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January 01, 2008

Two visions of employee motivation 

I was studying the styles of two well known executives, Jack Welch and Steve Ballmer, on YouTube. 

 

Here is Jack Welch during a book promotion interview. He presents a no-nonsense explanation of why some employees are ultimately going to go farther than others: some are evaluated as better performers than others. In other words: Not everyone is willing to pay the price needed to become a vice president.  

 

While acknowledging the need for people to work and contribute in a cooperative manner, Welch doesn’t seem to place too much hope in comraderie for comraderie’s sake. He notes that most workers probably don’t want to have dinner with the boss. (They’ve been working with him (or her) all day.) Welch also acknowledges that money is a major motivator for anyone slugging it out in cubicleland. 

And here you can see Steve Ballmer at the other end of the spectrum. He totally goes nuts at a Microsoft “pep rally”, evoking the team spirit of high school. He ends with the ovation “I LOVE THIS COMPANY!” 

 

I don’t know: maybe Steve Ballmer really does love Microsoft that much.  (He has made enough money from Microsoft over the years, after all.) But is his ebullience at just being there meaningful for other Microsoft employees? Most of them will be short-timers who never get close to Ballmer’s level in the organization.  

I tend to prefer Jack Welch’s more realistic assessment of the relationship between employers and employees. In the current age of downsizing, rightsizing, and job-hopping, the Steve Ballmeresque version of corporate esprit de corps strikes me as positively extraterrestrial.  

We need not try to make the employment relationship more than it really is. There is nothing inherently wrong with the concept of a business relationship between employer and employee, involving a simple exchange of a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. This conflicts with the visions of those who obsess about the importance of “corporate culture.” But corporate culture is far more meaningful to those at the top of an organization than it is to those in its lower ranks. Jack Welch seems to get this, whereas Steve Ballmer apparently doesn’t.