The Best of HBR                        
   on Motivation

It's the New Year, time to get employees motivated for the months ahead. But how do you go about creating a climate where employees volunteer their creativity and expertise? The answers, provided by Professors Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in this "Best of HBR" issue on motivating people, may surprise you.

In a knowledge economy, ideas are a company's greatest resource. But tapping into employees' creativity isn't like drilling for oil; it can't be forced out. Creativity and idea sharing emerge in an environment where employees trust managers to make good decisions and behave with integrity. Unfortunately, say Professors Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in this "Best of HBR" issue on motivating people, employee distrust and its attendant lack of engagement is a huge, unrecognised problem in most organisations. Their research into the links between trust, idea sharing, and corporate performance reveals that employees will commit to a manager's decision - even one they disagree with - if they believe the process the manager used to make the decision was fair. In this article, they explain their theory of "fair process" and how it plays out in a number of corporations.

Managers beware: people care about the decisions you make, but they care even more about the process you used to get there. This is the central theme in this 1997 article, resurrected in the January 2003 "Best of HBR" issue on motivating people, by Professors W. Chan Kim, the Boston Consulting Group Bruce D. Henderson Chair Professor of International Management and Renée Mauborgne, the Distinguished Fellow and Affiliate Professor of Strategy and Management.

Their theory, as applicable today as it was in 1997, suggests that employees will volunteer creativity and expertise if they trust managers. The best way to do this, they say, is to employ "fair process" whenever decisions are made. Fair process, which is different from group consensus, involves three key actions: 1) Engagement - involving individuals in the decisions that affect them by asking for their input and allowing them to refute the merits of one another's ideas and assumptions, 2) Explanation - ensuring that everyone involved understands why a decision was made, and 3) Expectation clarity - clearly stating the new rules of the game after a decision has been made.

In studying 19 companies, the authors found that managers who believed the company's processes were fair displayed a high level of trust and commitment, which, in turn, engendered active cooperation. Conversely, when managers felt an absence of fair process, they hoarded ideas and dragged their feet.