Management by Maslow

To those of us fortunate enough to be familiar with the works of Abraham Maslow, this strategy makes perfect sense, as reported by Fast Company.

An excerpt.

“Chip Conley has a blind spot: The closer you work to him, the less likely he is to recognize your efforts. So Conley, the founder of Joie de Vivre hotel chain, deliberately designed structures to instill a culture of recognition in his company. Conley is the author of three books, most recently Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. In this Q&A, Conley talks about how the near-death of his business changed his outlook on leadership, why managers put too much emphasis on money and not enough on meaning, and why it's more important to climb the employee pyramid than the corporate ladder.

“Kermit Pattison: Let's go back to the dark days of 2001. You had all your hotels in the Bay Area and when tourism tanked after 9/11; you joked you were most vulnerable hotelier in the USA. How did that shape your philosophy about business leadership?

“Chip Conley: No doubt, when you're most on trial you are forced to be your most ingenious. Between the dotcom bust, 9/11, the wars, and the recession, I could see our company was on the verge of going out of business. I ended up in a local bookstore looking for a business book to help me get through it. I quickly ended up in the self-help section. That's how I got reacquainted with the work of Abraham Maslow, a famous American psychologist from the mid 20th century.

“Maslow looked at psychology not from the model of deficiency, which is what most psychologists look at, but from a best practices model: What if we study people who are fulfilled and what he called self-actualized? I liked that as a business guy so I started using Maslow's hierarchy of needs pyramid for a model of how we connect to the higher needs of our employees, our customers and our investors.

“How did that make you rethink how you manage people?

“In a recession, we all get fearful. The most contagious emotion in most companies is fear. Most companies do such a poor job communicating that most employees get stuck in a place of survival and don't have a lot of room for creativity, innovation, or ingenuity. We took the Maslow pyramid and turned it into an employee pyramid with three basic themes: survival the base, succeed at the middle, and transformation at the top. Applying that to employees, it's money, recognition, and meaning.

“Do companies often misjudge employees by assuming that compensation is their primary aspiration?

“Every survey that's been done in the U.S. tends to show money is not the primary, secondary, or third; It's fourth place on why people leave their jobs. The primary motivator of disgruntlement at work is the feeling of not being recognized. People join a company and they leave their boss, as Marcus Buckingham said. The bottom line is the ultimate motivator that says "I gotta to out of here" is not that you're underpaid, it's that you feel under-respected or under-recognized. There's a lot of research that shows that. Unfortunately, the practice of management tends to not take account of that.”