forms of reward, monetary or otherwise, depend upon feelings.[9] When players in an economic game plan their monetary strategy, the dopamine reward system in the basal striatum—the same brain area that processes food, sexual, and drug-related rewards, lights up on the brain scans. These experiments indicate that there is only one reward metric for human beings—sensations of pleasure and pain emanating from the basal striatum. Neuroeconomic research is putting feelings and emotions where they belong--at the core of economic decision making.
In another set of neuroeconomic experiments, the neuropeptide oxytocin, the relationship hormone, was administered by nasal spray to subjects playing the ultimatum game—an economic game where players can share a monetary reward if they cooperate with one another. Players who received the oxytocin spray were far more generous with their partners than those who received a placebo spray.[10] It is postulated that oxytocin produces pleasurable, trusting feelings by stimulating the basal striatum. These positive feelings, in turn, are thought to motivate the generous behavior—another example of feelings affecting economic decision making.[11]
The bottom line is that you no longer need to whisper when you talk about emotion in a business setting because it has finally been proven that feelings and emotions inhabit the very core of economic decision making. I will demonstrate in this book that emotions rule in business and in life because they encapsulate the fundamental survival needs of our species. In the future, managers will embrace emotions and put them front and center on the management dashboard because they are the fundamental forces that make human beings go!
The Five Social appetites That Drive Human AchievementThe goal of this book is to describe the best way to motivate human beings. We want to align perfectly with human nature and thereby foster optimally productive and engaged employees. Aligning with human nature, I will demonstrate, means aligning with the motivational mechanism and the five social appetites that power it. Employees at these firms will feel good at the end of the day—better, perhaps, than when they arrived in the morning. Pleasure is nature’s way of informing us that our actions are aligned with survival—which is what human nature is all about.
The social appetites, as described in the introduction, are simple survival mechanisms that obey rules and logic. The remainder of this chapter will describe these orderly mechanisms in a way that even an engineer, CFO, COO, or mathematician could love.
It would seem, at first glance, that “logic” and “emotions” are incompatible terms. One signifies clarity and the other implies subtlety and complexity. If this is your view, then it may need some revising. Appetites, drives, and emotions are based on a hard and immutable logic—the logic of survival. Illogical or unproductive systems don’t ultimately survive nature’s evolutionary test track.
Hunger is certainly a useful component of the motivational mechanism. The survival logic for this familiar biologic appetite is simply EAT OR DIE. Pretty clear, wouldn’t you agree?
Here is another example of survival logic. Try holding your breath for two minutes. What is the survival logic for the sensation that your chest is about to implode? The logic, again, is simple—BREATHE OR DIE. Are you starting to get the picture? Everything that is absolutely crucial for survival is governed by regulatory feelings of pleasure and pain. NATURE DOES NOT LEAVE THE NECESSITIES OF LIFE TO CHANCE! This is the fundamental premise of Primal Management, so think about is carefully before proceeding.
Regulatory feelings of pleasure and pain govern the following biologic necessities: nutrition (hunger), hydration (thirst), oxygenation of the blood (pain of not breathing), protection from physical damage (sensory pain), energy conservation (pleasure of relaxation), and reproduction (sexual and romantic pleasures).[12]
What about social regulation? Is the social domain unregulated, or do human beings possess social appetites and drives that are analogous to the traditional biological ones? I will prove that nature’s design is symmetric and that our social world is just as rigorously and comprehensively regulated as our biologic one (see Figure 1-1). Nature did not abandon the theme of regulatory sensations when faced with the challenge of producing a social, technology-driven primate. Rather, nature’s theme of using pleasure and pain to regulate human behavior was turned outward to regulate group behavior, like an appetite turned inside out. Here are five social needs that are so crucial for human survival that they are regulated by feelings of pleasure and pain.
Social appetite 1: The Cooperation Appetite
A lone human being wandering the Serengeti Plain is just lion bait. A group of human beings, however, working as a tightly coordinated team, are a force to be reckoned with. Cooperation is vital for our species and nature did not leave it to chance. Nature incorporated a bonding circuit into our psyches that I call the cooperation appetite.
The cooperation appetite is the most important social appetite in the motivational mechanism. It supplies the emotional glue that holds groups together. I will refer to it as the gateway appetite because we cannot ignite the other social appetites without first creating a tightly bonded social group, a tribe.
Cooperation is partly regulated by an area at the front of the brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, that tracks our social investments.[13] In subsequent chapters I will refer to this brain area as “the vault.” Everything into which we freely invest energy becomes merged into our sense of self, our personal identity, our vault. Consider, for a moment, the tremendous investment parents make in their children. This investment incorporates the invested child into the parents’ psychic vault. The parent subsequently protects the child as part of self. If the child is threatened, the parent feels the threat. If the child has success, the parent feels the success.
FIGURE 1
This simple example illustrates a more general truth—that the brain tracks all of our investments in children, friends, and co-workers. It even tracks our emotional investments in hobbies, pets, career, sports, and conventional assets like money and property. The totality of the investment portfolio creates our sense of self, which is something we own and protect.
Psychiatrists call this identity-merging process cathexis. Cathexis is the almost magical process that underlies all relationships and it is the single most important idea in this book. Chapter 4 will explore this stealthy and mysterious process in more detail because it lies at the core of the motivational mechanism.
This identity-merging process may explain why the CEO’s profiled in Jim Collins’ bestseller Good to Great put the well-being of their organizations ahead of their personal well-being.[14] These CEOs valued their organizations and honestly invested in them and thereby brought their organizations inside of themselves. After that, the CEO and the company were one and the same.
The neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin are also involved in the bonding process. When people show interest in us, or assist us in some way, oxytocin and vasopressin are released and we experience warm, friendly feelings for that person.[15] In subsequent encounters we are likely to work cooperatively with someone who has been generous toward us. We also experience these warm feelings when we contemplate the people, places, or things we have invested it, be it a child, workmate or family pet. Vasopressin and oxytocin are probably also involved in creating the warm family feeling reported inside great companies.[17]
Two percent of the population do not respond normally to oxytocin and do not experience warm feelings for the important people in their lives. Not surprisingly, these individuals have personality traits similar to sociopaths and generally lack empathy for their fellow human beings.[18]
Any workplace that encourages commitment and investment can achieve something miraculous: a united tribe in which each person is psychologically bonded to the group and one another. The extreme opposite is a hierarchical workplace, dominated by fear, where no voluntary investment occurs. This sort of workplace will be inhabited by warring clans who battle one another for resources.
Chapter 4 suggests a two-step process for helping your employees, and you, merge into a psychologically bonded superorganism.
Social appetite 2: The Competency Appetite
Human beings are primarily skill-based creatures as opposed to instinctual creatures. We must master the survival skills of our tribe in order to survive. Nature uses pleasant feelings of high self-esteem to reward us when we are competent and painful feelings of low self-esteem to punish us when we are incompetent. These feelings are regulated by the neurotransmitter serotonin and serotonin 2 receptors in the medial prefrontal cortex and amygdala. Antidepressant drugs, like Prozac, artificially increase serotonin levels in the brain and thereby boost the patient’s confidence and self-esteem. The illegal drug ecstasy also stimulates the serotonin system and boosts feelings of self-esteem and confidence.
Self-esteem is the highest denomination of emotional currency because it represents an ongoing annuity of good feelings about ourselves as opposed to a one-time payment. Companies that tap into this vital form of emotional currency will have happier and more productive employees because employees will receive a much larger emotional paycheck at the end of the day; the paycheck that ultimately matters to them the most.
The competency appetite does more than encourage competence. I will demonstrate in Chapter 5 that it provides the propulsive forces that make culture possible in the first place.
Social appetite 3: Skill-Deployment Appetite
Nature not only rewards human beings for mastering skills, but also for deploying them over and over again to achieve goals. Whenever we deploy a skill successfully, we get a brief euphoric high, like the feeling of hitting a long drive down the middle of the fairway. This feeling quickly fades, which is nature’s signal to do it again—deploy another skill! The neurotransmitter dopamine, and dopamine1 and dopamine 2 receptors in the basal striatum, help regulate these brief achievement-related highs. The dopamine reward system is the same brain system targeted by addictive drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine.
Type-A high-achievers live for this feeling. It’s their "neurotransmitter of choice.” Human beings participate in sports, play Monopoly®, solve math problems, and pull the one-armed bandit at the casino for one reason—we love dopamine. If a lab rat is given the choice between pulling a lever that administers dopamine or pulling a second lever that delivers food, the rat will pull the dopamine lever until it dies from starvation. Cocaine is an addictive drug for human beings because it pulls the dopamine lever—hard.
Imagine a world without the dopamine incentive. It would be a different world—a lazy world! If your workplace seems lethargic, then perhaps your tribe isn’t being stimulated enough to get its requisite dose of dopamine. Chapter 6 is a how-to guide for developing a dopamine-rich workplace environment where everyone values the corporate game and plays to win. The alternative is a workplace full of disengaged underachievers who don’t value the game and who view work as a dreadful chore.
Social Appetite 4: Innovation Appetite
Human beings are, relatively speaking, slow, weak and poorly armed. If we didn’t compensate for these physical shortcomings with technology, we would certainly be extinct. Innovation is therefore a vital necessity for Homo sapiens and nature allocated several important pleasures to make sure we do it.
Curiosity is a major innovation-related pleasure and most human beings love it. Curiosity (the pleasure of novelty) encourages human beings to explore, learn, and innovate. Curiosity motivates human beings to go hiking in the wilderness, watch nature shows on TV, conduct research, visit zoos, and go on exotic vacations. The neurotransmitter dopamine, and dopamine 4 receptors in the ascending dopamine projections, have been implicated in regulating the pleasurable sensations associated with curiosity.
There is another pleasure associated with innovation—the Eureka! moment experienced when we get an idea. I, for one, live for the Eureka pleasure. It appears to be created by mµ opioid receptors in the association cortices in conjunction with the dopamine reward system in the basal striatum. [19]
Creative employees crave the pleasures emanating from the innovation appetite and will not stay around long if they don’t get them. Chapter 7 will pop the hood on the innovation appetite and explore its component parts.
Social Appetite 5: Self-Protection Appetite
The self-protection appetite, as its name implies, is designed to keep us safe and secure. The self-protection appetite’s key component is the amygdala, a brain area that scans the environment for impending threats. If threats are detected, the amygdala reflexively triggers anxiety and fear by releasing the neurotransmitters norepinepherine and serotonin, the corticosteroid hormone, cortisol and corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF).[20] When threats are absent in the environment, a different brain area, the dorsal striatum, makes us feel safe and secure.
The self-protection appetite is the one that dispassionate, hierarchical companies rely on most. These companies, I will argue, motivate their employees using a simplistic carrot (money) and stick (fear) approach. This approach is outmoded, harmful, and creates companies that sputter instead of roar.
The stick—the fear of being fired--is easy to use. Even novices, with little understanding of human nature, can get people moving by threatening them with a stick. Overuse of the stick, however, triggers the brain’s defensive systems via the amygdala and spawns a workforce composed of enemies who work against a company’s interests rather than for it—hardly a prescription for improved productivity.
Employees bring major investments in education and career experience into the workplace, and these social assets are automatically at risk because of the ever-present fear of being fired. Investments in family and property are also at risk because loss of a paycheck would threaten these investments, too. Investments in friends are at risk because being fired might tarnish one’s reputation and therefore one’s social desirability. It is not very sporting to take advantage of employees by threatening their core investments with a stick. This Neanderthal-like approach has got to go.
Chapter 8 describes a more humane, pleasure-based alternative to using the stick. This approach respects employee’s core investments and strives to keep employees on the safe and secure side of nature’s pleasure-pain spectrum. Instead of threatening employee’s core investments, great leaders help employees protect and expand their key investments—and thereby build trust instead of distrust.
I am not suggesting that these five social appetites might exist; rather, I’m saying they do exist. The logic of survival demands them. Once nature started down the path of using pleasure and pain to guide human behavior and decision making, there was no turning back because behaviors lacking emotional incentives simply wouldn’t occur. In other words, why would the rational mind chose an option with no reward over an option with emotional reward? Answer, it wouldn’t. Feelings are ubiquitous. We swim though a sea of them every day. Every thought and every action is, in reality, emotional.
Implications of the Five Social Appetites
Please review Figure 1-1 carefully. It represents the distillation of thirty-one years of pondering emotions. Figure 1-1 depicts the guts of nature’s motivational mechanism! If the social and biologic appetites depicted in Figure 1-1 were somehow turned off, human beings would drop to the ground and remain there, motionless, because they would have no incentive to get back up.
In the introduction I suggested that companies should align themselves with human nature in order to achieve optimum performance from their workforces. Now we can see what that direction looks like—a set of five social appetites that regulate human survival and motivate every action occurring in the workplace. Companies that align with human nature by feeding these vital appetites will harvest more motivational energy than those that don’t. It’s as simple as that.
Like it or not, people focus their energies where they get the most emotional satisfaction, the most pleasure. The scientific term for pleasure-seeking is hedodynamy—the universal human motivation to avoid painful or distressing feelings and to search for pleasant and agreeable ones.[21] If business leaders want their employees to focus their energies at work, they must understand how to ignite these natural productive pleasures in the workplace. In other words, they must craft a workplace game that human beings will instinctively enjoy playing.
Companies that ignore the motivational mechanism and its productive pleasures will get what they deserve, actively disengaged rather than engaged employees. Companies that ignore the social appetites will have a hard time competing with companies full of passionate, well-fed employees.
Components of Employee Satisfaction
When employees fill out a conventional satisfaction survey, they are essentially reporting how they feel. Figure 1-1 refines the concept of employee satisfaction by subdividing workplace emotions into five dimensions of feeling.
Companies could conceivably improve employee satisfaction by feeding just the biologic appetites depicted in Figure 1-1. They could, for example, provide employees with gourmet meals served by attractive waiters and waitresses. This would satisfy two biologic appetites simultaneously and thereby contribute to employee satisfaction, but it might also distract employees from the business tasks at hand. Feeding the biologic appetites is possible, but perhaps an ill-advised and inefficient, route to improving employee satisfaction and performance.
Feeding the social appetites, on the other hand, is highly desirable because these appetites, unlike the biologic appetites, are tied directly to productive behaviors that corporations covet: innovation, skill mastery, goal attainment, and teamwork. Instead of feeding employees gourmet meals, I suggest that managers create a tribal ecosystem that satisfies the primal human desires to belong, develop skills, achieve group goals, invent, and feel protected.
Money is a Feeling-Based Concept
The default tools to motivate employees are 1) money: “do it because I pay you,” and 2) fear, “do it or I will fire you.” This Neanderthal-like, carrot-and-stick approach to motivation is crude and inefficient because it fails to fully engage the motivational mechanism.
My MBA course in compensation suggested using wages, options, profit-sharing, bonuses, and vesting to motivate employees. This book takes a wider view of monetary compensation by proposing that all compensation, monetary or otherwise, is inherently emotional or feeling-based. What’s more, monetary compensation can be broken down into constituent emotional components: 1) money in the bank lessens anxiety and thus reduces pain—a feeling; 2) a large paycheck is a symbol of achievement that boosts self-esteem, which is an ongoing pleasurable state; and 3) money can be converted into a myriad of emotionally satisfying goods and services, like a great meal or an exciting vacation.
In Chapter 9 I will argue that the concept of “economic utility”— a measure of the relative happiness or satisfaction (gratification) gained by consuming different bundles of goods and services—is a feeling-based concept, as are the concepts of employee satisfaction and employee engagement. Economic utility, I propose, can be subdivided into the ten[22] component feelings depicted in Figure 1-1—all of which are tied directly to human survival.
I will demonstrate that the only true way to rouse a human being from his or her slumber is with emotional incentives and the true paycheck recognized by the human brain is the emotional one. In other words, emotions and feelings are the fundamental currency of the human mind and this currency comes in five denominations that correspond to the productive feelings emanating from the five social appetites.
Flawed Accounting System
The business community has traditionally used a flawed accounting system to measure employee incentives. It accounts for every penny of the traditional paycheck and benefits (extrinsic rewards) but has utterly failed to account for the intrinsic, but equally important, incentives that accrue whenever human beings interact productively with one another. It makes neuroeconomic sense to consider extrinsic and intrinsic rewards as equivalent and additive because intrinsic rewards activate precisely the same reward center, the basal striatum, as monetary rewards.[23] Since both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards are ultimately based on a common feeling-metric, why hasn’t the business community come up with a mechanism to measure both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards with equal fidelity and thereby capture the overall emotional paycheck?
In Chapter 2, I will describe a more nuanced and accurate accounting system that tallies the whole paycheck, both extrinsic (monetary pay) and intrinsic (the five productive pleasures that drive human achievement). The improved accounting system involves an emotional health survey to collect reward data and two metrics to analyze the results. This improved accounting system will hopefully lead to more informed and productive decision-making on the part of management.
Pleasure-Based Management
As described above, the social appetites, just like the biologic appetites, are powered by feelings of pleasure and pain. Whenever these biologic or social appetites are fed, we feel good. In other words, we are meant to feel good every time we act in a way that serves survival, or as neurobiologist Antonio Damasio artfully put it, nature “seduces us into good behavior.”[24] . If the social appetites are not fed, we experience the painful side of the pleasure/pain spectrum in the form of frustration, depression, boredom, fear, and stress.
I suggest that human beings not only crave nature’s productive pleasures; we are addicted to them. People who can’t experience these pleasures naturally often obtain them unnaturally though the use of illicit drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine.[25] People who don’t experience nature’s productive pleasures at work will seek them outside the workplace in activities like sports and hobbies.
Companies basically have two choices for motivating employees—motivate with the carrot (the five productive pleasures) or motivate with the stick (fear). I argue in chapter 8 that carrot-based management is generally the way to go.
Implementation within a large organization
I sincerely hope that CEOs and other top executives will resonate with the ideas in Primal Management and want to implement them throughout their organizations. Perhaps the easiest way to implement these ideas is to introduce them under a marketing banner; an approach called internal branding or employee branding. Even the most traditional, risk-averse organization should respond positively to this approach.
I assume that your organization is already proficient in marketing its products and services to external customers. Internal branding takes the concepts of external marketing and turns them inward on the organization itself. Instead of satisfying the needs of your external customers, internal branding focuses on satisfying the needs of your internal customers, your employees. Just as external marketing determines customer needs through surveys and customer focus groups, internal branding uses the very same marketing tools on employees. The last step in the traditional marketing process is to devise a product or service that satisfies the customer’s needs. Similarly, the final step in the internal branding process is to design a work environment that satisfies the basic needs of your employees.
Managers understand marketing and will immediately latch onto the internal-branding concept. The internal branding approach provides a brilliant, businesslike, non-threatening format for discussing subtle employee needs. You can justify the internal branding discussions as either an employee engagement initiative to improve productivity or as a talent-retention and recruiting initiative to reduce employee turnover. All of the ideas in this book can be packaged neatly within the ensuing internal-branding discussions.
The discussions of employee needs provide a perfect segue into discussing the five social appetites that are the focus of this book. While your organization is sorting out employee needs, you will already know most of the answers. Employee needs will inevitably revolve around the primal appetites to invent, master skills, achieve goals, work as a tightly bonded team, and feel protected. You will therefore have some of the answers to the exam before the test even starts!
You can start the internal branding process by administering the emotional health survey (needs survey) discussed in Chapter 2. The survey results can be used as a starting point for ensuing discussions (focus groups) with your employees.
The internal-branding process will allow your employees to design their own dream workplace. Let them decide upon the tribal priorities, norms of behavior, and shared goals that support this dream workplace. Make this dream your brand image; the shared ideal against which all behavior inside the company is compared. The internal brand represents the core values of the tribe; its culture; its ten commandments.
The internal branding approach encourages employees to invest in and connect with one another simply by forcing them to confront tough issues--like what constitutes an ideal workplace and what values do we truly hold in common. Investing in the internal branding process may, paradoxically, create the invested bonds that make this approach so effective. The internal brand will have emotional power because it is agreed upon, not imposed. If someone falls short of the group’s vision, he or she will not only have to answer to the tribe but also to the brain's internal disciplinarian—the competency appetite.
You, the leader, will need to embrace and model the shared values of the organization, so you had better involve yourself in the process. Internal branding is not something you can take lightly or delegate to HR.
Now build your recruiting process around the internal brand image. When prospects interview, let your employees sell the group’s value system and explain why your company is such a fabulous place to work. Implementation within a workgroup
If you are a manager or supervisor within a large, traditional bureaucracy, the internal branding idea might not work for you. In this case I recommend creating a productive, employee-centric ecosystem within your own department.
If you personally apply the ideas in Primal Management by wrapping your arms around your employees and taking personal responsibility for their health and well being, I predict that your group will become markedly more productive and successful. Your colleagues may even ask for help in creating superorganisms of their own. Over time, your entire organization may follow this prescription and metamorphose into a superorganism, possibly with you as the tribal leader. SummaryWe have logically derived something VERY important in this chapter. Human beings possess five social appetites that reward cooperation, competency, skill deployment, self-protection and innovation with productive pleasures. These appetites function as an integrated system to propel human ingenuity, achievement, and survival.
The productive pleasures associated with the five appetites motivate commitment, passion, and hard work, or, as Aristotle pronounced, “Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.” Nature and business essentially want the same thing. They both want human beings to be active, productive, and to survive. Without this system of productive pleasures we would all be dead! Extinct! It’s time for companies to align themselves with nature’s productive pleasures and thereby tune their motivational mechanisms to peak efficiency.
Companies that understand the social appetites, and feed them, will have an important competitive edge in selling their products and motivating their workforces. Their businesses will resonate with confidence, creativity, enthusiasm, and commitment; precisely the attributes customers are looking for. This innovation may change how you view yourself, your world, and how you run your business. If you decide to opt in and switch to a more pleasure-based management style, you will not be alone. This is precisely how great companies become great!
If you work with human beings, you ought to understand nature’s social appetites and the productive pleasures associated with them! They make the difference between a good company and a great company. The methodology I endorse creates a rare win-win scenario for employees, management, customers, and shareholders. Employees win because their emotional take-home pay increases. They’re also more secure because the company becomes a super-productive superorganism that dominates the marketplace. Management wins because the company is more productive, efficient, innovative and profitable. Managers also win because they develop authentic relationships with fired-up employees. Customers win because they get faster, better service from people who radiate good feelings. Shareholders win because they make money. Who wouldn’t want this?
If you learn only one thing from this book, I hope it is a realization that EMOTIONS RULE in every aspect of human behavior. The rational mind serves the emotions by figuring out how to fulfill our survival needs. Managers need to be clever, organized, and logical, but equally important, they need to understand the emotional “calculus” that runs the show.
I have wandered in an intellectual “wilderness” for thirty-one years in an attempt to unravel the underlying architecture of the social emotions. I believe I have made an important discovery—a set of social appetites that control human behavior in the workplace. I believe this discovery can help you, my tribe, survive and thrive in the unnatural environment you have built for yourselves. I think my discovery can help you convert the sterile enclosures of the modern workplace into productive, people-friendly ecosystems. If you applaud this discovery, it will magically become a thing of value that will spread organically through the corporate tribe.
The intent of this book is to reprogram your perspective, your worldview. Western culture has been hyperrational ever since the industrial revolution. You and I were brainwashed with an unrealistic worldview and we are tainted by it. Once you are recalibrated and heading in the right direction, you will naturally make decisions that are consistent with your new, more realistic view of human nature. You will not need a detailed laundry list of specific instructions because once I get you on the right path, the steps forward will be more-or-less self evident. End Notes[1] “Dilbert is Right, Says Gallup Survey: A national employee survey confirms that uncomfortable work environments do make for disgruntled employees,” Gallup Management Journal, April 13 2006.
[2] Tom Rath and Donald O. Clifton, How Full is Your Bucket? (Omaha, NE: Gallup Press, 2004), 33.
[3] Bryant Ott, “Investors, Take Note: Engagement Boosts Earnings.” The Gallup Management Journal, June 14 2007.
[4] Bryant Ott, “Investors, Take Note: Engagement Boosts Earnings,” The Gallup Management Journal, June 14 2007.
[5] Alex Edmans, “Does the Stock Market Fully Value Intangibles?” retrieved on January 31, 2008 from the Wharton School Website, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=985735
[6] This quotation was obtained from the Great Place to Work Institute website on May 26,2008. See: http://www.greatplacetowork.com/great/index.php
[7] See, Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999), 39.
[9] A.G. Sanfey, “Social Decision-Making: Insights from Game Theory and Neuroscience,” Science 318, (207): 598-602.
[10] Paul J. Zak, “The Neurobiology of Trust” Scientific American 298, Vol. 6 (2008), 91.
[11] Paul J. Zak, “The Neurobiology of Trust” Scientific American 298, Vol. 6 (2008), 92, 95.
[12] In this paragraph I divide bioregulation into five basic categories or appetites: nutrition, energy conservation, protection of the body proper, breathing and reproduction. While these categories capture a large swath of bioregulatory phenomena, they are in no way authoritative or comprehensive. In other words, my categories are meant to capture the basic architecture of biologic regulation for the lay reader, not the technical nuances.
[13] Antonio Damasio wrote in Descartes Error that the ventromedial prefrontal region contains personal, categorized, information which he likens to a personal autobiography. This is similar to my view, except that I envision not just information storage, but investment storage and a sense of ownership over the investments. See, Antonio Damasio, Descartes Error (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994, 2000, current edition Penguin Books, 2005), 183.
[14] Jim Collins, Good to Great, (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 21.
[15] Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, Joy Sorrow and the Feeling Brain, (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003), 95.
[16] Paul J. Zak, “The Neurobiology of Trust” Scientific American 298, Vol. 6 (2008), 91.
[17] Both Jim Collins in Good to Great and Peters and Waterman in In Search of Excellence report a family feel inside high-performing companies. See: Jim Collins, Good to Great, (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 261.
[18] Paul J. Zak, “The Neurobiology of Trust” Scientific American 298, Vol. 6 (2008), 95.
[19] Irving Biederman and Edward Vessel, “Perceptual Pleasure and the Brain,” article on the Red Orbit website dated May 15, 2006.
[20] Scott Rauch and Lisa Shin, “Structural And Functional Imaging Of Anxiety And Stress Disorders,” Neuropharmocology, The Fifth Generation of Progress, Chapter 65, Edited by Kenneth L. Davis, Dennis Charney, Joseph T. Coyle, and Charles Nemeroff, American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2002.
[21] Yohan Castel, Psychobiologic Needs, retrieved on November 8th, 2007, from the Psychobiology Website; http://psychobiology.ouvaton.org/textes.uk/uk-txt-p04.20-besoinspsychobiologiques.htm
[22] The five social appetites shown on Figure 1-1 can explain the bulk of human social behavior, but there are actually more than five biological appetites. The five biologic appetites (regulatory systems) listed in Figure 1-1 are the main players that we are most familiar with. There are many other regulatory systems that operate completely beyond our conscious awareness. These background systems regulate things like blood pressure, blood ion concentrations, hormone levels and heart rate.
[23] Keise Izuma, Daisuke Saito, and Norihiro Sadato, “Processing of Social and Monetary Rewards in the Human Striatum,” Neuron 58 (2008), 284.
[24] Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999), p. 78.
[25] Dan Waldorf, Craig Reinarman, and Sheigla Murphy, Cocaine Changes: The Experience of Using and Quitting (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
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