76. Everything gone PEAR shaped? Here's why that’s a good thing

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcription service. It has not been edited by a human and therefore may contain mistakes. 

 
00:00 
Dom Hawes 
Be honest. Are you happy in your work? Today, we pull back the curtain on a persistent issue that has been gnawing at the core of our profession, job satisfaction, or the evident lack thereof. A recent study from marketing Week suggests that only half of marketers genuinely enjoy their work. That's terrible. That means the other half of us are having a really tough time with it. So what the hell's going on? I mean, we got into this business because it's supposed to be fun. Like, we get to do the cool stuff, we get to be creative, we get to follow our passions. We get decent salaries, we get good career opportunities.  

 
00:40 
Dom Hawes 
Decent working conditions? No. I think it's time we address the elephant in the room, and we're about to do that. With insights derived not from traditional business rhetoric, but from the world of sports psychology with acclaimed author, coach, and psychologist, Simon Hartley. Today, Simon is going to give you a very simple way of motivating your team. Who knows? He may even be able to boost your own job satisfaction and performance. He really is that good. So don't go away. You're listening to Unicorny, and I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Today we are going to force our way through the fake facade. Up to half of us put on every day and ask, why aren't marketers happy? Marketing week ran a survey, and the results were like a bombshell to me. They found that just under half of us, we're just not feeling it.  

 
01:38 
Dom Hawes 
Not that I need to make statistics relevant to a marketer, of course, but just think about this. Think about your best buddy in marketing. They're there in the room with you. Now, according to marketing Week, one of you hates your job. That's a really sad statistic. So, have marketers lost their purpose? Is marketing marginalized? What happened to marketing's mojo? Only you will know the specific circumstances of your team. But Simon Hartley can help you model happiness and structure the way you manage your team to make their work more rewarding, more enjoyable. And, of course, that will make them better at what they do. We're going to explore two of Simon's published works today. Motivation is pear shaped and two lengths of the pool. The former details a framework you can use to improve your team's motivation.  

 
02:24 
Dom Hawes 
The latter details how you can improve their performance. Simon is one of the most inspirational people I have met in my time in business, so I am delighted to be able to introduce him to you.  

 
02:37 
Simon Hartley 
Thank you very much.  

 
02:38 
Dom Hawes 
Would you mind please, introducing yourself and telling people about who you are and what you do?  

 
02:43 
Simon Hartley 
I describe myself as sports psychology is my background. But I also caveat that by saying, I learned a long time ago that sports psychology is a misnomer. It's really human psychology as I look at it. I do sport psychology sometimes in sport, and sometimes I do it in businesses or in educational charities. But really this is about human psychology. It's about helping people perform at their best. I started in sport, you know, I worked for the first ten years only in sport, and since. Since then I've been doing exactly the same stuff in all sorts of different fields.  

 
03:11 
Dom Hawes 
You work with some interesting teams still?  

 
03:14 
Simon Hartley 
Very, yes.  

 
03:14 
Dom Hawes 
So what's on your plate right now?  

 
03:16 
Simon Hartley 
This year I've got two sort of major sports projects. One with the Fiji rugby sevens team. They have an Olympics coming up in Paris. They're quite keen on winning another gold medal to follow the two that they won in the last previous two games. And also FC Bayern Munich, which I think we're in our 6th season now with FC Bayern. So it's been incredibly interesting this year.  

 
03:36 
Dom Hawes 
And so you started in sport, you very firmly now also coach businesses.  

 
03:42 
Simon Hartley 
Yes.  

 
03:42 
Dom Hawes 
How and when did you make the leap?  

 
03:44 
Simon Hartley 
There are two elements to it. The very first time I took sport psychology outside of sport, I was challenged by a friend of mine who was a sales director. The sales director said, I've got a challenge. My team has got a sales target, which has just leapt up from a million pounds ahead to a million and a half. And it was literally December 31 to January 1. The sales target went up by 50%. He said, they only just scraped it last year. This year the conditions are tougher, the market's tougher, the competition's better. We're not plugging any more money into our marketing budget either. The problem is I don't think they can do it, nor do they can you help us?  

 
04:22 
Simon Hartley 
And my honest answer was, I don't know, because I've never worked with salespeople, but shall we just do sports psychology and see if it works? And we worked with them for about, I think, nine weeks over the first quarter of the year. And at the end of that year they all sales past their targets. I think the top performer hit two and a half million. I learned two things. First of all, that this stuff that I called sports psychology isn't really. It's human psychology. Secondly, I should have charged them on a percentage, not a flat fee. And that was its first incarnation. My interest is also taking me outside of sports. So I do sport psychology as I describe it.  

 
04:57 
Simon Hartley 
I also work with and study the very best in the world to figure out what they do differently and the principles that underpin their performance that we can then apply into any field.  

 
05:07 
Dom Hawes 
Hence the name B.  

 
05:08 
Simon Hartley 
World class indeed.  

 
05:09 
Dom Hawes 
Today we're going to be talking about marketing. Marketing in the biggest sense, the broadest sense. So not just two marketing people, but all businesses need to market what they do. I want to start with some stats that I saw in marketing week which said that just over half are satisfied, with the implication being, of course, that the other half are deeply unsatisfied or dissatisfied. And I want to dissect those. It really surprised me because most people think of marketing, and on the scale of interesting from one to ten, most people think marketing is right up there and it should be very rewarding. But it's not, in your experience, what makes people unhappy at work.  

 
05:45 
Simon Hartley 
Honestly, I think it's a shortage or a lack of the things that make us happy. When I look at many jobs in workplaces these days, it's just a long stream of things to do. And it doesn't get very far beyond that. And it's not only a long stream of things to do, it's a long stream of things to do with lots of measures and targets around it to make sure that we do more and that next week we've got more things that we need to tick off the things to do list, and the week after that we've got even more. And that's a pretty kind of dry, sanitized existence that's not very rich in terms of life experience. So I think, honestly, a lot of people probably feel like biological robots in their workplaces.  

 
06:24 
Dom Hawes 
It was very interesting in being an agency during COVID because the role changed from being something that was proactive and working in a team based environment to almost doing piecemeal work. Like you picked up a series of tasks exactly in the way you just described, and then you did them until you stopped, and then you started another list of things to do. And there was a junior who I was speaking to. I think she had maybe two or three years experience, and she didn't have the benefit of being in an office. And of course they were the people that were, I think, probably hit the hardest, the zero to three year experience bracket. And she asked me a question. She said, how do I know at the end of the day when I'm supposed to stop?  

 
07:01 
Simon Hartley 
Yeah. Interesting.  

 
07:03 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, it was like, look as if you're in an office. It's like when everyone goes home. But she was on her own, she was working routinely till 10:00 every night. And I said, well, can't you ask your, like, know your team leader? Oh, no, they will have stopped by then, but I've still got things on my to do list.  

 
07:16 
Simon Hartley 
Yeah. And my experience actually is that we could compound all of this with the frustration that comes. That feeling that you get when you haven't finished all of your stuff today. And I think most people have got a to do list that doesn't fit into the day, into the working day. So there's always some of it that drops off the end and you have to pick up tomorrow. So you don't get that feeling that you can just put things down, close the door, walk away, because you've done a great job today and you've completed everything. Because I don't think anybody has that feeling that they've completed everything today.  

 
07:46 
Dom Hawes 
To do list. It's the tyranny of the modern age. The to do list. What role do you think leadership should play influencing happiness in the workspace?  

 
07:54 
Simon Hartley 
I think it's got a huge influence, honestly. And some of the time, I think describing, for example, not just what we need to do and how we need to do it, but why it matters. I think that's part of it. Helping people feel valued and valuable. Creating an environment that's genuinely got some energy and some buzz to it, I think is massive. Giving people creative license, the ability to go and try something, make mistakes, find out, experiment with things. I think that's huge as well. One of the teams that I've been working with, the Fiji rugby sevens, we know that to perform at their best, they have to be laughing. It's one of our indicators now, we don't have a measure for it.  

 
08:33 
Simon Hartley 
We don't literally put decibel counters on this thing, but we are tuned into it because we know if they're not laughing, they won't perform. Ben, who was the head coach that brought me in first, said, if they're not having fun, if they're not laughing, they won't perform. I thought, I wonder how many other environments that's true of, and I wonder how many KPI's there are in the world. That's like a phonometer. I suspect not many. You know, how many chief executives are focused on, we have to have more fun rather than we have to churn the wheel and produce more things, you know, turn out more widgets. And it was a real insight because I think that kind of comes to the heart of maybe why people aren't necessarily enjoying their work life.  

 
09:11 
Dom Hawes 
I think in times of downturn like we have at the moment, you know the reason I'm the chief executive of my day job and I have to answer to investors and lenders and that kind of stuff. So there's kind of a table stakes, level of performance, which is what the KPI's and they're mentally waypoints, of course, not objectives, but the objectives should be great. Client work, happy people, all that stuff. And I think you're right. Maybe sometimes the short term focus on performance outstrips happiness.  

 
09:39 
Simon Hartley 
And it doesn't have to be one or the other. What the Fiji rugby sevens guys understand that this is the route to performance and if we lose this, we're going to lose the performance. This is not either or. It's not. Shall we go and have fun and play with the pool table over in the corner or shall we do the work? It's not that. This is about making sure that our environment is conducive to performance.  

 
09:58 
Dom Hawes 
Creativity or the definition of it can be interesting. Like in your experience with all the motivational work you've done and all the psychology in business work you do, when and what gives people a license to be creative.  

 
10:10 
Simon Hartley 
So I think there are a few component parts. Being able to make mistakes I think is massive. Something else I learned from watching the Fiji rugby sevens. Most training sessions, when you're coming towards a competition or towards a game, the coach is trying to eliminate errors. But the Fiji rugby sevens coach didn't at all. He was quite happy for them to keep experimenting and keep playing. It's one of those words actually, that in sport gets lost. The word play. Because people talk about performing. Yes, they talk about maybe athletes, not players, but actually in most game sports we want people to play like they did when they were a kid, play music like they did when they were a kid, you know, and that bit seems to get lost.  

 
10:52 
Dom Hawes 
I guess it's probably the same. A lot of people come to work and feel like they need a different Persona when they come to work. It's a little bit more serious, as you say. It's a little bit less playful and there's a lot of talk about psychological safety and it's okay to make mistakes, but I don't think many people live that.  

 
11:07 
Simon Hartley 
No. And going back to what were saying about KPI's and whatever lean thinking, I think by its nature eliminates margin for error. But you have to have margin for error to have license for mistakes and experimentation and creativity. If we take away all the margin for error, then we're not going to foster any of those things.  

 
11:28 
Dom Hawes 
It's a hard thing in leadership because, I mean, especially, and I keep coming back to this, but especially in a downturn, you want happy people and you want creative people, but there's a day to day reality, too, I thinking about the guiding principles of it. How do you think the principles of motivation is pear shaped? Can help us diagnose the roots of unhappiness or dissatisfaction?  

 
11:48 
Simon Hartley 
Pear shaped motivation, very simply, it's my realization that if you ask people, why do you come to work? You'll get loads and loads of different answers, hundreds of different answers. And it took me a long time to figure out that actually they all fall into four categories. They all fall into purpose, which is the p of PEAR enjoyment, which is the e, achievement, which is the a, and recognition and reward, which is the r. These are the elements that drive people's motivation. You and I won't be driven by exactly the same combination of those. I think everybody is driven by all of them, but to different. It's like personality typing, you know, we've all got different elements of personality, but some are stronger in you and some will be stronger in me.  

 
12:29 
Simon Hartley 
So by understanding those, we can also understand whether, first of all, our people are driven in different ways, and therefore we can interact differently with them, but more importantly, whether our environment's got all of those component parts or not. And if it hasn't, we can start to create an environment that is more purposeful, is more enjoyable, is driven towards people understanding their achievement and ambition, and also feeling recognized and rewarded. And therefore, if we include all of those within an environment, it's likely that we're going to get a lot of motivated people. I've met lots of business leaders who have read the Simon Sinek start with why. Understand the whole why? Probably feel it themselves because they started their business, but they will legitimately say, the trouble is, my people aren't geared that way, quite frankly. They don't give us stuff.  

 
13:16 
Simon Hartley 
You know, we churn out widgets. They're not bothered. So if we can understand that largely the differences between people can cause the cracks, that things end up falling down.  

 
13:28 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah.  

 
13:28 
Simon Hartley 
We also start to know that a boss has got to understand the motivation of their people, not their own, in order to motivate those people.  

 
13:34 
Dom Hawes 
There you go, unicornists. You thought you were tuning in for a podcast. You're getting therapy, too. I'm so guilty of that. Well, who would have thunk it? There we are talking about human motivation, but almost immediately, we find ourselves going right to the heart of one of the biggest recurring themes here on our show. That's right, it's the bloody numbers again. I never expected we'd get here, not on this show. But it does make perfect sense. Now, for those of you who are new to the show, let me explain. I don't know how many guests we've had on here now, like a hell of a lot. But it's remarkable how many of them warn against a business or marketing department that is focused solely on its numbers. And by that, of course, I mean measurements.  

 
14:18 
Dom Hawes 
The KPI's, the click through rates, the site visits, the time spent viewing, and all that kind of stuff. Now, as one guest so aptly put it, like KPI's adjust how we keep the score. They are not the game itself. The game is to create a happy customer. That's really the only measure of success that counts. So given that businesses, and especially marketing departments, are just collectives of people, it's really no surprise to hear Simon talk about the consequences of applying performance metrics to those people. It creates, as he put it, a dry, sanitized existence that's not very rich in terms of life experience, in which a lot of people probably feel like biological robots in their workplaces. Blimey, that is not a happy customer. One of the chief problems with too much emphasis on personal KPI's is it makes failure the enemy.  

 
15:12 
Dom Hawes 
By putting a number on human performance, we effectively create fear. Fear of failure. And as Simon points out, that is the antithesis of a creative culture. In a creative culture, we have to be okay with failure. Or as he showed us, we have to be able to play. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not necessarily advocating failure. And by the way, I'm not great at this myself. When you're running a a company, especially one with 200 people in it's really hard to view failure as a positive attribute. But that's why it's resonating with me so much, because I know that I need to do and better. Here on a recent podcast, we discussed whether or not marketing should be more professional, more scientific, more structured. Like, should we all be trained in a uniform way? And here's where we netted out on that.  

 
16:00 
Dom Hawes 
Our greatest strength in marketing is our dynamism. It's our ability to create the unexpected that leads to great results. In short, we are at our best when we're a creative business, and it's really hard to legislate for that. Certainly the last thing we want to do is anything which will hamper or stifle that creativity. So going back to our original provocation that half of us are unhappy, is this the cause? Are we simply not able to be creative? It was probably the number one reason that we all got into this business, to be creative, to be around creatives. So if only half of us are able to get anywhere close to being creative, it's no wonder the rest of us are feeling miserable. Let's dig into this a little bit more. I want to get into the actual psychology.  

 
16:48 
Dom Hawes 
I want to go deeper into Simon's four motivations. So let's go right back to him now and see what we can learn from his brilliant book. Motivation is pear shaped. I have to say, I love your writing style because it's easy to read, easy to pick up, and you have a very nice habit of writing books that aren't too long.  

 
17:08 
Simon Hartley 
That's dyslexia at work for you. It's got to be simple for my brain to understand it. And if I'm reading it back to myself and I use too convoluted language, my brain can't handle it. So it has to be simple. I also like short books because I fall asleep if I'm reading for too long, honestly. So, yeah, they tend to be good for me, and therefore, hopefully they'll work for everybody else as well.  

 
17:32 
Dom Hawes 
Maybe you could elaborate on the framework now and just go through the acronym and talk about the components.  

 
17:39 
Simon Hartley 
PEAR to me is a very complete understanding of motivation, and it's something I've been trying to understand in my field of endeavor for best part of 30 years. And as tends to happen, it takes a long time to see the simplicity in something. So this is really a result of me asking a question, why do you come here and do this stuff with us? And it's not the headline question, why do you come to work? Because if you ask that, people will say, I need to earn money, and, you know, we've got a roof to keep over our heads and feed kids and all that sort of stuff. But if you ask a slightly different question, why do you come here and do this stuff with us? Then you get all the different answers, and you can imagine what kind of answers you get.  

 
18:16 
Simon Hartley 
Some of it is related to purpose. People are saying, we make a difference, we make a real impact. We can see that the world's a better place because of what we do, which is great. We changed lives, all that sort of stuff. And some people really understand that. As you mentioned, we spent some time at the RNLI headquarters, during the time that were there, I got a real sense that most people in that organization understood not just what the organization did. You know, they saved lives, but their connection to it. Even if they worked in the gift shop, they still understood that what I do helps people to jump in a boat and save people on the water. So that's the p of purpose, which I think is important, but it's not everything.  

 
18:55 
Simon Hartley 
And this is where Simon Sinek and I would probably have a robust debate, because to me, that's too one dimensional. There are lots of other component parts that do motivate people. A lot of people will say it's about enjoyment. I need to enjoy the environment, the culture, the people I work with, the team that we've got, or maybe the challenge that we take on. Sometimes it's not the task, it's not that all the tasks are fun. Sometimes they enjoy the challenge and they want it to be difficult. I've come across a lot of engineers that don't like easy stuff. They like the difficult, challenging, stimulating stuff. So there's all sorts of reasons why people can enjoy the space that they're in and the team that they're with.  

 
19:31 
Simon Hartley 
The a is ambition and achievement, which essentially is an understanding that we're good at this, we're good at what we do. We might even be the best. I'm good. We're improving. I'm improving. We can see progress in what we're doing. That sense of achievement, I think, is a huge driver for many people, having worked in elite sport for a long time. There are a lot of athletes who have sort of fallen out of love with what they do. Even people that play football for a living or whatever, they get to a point where it's just a job. Salespeople, a lot of the salespeople I've met say, I don't really care about the thing I'm selling. When you dig down under the surface, what they really are motivated by is the feeling of achievement. They want to win.  

 
20:12 
Simon Hartley 
They want to hit the targets or achieve the goal or whatever. They get a real buzz from that. So that's the ambition and achievement. And the r is recognition and reward. So reward, yes, can be paying shillings and pence. It could be in the form of bonuses or commission checks or whatever. It could also be awards that we win. It can be a pat on the back, it can be a thank you. This is the feeling that we're valued and valuable. So in totality, when we bring those four together, I think we've covered off pretty much everything that drives people and motivates them in a workspace.  

 
20:44 
Dom Hawes 
And so individuals then will have a slightly different profile of what ticks for them. So for me, purpose is really important to me, but once I've got it's kind of established, and that's that. Enjoyment is really important to me, and I'm one of those people that likes the challenge. An agency comes to mind. Their strapline is simple ideas for a complicated world. They get off on taking really complicated stuff and distilling it down to simple words and pictures. Achievements really interesting for me because never operated at the kind of level of sports people that you deal with day to day. But, you know, I was involved as an amateur rower and we master row. I should say an achievement was an interesting, that was what motivated me as a rower. And went to the worlds and we did really well.  

 
21:30 
Dom Hawes 
But once we'd got there was that kind of hollow, empty feeling. It's like, yeah, now what?  

 
21:35 
Simon Hartley 
Yeah, absolutely.  

 
21:36 
Dom Hawes 
And I could see that at work as well. Like when you, particularly as people advance through their career, you know, they set their sights on something, and then when they achieve it, then what?  

 
21:45 
Simon Hartley 
This is where goals, because they're pretty temporary and transitory. If we're motivated by a goal in isolation, it's got a sell by date on it, and then we have to ask, what next? One of the traps, actually, for people who are almost purely achievement goal orientated, is that they're almost, like, insatiably hungry.  

 
22:05 
Dom Hawes 
Okay.  

 
22:05 
Simon Hartley 
There's got to be another goal. And it's quite a vacuous, empty existence just chasing another goal for the sake of it being another goal, to get another adrenaline hit or dopamine hit when you achieve it. Olympians go through the same thing. You know, the most difficult time for an olympian is straight after an Olympics, especially if they won a gold.  

 
22:24 
Dom Hawes 
Okay.  

 
22:25 
Simon Hartley 
Yeah.  

 
22:25 
Dom Hawes 
So how long does it take to get back on the horse?  

 
22:27 
Simon Hartley 
They may not get back on the same horse. They may get on a different horse. They're probably more sort of solid answer from their point of view is to feel good enough without hitting a goal.  

 
22:38 
Dom Hawes 
There's a certain type of person that thinks that every day you turn up has to be a ten, but it can't because if you do, you burn out pretty quickly. And I think someone who's achievement oriented probably feels a little bit like that. I've worked with people like that and they're very tiring to be around.  

 
22:52 
Simon Hartley 
They feel exhausted. A lot of the time, too.  

 
22:54 
Dom Hawes 
Oh, really?  

 
22:54 
Simon Hartley 
Okay. This is one of the reasons I think it helps to have a solid base for motivation. Not one strong pillar and not one pillar that you're dependent upon, but actually a really good solid base of four strong pillars. And there will always be one that's stronger than the others. You need strength in all of them because one on its own is going to be fragile. It's going to be brittle, as I call it. It can be strong, but it'll also be fragile at the same time. I've seen equally a lot of people who are motivated by the recognition reward. I've seen salespeople who hang everything on the commission check, and as soon as the economy turns and their commission checks start to dry up, their motivation goes with it rapidly.  

 
23:33 
Dom Hawes 
The checks need to get ever bigger or they feel like they're not succeeding completely. Let's turn this now. Just, you know, imagine we're in marketing leadership. So you need to structure your work environment, your practices, your policies to bear those four things in mind.  

 
23:47 
Simon Hartley 
It's not massively complicated, although it's something that you need to sort of mentally be on top of. We need to keep talking about purpose, the why as well as the what and the how, or else we just drift into an ever lengthening things to do list. And even on a daily basis, I mean, personally, I keep checking in on not just what I'm doing, but why I'm doing it and why it's important, why it matters, you know, why I care about this thing, because that brings it all to life and makes it all far more engaging. So just to be able to do that on a daily basis, and I often talk to leaders about just expanding our communication slightly at either end to make it more inspirational.  

 
24:22 
Simon Hartley 
So rather than here's what I need you to do, and maybe on the other side, thank you for doing it. That happens occasionally. What if we said, here's what we need to do, and here's why it's important. And on the other side of it, we say, thank you for doing it. And also here's the difference it made. If you think about how inspirational that slightly longer message is, it doesn't take very much more effort to do. It takes a little bit longer to think through doing it, but it's like a muscle that, you know, when you flex it, after a while, it becomes well trained. It's habit. And you start doing it on a more regular basis with teams, with individuals. Just to be able to do that a little bit more, I think makes a huge difference and strengthens RP pillar.  

 
25:01 
Dom Hawes 
I've got a good understanding of the p. Talk to me about ear.  

 
25:06 
Simon Hartley 
So there are lots of elements to enjoyment. E. It could be one of the ways that we can increase enjoyment often is to help people develop their skills. Because if you think about it, a lot of people don't enjoy what they do if they feel like they're struggling at it. I learned years ago, I was writing a fictional book, that my motivation to do it, my enjoyment of it, and my feeling that I was good at it were all very connected. When I started out, I was absolute garbage at it, and I knew I was garbage and I didn't really enjoy it. It was like wading through treacle. But as my skills developed and as I read bits back to myself and thought, you know, that's not rubbish, that bit, that's okay. That bits actually quite good.  

 
25:45 
Simon Hartley 
And I started to get a little bit more feedback on it, I started to enjoy the process more as well. And towards the end, I would actually sit down and feel good as I was writing. So to increase people's skills is one thing. If we also understand that a lot of that feeling of enjoyment comes from having a great team. Very simply, let's employ great people, shall we? Not just qualified professionals, not just highly skilled professionals, but really good human beings. Because if we fill a room with good human beings, the chances are people are going to enjoy being part of that team.  

 
26:15 
Dom Hawes 
What about achievement then? I keep talking about it because it's one of the. Again, it's one of those things that drives me. How do you create an environment where achievement doesn't become too toxic?  

 
26:25 
Simon Hartley 
I think the missing element in most environments is that we recognize our achievement. We don't just achieve. We also recognize the fact that we're progressing. I mean, so many people are busy ticking off that next thing, looking at how far they've still got to go. They're not looking at how far they've come. So just to recognize the fact that we're doing better and it might be that it's turned into a result, and we can see it on the scoreboard. It might not be, it might not have turned into a result yet, but we're aware that what we're doing is higher quality and that we're learning, we're progressing, we're developing, we're improving all the time just to stop and appreciate that as we go.  

 
27:00 
Dom Hawes 
Talk to me about recognition.  

 
27:01 
Simon Hartley 
The one easy win I think that there is within recognition is to get the feedback that comes in to the people who actually need to know, who probably contributed to making it happen. I've seen lots of organizations where customer feedback, for example, comes in and it sort of pools in the customer service team. And yet the person who actually contributed to making the customer happy never hears about it. Just getting that feedback to people more often. We were talking earlier about bosses who say thank you. Some do, some don't. There's also a really profound difference between saying thank you and thank you for tells you that I noticed and tells you what I noticed. So within sports environments, what we will often do, we'll sit down with the players.  

 
27:47 
Simon Hartley 
We've just played a game, we'll be watching the videos and the obvious things that you would think that would come up. Who scored the goals? Let's go and congratulate them. No, let's congratulate the player who ran 60 yards to stop a pass that the opposition would have otherwise made, that might have allowed a cross to go into the penalty area and maybe somebody could have scored off it. Let's celebrate the fact that no result happened out of that because somebody ran 60 yards and say we noticed. Thank you very much.  

 
28:16 
Dom Hawes 
Take that into the workplace and all those unsung heroes that do the things that don't win the pitch or win the award, but that absolutely, if they weren't there, it wasn't possible completely. Earlier in today's podcast, I surmised that our issue in marketing might be about a block on our creativity that many of us just aren't able to fulfill the reason we got into this business in the first place. But listening more to Simon, I'm seeing that my view probably over indexes. It puts too much emphasis one thing, and there's an inherent weakness in that singularity. When he examines our motivations, he is looking for balance. This builds strength. Are we equally motivated by purpose, enjoyment, achievement and reward? Of course, we will find more motivation in one of these four than in the others.  

 
29:08 
Dom Hawes 
But I really like his point about having all of them covered. Because if one declines or disappears, as in the case of the sales commission guy, motivated solely by reward, then motivation as a whole doesn't collapse. The other three factors, they're still in play. I also really like Simon's very simple advice for leaders looking to support this kind of culture. We can show people that is how we think about happiness, too. So we don't just focus one thing that is the most inspiring for us, like purpose in my case. Instead, we review things with them across all of the motivations.  

 
29:41 
Dom Hawes 
So we build on what we want them to do by saying why we want them to do it, why it's important, and then we talk to them about what they are going to get out of it, what goals this will hit, how it's helping them progress, and then coming out the other side. We don't just say thanks. We recognize what they did, how they did it, and what effect their actions are having on the world at large. And that would also be the right moment to reward them. And this is the right moment to say, that's it for part one. Look out for part two, because now we understand the PEAR framework. What I want to do next time is apply some practical examples to it and get some advice on how we make this come to life in our organizations.  

 
30:24 
Dom Hawes 
So don't miss part two. Make sure you're subscribed and it will just appear in your podcast feed, like magic. See you next time. You have been listening to Unicorny. I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Nichola Fairley is the series producer, Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor, and Peter Powell is our scriptwriter.