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Punished by Rewards with Alfie Kohn · Disengaged

• James A. Seechurn: Hello and welcome to another episode of the as discussed podcast. If you found this interesting, please give it a thumbs up. Please subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you prefer. Today I have a very special guest, the great Alfie Kohn. Alfie Kohn published the book Punished by Rewards And this was really the foundational text, challenging incentive-based management. helps people to find this podcast. He's written extensively on education, parenting, and workplace motivation. And he's one of the most consistent and evidence-grounded critics of behaviorist management thinking over the past 30 years. If you're interested in what we've discussed today, Alfie Kohn has written, I believe, 14 books or so. of it's about parenting and education, but in particular I'd recommend Punished by Rewards, which is specifically on this topic, ⁓ also No Contest, which is about the role of competition in society and how much damage it can do. To clarify some terms that we use in our discussion, we use the term rewards frequently. what we mean by this is not just bonuses and merit pay. This really refers to anything external used to shape behavior. This could be promotions, recognition, ⁓ ratings, commission, even praise deployed strategically. The key distinction is that rewards are conditional. They're something offered by someone with more power to someone with less power who decides what constitutes good enough performance to earn them. To clarify some terms, we refer to intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation in this discussion. And for anyone that's unfamiliar with those terms, I just wanted to offer a brief explanation. Thanks so much for listening. Intrinsic motivation is motivation that comes from within the individual. It's something that the individual wants to do because they want to do it, because they enjoy the work, they enjoy collaborating, they feel a sense of mastery and purpose about what they do. Whereas extrinsic motivation is something coming from an external force, typically money or status or prizes, or to the reverse, avoiding punishment. The research that we refer to that really drives this whole conversation is that extrinsic motivators don't just fail to boost intrinsic motivation, they actively erode it. And if you're unfamiliar with this of research, I highly recommend looking up Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's self-determination theory, as well as reading Alfie Kohn's text on this in particular, Punished by Rewards, but also No Contest is a very interesting book. And I also summarized this myself in my book, What Pay Costs. To begin with, I asked Mr. Cohen about the 20th century psychologist B.F. Skinner, who is really the architect of behaviorism. This is the belief that human behavior is shaped entirely by external consequences, i.e. rewards and punishments. His framework became the intellectual foundation for how corporations manage performance, do good work, get rewarded, do poor work, get punished. And Skinner applied this logic not just to individuals, but to entire societies. And he wrote a novel that we refer to, Walden II, imagining a utopia built on behavioral engineering. If you enjoy this discussion, would really appreciate it if you could. Give this a thumbs up. Subscribe to the podcast on whatever platform you listen to your podcast and tell a friend ⁓ That would really go a long way to helping more people hear these kinds of conversations. So without further ado, I give you Mr. Alfie Kohn. James: Mr Kohn? ⁓ you today? Alfie Kohn: not too bad thank you James: thanks much for taking the time to speak. I know you have no shortage of people that want to hear from you. So this means a lot to me. Thank you. Alfie Kohn: Yes, I'm glad to do it. James: So before we get to paying the workplace and all that fun stuff. ⁓ I have ask you about BF Skinner, ⁓ who do you mean, Matt? So ⁓ I struggle to accept a view of humanity, there's something to me almost morbidly fascinating about logic of behaviorism and the he What was he like? Alfie Kohn: He was an engineer by temperament. He was always ⁓ tinkering with things. He tinkered with the idea of a bassinet for his child, and he tinkered with the idea of creating a whole society. He was, by his own admission, not a particularly deep thinker. ⁓ And he also believed that anybody who disagreed with him simply misunderstood what he was saying. And when I realized that was true, that became a kind of negative learning for me lifelong because I never wanted to be like that. James: Yeah, he sounded like a fascinating person. speaks almost with like, well, I read your interview notes with him. speaks almost poetically about his beliefs, but his beliefs are so strangely cold. It's almost dichotomous, but fascinating. Alfie Kohn: Yeah, he talks in his autobiography about having had some depression right after he left college. And he, as I put it, he found himself by losing his self and everyone else's self in the bargain. James: Hmm. Yeah, yeah. ⁓ fascinating person. I need to read his novel. I think he published a novel, didn't he, as well? Alfie Kohn: well waldon to with the novel but it was you know didactic but yeah James: Yeah. I still kind of feel I ought to read it at some point. Anyways, so you've written a lot on education and parenting which I find really fascinating. But today I'm going to pull you back into the workplace, specifically back to corporate America, which is where I spend my time. Now, the evidence against financial rewards is at this point so deep and so consistent that I personally find it quite baffling that merit pay, bonuses, performance reviews seem to be in many ways more entrenched than ever. And I work with a lot of tech companies here in Silicon Valley. So I'm not going to ask you to rehash all that evidence here. But what I'd love to do instead is get your response to some of the pushback that I frequently hear regularly when I make this argument. OK, so I think the most common one I get is when I challenge pay for performance. It's not a defense of the system as it exists. It's kind of like a promise that eventually we'll just be better at it. Alfie Kohn: OK. James: Like the problem isn't the performance, but it's that we haven't figured out. And if we get enough data and frameworks and better managers, maybe AI will get there. Like it's some kind of promised land of management theory. What would your response be to them? Alfie Kohn: well first i want to hear who's saying that if it's consultant they obviously have a vested interest in framing the issue that way just higher higher me and we'll get it right even though nobody ever has before but even if you're not a person who stands to benefit financially from this you may benefit cognitively emotionally because you're so deeply invested in the whole behaviorist worldview James: Hmm. Alfie Kohn: that it would be deeply unsettling to acknowledge what i believe the evidence shows which is not that rewards don't work but that rewards can't work the problem is inherent in the. Fatally flawed assumptions about human motivation on which all incentive plans all rewards are based but that leaves you gulping especially if you don't know what else to do. James: Hmm. Hmm. Alfie Kohn: And if you've been marinated in behaviorism your whole life, ⁓ and obviously it's not just in the workplace, it's the way we're encouraged to ⁓ think about human psychology and raise our kids and teach our students and so on. So I think it's very important to make sure that folks know that why rewards can't work. And if people say, the problem is that we're not rewarding enough people ⁓ that the rewards are too small or that people don't want just cash ⁓ that we should be rewarding groups instead of individuals or that ⁓ we're we're doing it the wrong way and there is not enough connection between the behavior and the reinforcer i could go on and on and on and i'm sure you've heard all of those And some of them are actually pair up to the point that they create dilemmas where either you're, you're, you're failing in this direction or that direction and you can't solve both. But I think the important thing to do is to acknowledge when people point out an incidental failing of the way a given incentive plan is implemented and say, yeah, you're probably right. But now let's talk about the underlying assumptions here. and why they can't be fixed ⁓ you know it's not just about talking about a given organization comp plan it's about talking about the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation and why tends to kill intrinsic no matter how it's done James: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and you get that a lot. almost like it's not that the assumptions, there must be some other form of the incentive that we're not doing. Like say like team incentive, I think often comes into it, which I do think is less salient. Therefore maybe, maybe less bad. I don't know if you'd agree with that, but it feels like team incentives aren't quite as maybe intrinsic killing as ⁓ as individualized incentives. But it's a Alfie Kohn: Right. but i don't know i think sometimes they multiply the damage by the number of people involved by creating this dynamic where people are looking for scapegoat when the team doesn't repeat its reward James: Interesting. Hmm. Yeah, that's Interesting. Okay. So, If we did succeed in stripping out some of these common, you know, uses of this mentality, things like merit based, based pay, bonus cycles, performance reviews, currently in most of corporate America, the promotion structure remains largely intact. And then the promotion kind of becomes the dominant extrinsic carrots. And then the defense would be that people, well, if you just take away merit, people would just start focusing on promotion and managers will use of that as the control mechanism. And we're just going to shift the problem from one place to another. How could an organization deal with that problem? Alfie Kohn: Well, first of all, what you've raised is an interesting question because it pushes the problem back even further. I've been saying it's not just a given incentive plan. The problem is with rewards per se. But the implication of what you just asked is that even rewards aren't the foundational problem here. It's with the idea of control. and the more an organization is about doing things to employees rather than working with them to solve problems even rewards don't exhaust the the problem here because some something else will be found to control people in many cases it's often a version of punishment which we use various euphemisms for like James: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Alfie Kohn: accountability or something like that. The first step, in fact, I always tell parents and teachers this as well as managers, is to recognize that rewards and punishments are not opposites. They're two sides of the same coin. I've been doing this for a very long time, and the one thing that's become clear to me is that rewards at their heart are about people with more power imposing that power on James: Mm. Alfie Kohn: on people who have less power. It's control through seduction, as one researcher put it years ago. And the ultimate alternative here is not only is it not just a different kind of reward system, it's not just about looking for some other way to pay people. It's about rethinking the extent to which James: Hmm. Alfie Kohn: you know american corporations are among the most totalitarian institutions ever devised creating something that's more democratic but anyway back to the specific of your question promotion should not be used as a reward not only because rewards are inherently counterproductive but because that's bad for an organization to promote people based on how good a job they did at a different job James: Hmm. Mm-hmm. Alfie Kohn: i mean you want to you want to think obvious ideally in a more democratic collaborative fashion rather than the person on top the fighting everything unilaterally about what happens to those on the bottom but you want to be thinking about who's the best person to fill this role not let me give you instead of ten thousand dollars or a trip to hawaii James: Hmm. Alfie Kohn: i'm going to give you a place presidency if you're really quick for that i mean promotion should not be a reward and so that's the separate a separate issue that should be dealt with apart from the fact ⁓ reward be it ⁓ promotion or a state dinner or a check or a patronizing pat on the head and a good job and a trophy ⁓ of these are extrinsic inducements inducement that on your mind the quality of work and people's desire to do good work James: Hmm. I completely agree. And you see it all the time. And to use your word, promotion has been turned into a goodie. So people look for it because they they need it. And in particular, when you look at the typical American corporation, the gap between the lowest paid and the highest paid, everything's become an economic event. So it really brings me to my next point. We've created circularity. We created a company format in which you have to focus on the money. and then people focus on the money, and then people point to people focusing on the money to show them that people need to be motivated by money. So how do we break free of this cycle? And I've seen some examples in smaller companies and obviously outside of corporate America and cooperative type environments. But how does corporate America break free of that cycle, given that the pay gap in particular has actually been growing over the past few decades since you released Punish by Rewards? Alfie Kohn: it by addressing the fact that a lot of people are underpaid. I mean my sort of standing on one foot alternative to pay for performance is pay people well, pay people fairly, and then do everything in your power to take money off of people's minds. And you know then I walk people through that and of course there's some ambiguity and some room for discussion about how well is well and what constitutes fairly and who gets to decide. But the punchline here, of course, is if people come to work in the morning thinking, what do I have to do to get more money? You have undermined what the late Dr. W. Edwards Deming said is quality with a capital Q in the workplace. you don't have quality when people are thinking about this tit for tat that everything they're doing is conditional you want people to come to work thinking about the task and the people they get to do it with and the problems they want to fall as soon as it becomes a means to an end the end of being higher compensation or some other extrinsic rewards for their goody you've got a problem because now you have devalued the work in people's minds it's just a means to an end it's something they can't wait to be done with so they could get the check and not only does that reduce people's quality of work but it also reduces their quality of life ⁓ obviously a larger societal issue to think about the growing ⁓ James: Hmm. Alfie Kohn: in our society including in corporations and the obscene amounts that people in the c-suites make compared to the people actually doing the work ⁓ the best companies best almost any meaningful criteria the best companies ⁓ narrowed that gap but they want to make sure that people feel that they are paid well so they don't have to think about money all the time and many surveys going back decades where you ask people what are you looking for in a job what do you hoping for what what's important to you you know people tend not to mention money at the top of the list they say things like ⁓ good people to work with a chance to be creative of variety of different tasks or not always doing the same thing and a chance to have some thing about what i'm yeah if you underpaid people so they have to struggle to make and meet and pay their bills of course they're gonna think about money and by the way all that proves is that you've been underpaying it's not at all even the beginning of an argument for rewards for turning money into a James: Mm-hmm. Alfie Kohn: a doggy biscuit you know ⁓ or which is to pay making money conditional on what someone with more power decides constitutes a good job it just says you've underpaid them but if people get enough except for a few people and they do exist who are as the sociologist philip slater called them wealth addicts for whom there is never enough money because money is actually trying to compensate for more meaningful things missing in their lives. But aside from them, when people's basic needs are met, they need a sense of autonomy. They need the opportunity to make decisions about how best to do their job and not feel controlled. They need to feel, as another researcher put it, like origins in their lives rather than like pawns. James: Hmm. Alfie Kohn: if people feel powerless don't have that autonomy they're often going to give up and just say well you better damn well pay me more you know the info it's interesting about the surveys where people say that money ranks fairly low down on the list of what ultimately matters to them about a job they want is that when you don't turn around and ask The managers, what do you think matters most to the employees? They say money. And then they proceed to manage based on that error. James: Right. you remember thinking you met Teresa Amabile Alfie Kohn: Amabile yes yes people we should over for break at the James: I'm I believe I'm sorry. Yeah, so I've never seen or never heard it said I've only seen it written down. But yeah, she conducted that wonderful study as part of her progress principle research that asked managers what she what the manager thought would motivate the individual and exactly as you described, but almost all of them failed to mention progress in their work, which was the defining characteristic of her research, which is really great. I think it was 95 % of managers are essentially wrong about the thing most important to the people that they were managing. Alfie Kohn: Yeah, right, right, right. But it's easier to do that. You know, there's other research that found that when you do simulations with people playing manager, that they end up ⁓ managing more poorly when they are asked to use incentive plans. They basically have the reward managed for them instead of doing the harder work of management. By the way, I want to say about money that if you don't have enough James: Hmm. Alfie Kohn: where you're paid in a way you think is unfair it can be motivate you a lot of people assume that the inverse of that is true and therefore more money allocated in a cleverer ⁓ fancy or newer way can motivate and that's that's just not true ⁓ there was a guy years ago frederick herzberg ⁓ James: Hmm. Mm-hmm. Alfie Kohn: may be familiar with with his work who basically whole career with basically pointing out out to little money. Can piss you off but that doesn't mean that more money motivates you in a meaningful way. The analogy i like to use this with the HVAC system in a building. You know if ⁓ if you to work in an office and it's really hot all day or too cold or the air's too dry or something that can. ⁓ interfere with your productivity but if you get the humidity and the temperature exactly right that can't read get you past zero past baseline all you can do is get to nothing and then you have to work with people that's why compensation consultants are always you know moving in the wrong direction because they're trying to persuade us James: Hmm. Alfie Kohn: that people will do better work if the humidity is just right James: Yeah, yeah, and that used to be me. Alfie Kohn: ⁓ well you get kudos for being able to have the courage to acknowledge that you were barking up the wrong tree which most people don't get that's hard to do James: Well, eventually you realize that it's not fixing anything. And you talk about engagement surveys and the irony is that companies spend lots of money on engagement surveys and it tells them all the things that you described that money's not important. It's about opportunity, engagement, really the fundamentals of self-determination theory. But then they still continue to leverage rewards to drive people. so one of the other criticism, or not criticism, one of the pushbacks is if you start doing what Alfie Kohn: That's right. James: we're talking about, which is really flattening pay and creating less of an economic event between movements around the organization. And you turn pain into a non-conversation, then you start deviating from the market, you know, that wonderful thing, the market. And many companies are so accustomed to market benchmarking that to deviate from that seems almost anathemic. You know, what do you say to that? how big a role does the market play in an organization that's maybe looking to flatten their pay structure? Alfie Kohn: Well, first of all, your company is part of the they that others are pointing to in order to justify their continued bad practices. At some point, we need to take responsibility. that's why I love to get people together from any different organizations so we can make social change together. And it's hard to be the first one. But the assumption that market considerations will drive, I mean, guess, James: Hmm. Alfie Kohn: Implicit in this is the idea that if another company is paying more for this position, that my person will leave, right? That's what we're worried about. James: ⁓ on one extreme, yeah, on the other extremes, we're paying more than we have to, which arguably is even more terrifying for some companies. Alfie Kohn: ha ha ha but the let's take the first one first if we are if with their they can get more over there and we assume people will leave then see above the conversation about how much money matters to people these are the other considerations the opportunity to have some say about what one does feeling of collaboration and community and variety and tasks and all of the rest of that and if it turns out that people one of the paid up enough to make a decent living but they're much more concerned about those other things and you're meeting those other needs because your your company doesn't feel controlling and people's basic needs for autonomy and belonging that's a competence or bet only your wealth addicts are going to leave and good ridden James: Right. Alfie Kohn: As for the other point about overpaying them, well, that assumes ⁓ a kind of troubling assumption that we don't want to hand out one dollar more to people than they could get elsewhere. Otherwise, we're wasting our money on those folks. ⁓ you know, the fact that we're not concerned about that, that we're narrowing the pay and paying people at the bottom a lot more than people at the bottom get another company's if a powerful signal of respect and trust and and and commitment to a more egalitarian sensibility that may well instill extra layers of loyalty and folks and that's money well spent James: Yeah, agreed. I think we are seeing some examples of it. think the most, you know, the stubborn area is really PLC America, with shareholders, it feels difficult to imagine that change. Do you see world where PLC America could adopt some of these principles, maybe not just, you know, the more independent founder driven companies? Alfie Kohn: ⁓ do I see a world? mean, it's, I've been talking about this stuff for a long time and I don't expect instant shifts. I think we have to, it's going to be a while to get there and we're certainly even the, the, the most enlightened and evolved corporate manager within a company has to contend with, but shouldn't be overwhelmed by a larger grossly inequitable ⁓ economic system in which we have to operate but there have been many examples where individual organizations can and make a difference and again it it gets back to not just looking at the specifics of the given given compensation plan but really in your bowl James: Mm hmm. Alfie Kohn: understanding that there isn't a single thing called motivation such that you would ask how do we motivate these employees because if you're talking about extrinsic motivation which means something outside the task like money that that tends to actively undermine the intrinsic motivation that's what ultimately what people want James: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Alfie Kohn: And the research shows that the more closely you tie the money or other reward to the performance, the more damage you do. It's exact opposite of the skinnerian behaviorism that we tend to expect. What rewards create is a need for more rewards. James: Hmm. Alfie Kohn: ⁓ because of the vicious cycle that set into motion. The more, the more you reward people, the more people lose interest in the work and then just focus on needing more money. And then the manager who set this up points to it and says, you see, that's all they care about. Yeah. Because you use bonuses, you know, because you use paper performance gimmicks, you set this into motion. This is not a law of life. This is not a fact about human psychology. James: Hmm. you Yeah. Alfie Kohn: This is an example of a dysfunctional system. James: And to that point, surely the stubbornest place for that is the sales function. And I've worked a lot with sales in my career. And if I were to go to a sales leader and say, hey, you should cancel your commission and just pay everyone a flat rate, they would probably explode. However, the sales role almost still seems purpose-built to satisfy every component of self-determination theory. You get autonomy, you get mastery, you get very strong Alfie Kohn: Yes. Yeah. James: internal and external relationships. But paradoxically, they're also subjected to the most controlling forms of reward. it the exception that proves rule? Why is it the sales are so tied to that model? Alfie Kohn: do from a superficial examination of it you can see that trying to get people to to pedal crap that folks don't need or to just focus on getting ⁓ the to buy my brand of it instead of your brand of it you think well the easiest thing to do is just to goad them you know with an extrinsic incentive ⁓ the job seems very specific and something people might not otherwise do What to do or do well without that extrinsic goal. But one of the reasons beyond that, I think that it, the behaviorism is just in its full strength concentrate when it comes to compensating salespeople, ⁓ is that the costs of sales of a commission structure are often hidden. You don't see how much the organization is losing out. James: Hmm. Alfie Kohn: When your people are focused just on gaming the system, promising results and improvements and products on a schedule that they really can't guarantee just to make it or figuring out which quarter they want to push the sales into because that's when they need to make their quota or losing out on the fact that because they're not the right match. for a given customer because they don't have the same background or speak the same language as well or whatever. In a ⁓ fully functional and an optimal organization, would, for example, pass that customer off to your colleague, a salesperson who's a better match for that customer. But if you're being goaded by incentives, you would never do that. I mean, and I've heard of it. James: Mm-hmm. Right. Alfie Kohn: organization to spoke at that organization where they got rid of commission ⁓ know it's just flat fee and productivity went up and you know the other thing that went up ⁓ was people's desire to stay in the job or to put it the other way around turnover decline markedly in many companies when you get rid of sales commission because of the enormous pressure that people are under James: Mm. Mmm. Alfie Kohn: So all the reasons that incentives, that rewards are not only ineffective, but counterproductive, doing damage, ⁓ aren't always available to us. We don't always see them. And therefore we think push them harder, dangle a bigger carrot over them, ⁓ and they'll do better. And we don't see until we get rid of it, just how much benefit it's not providing. James: Mm. Alfie Kohn: So it becomes unfalsifiable when people claim that we're just not, to come back to the question you asked at the beginning, ⁓ how we can tweak, how we can improve the reward system is the only question we ask. James: Hmm. Alfie Kohn: We will never make progress until we look at the ⁓ here of assuming, which is by the way We will never make progress until we look at the ⁓ here of assuming, which is by the way basis of all reward systems is the assumption that employees could be doing a better job, but they've decided not to until it's bribed out of them, which is both insulting and inaccurate. basis of all reward systems is the assumption that employees could be doing a better job, but they've decided not to until it's bribed out of them, which is both insulting and inaccurate. James: Mm. And with our sales function as well, at your point, all those second and third order effects. These days, sales is not transactional and simple. but now the sales model for many companies is so complex and companies are paradoxically concerned about their lifetime value and the quality of the services and their relationship with the client while also using extrinsic motivators to close deals. So I do wonder if we will see a retreat away from the traditional American aggressive commission structure at some point. I'd love to see an example of a ⁓ big tech company maybe trying it and publishing their findings. Alfie Kohn: Yeah, well, I don't know. Maybe I'd like to be optimistic about that, but I'm not sure it ever made sense. Even in simpler times, could, if many of us could see that it didn't make sense even then, and yet it persisted. And, you know, there was a huge furniture store, I know, in Texas where the guy sort of suddenly saw the light and got rid of all the commissions and people started, the salespeople started visiting. customers in their homes to see how the furniture looked. ⁓ started reading about it, taking time away. you know, used to be if it was pure, if they were just on commission, you know, you spend an hour learning about the product. That's not, that's an hour of sales lost. So people never did it. And it was amazing to see the results. Sometimes somebody would come in and he would say, you know what? don't think you need that expensive thing. In fact, I'm not sure you even need anything at all today. James: Hmm. Alfie Kohn: and customers were just so blown away by the fact that they were not getting this hard sell that they became lifelong customers of the company you know example after example after example of how even in the old days and even a non-tech you know retail establishment it didn't make sense and yet moving away from it was the exception even then so i don't know i don't know what it takes to have people you know you James: Mm-hmm. Alfie Kohn: I'm sure that in your podcast and in your writings, you can share with folks how you used to agree with them. You used to do this kind of stuff. What did it take for you to suddenly look at things differently? And then maybe that can, or maybe already has, informed the way you can persuade other people to rethink what they've been doing and assuming. James: Well, it certainly doesn't happen like a light bulb. It happens over time when I think your trust in these systems gets eroded. I think a big force in listening to you speak reminds me of Ari Kruglanski if I'm pronouncing it right. Ari Kruglanski perhaps, his theories around cognitive closure. And a lot of it, think, especially in sales comes down to this cognitive closure where a sale is a number and a number makes sense economically at that moment for that deal. And people like the simplicity. Alfie Kohn: ⁓ yeah, uh-huh. Uh-huh. Right. James: of them. But when you talk about your furniture salesman, the fact that you've got a customer for life is far more important, but much less measurable. So maybe sophistication around measurement will help persuade people then perhaps the initial one time deal wasn't serving them in the long run in terms of their lifetime value of that customer. Alfie Kohn: not just getting better at measurement, also, and this connects with what a number of people have written about, there's a great literature on this, and that Dr. Deming talked about, which is not overvaluing measurement. Deming is to say that the most important things to be managed cannot be reduced to numbers. And to some extent, it's an overreliance, this doesn't blow people's minds even more than what we've already been talking about. James: Hmm. Alfie Kohn: I Albert Einstein famously said, not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. So there are times when we need to quantify, but by over relying on that, we tend to drive our practices in the wrong direction, which includes the direction of behavioral control. James: Mm hmm. Yeah. Well, I want to be respectful of your time as well, I'd love to ask another question if you don't mind. Alfie Kohn: Yep. Let's we can do, let's do one more, sure. James: One more? Okay, thank you. we've talked about that there are so many obstacles, even when you read the data and we know the truth, that intrinsic motivation is what we should be aiming towards. And we know the truth about this. I work with lot of people, both advisors, but a lot of people in the HR profession who are faced with colleagues who have deeply entrenched assumptions about the right way, behavioristic ways to manage. Alfie Kohn: Yeah. Great. James: What advice do you have to them if they maybe are curious and they really fundamentally believe what we're saying but struggle to persuade their colleagues or struggle to exact meaningful change in their organizations? Alfie Kohn: Well, that depends on the relationship they have with their colleagues. It depends on the extent to which their colleagues are open to persuasion and to research, by the way. I would note here that I've been looking at this for a long time, and to the best of my knowledge, no controlled study has ever found a long-term in the quality of as a result of any kind of reward or incentive plan. James: Hmm. Alfie Kohn: The best you can get is a short-term blip in the quantity of work. ⁓ So I would start with that for people who claim to be evidence-based challenge them to find any research to demonstrate what we're, what we are hopefully looking for, which is quality, not just quantity and long-term, not just short-term as a result of any reward system, which can lead to people rethinking this, ⁓ but ⁓ too much depends ⁓ on Again, who those people are. If you're in an organization, it depends partly how hard you push and how you push depends on your tolerance or risk. ⁓ it depends on a lot of stuff. So when people write to me, care of my website, not just about workplace issues, but also about how do I, how do I change the minds of my colleagues when it seems such an uphill slog with, with teaching or with parenting. James: Hmm. Alfie Kohn: I can say, look, I can present you with the arguments, with answers to the challenges, and with research citations. There's a back it all up. But how you implement that and change other people depends too much on the situation and the individuals involved for me to offer much of use in a one size fits all fashion. But we should start by framing the issue. as i've tried to do here and i think you try to do to that it's not just about what's wrong with this incentive plan but what's wrong with the whole idea of extrinsic motivators and i mean the average american corporation is like a giant skinner box with a parking lot so immersed so we intended to to this ideology that it's hard for us to even begin to ask the question James: Hmm. You Alfie Kohn: And that's where you start, not necessarily, you know, in, my book, punished by rewards. have a whole chapter called, thank God it's Monday I try to lay out how to think about what we do instead, where I talk about reevaluating the content of the tasks people do reevaluating the, the feel of the place to create community and to give people more choice. I call it the three C's, but there's. before you even get to that point you have to have a reason to look at those alternatives which you don't as long as you're in thrall to the ideology of treating people like pet James: and fortunately there are examples now. They're not common. They're not PLCs. They're not publicly traded, but there are examples of companies that increasingly have very flat structures, sometimes almost entirely flat structures, very transparent pay structures. read a case study recently about a company that doesn't have a assigned CEO as a completely different concept of leadership and more democratic workplaces. There are definitely examples. It's interesting that the reaction to a lot of people from a lot of people rather is that would never work. And that almost shows you that maybe you haven't gone looking yet. Maybe it would work. Maybe it does work. Maybe where it works, those employees are very happy and that company's been around perhaps a lot longer than you have. It's just that those companies tend for whatever reason not to be publicized and celebrated in the business press, but they are out there. Well, Mr. Kohn I want to let you get on with your morning. I really appreciate the time. It's fascinating to speak with you. I think there's a whole generation of people out there that are willing and open to challenge these assumptions. So I really appreciate your time to share your ideas. Alfie Kohn: Yep, I'm happy to do it and I appreciate your commitment to helping people ⁓ wake up and look at things differently. James: All right, well thank you very much and ⁓ have a great day. Okay, take care, bye. Alfie Kohn: You too. Bye bye.