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How do you motivate employees when your cash cow is low on milk—when there is no longer room in the budget for the usual financial incentives like pay raises and bonuses?

The answer is simple: Make work meaningful. Build on your people’s natural desire to see how their work fits in with the grand scheme of things. All workers want to feel that what they do matters to other people, that their day-to-day tasks are somehow indispensable.

To make that connection clearer for their people, companies like Medtronic (MDT) have for years invited customers to give testimonials at their annual meetings. Qualcomm (QCOM) collects and shares stories with employees about how cell phones have saved people’s lives in emergency situations. The Volvo Saved My Life …  [ Read More ]

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The question came from a guest lecture my colleagues and I gave last week to an undergrad Organizational Behavior class at Wharton. While I was there a fun debate erupted about why the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is still so widely used despite its extremely suspect validity statistics.

The argument against the Myers-Briggs is that it’s based on a Jungian theory that has never been supported by statistics or other empirical research. In contrast, the Big Five has loads of empirical support, so why wouldn’t we always use the Big Five instead of Myers-Briggs?

The argument in favor of Myers-Briggs is that lots of people already know how to use it (i.e. have paid to be certified in it).  So switching to a new test would require …  [ Read More ]

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