Pain, Pleasure and Perspective: Dealing with Change (Part 1 of 2)
How painful is the current economy for you, for your sales team? How painful is it to evolve into a new business model, or are you even certain you need to change? Change is constant, but the evolution we need to survive is often painful at best. Photizo Group predicts that 50 percent of the dealers will either be acquired or close their doors by 2013. Learn why pain and pleasure are not the only answers for your high-impact organization to make the cut.
Pain and Fear:
Can you remember the first time you experienced pain as a child? Was it touching a stove and feeling the sudden pain of intense heat? Was it falling off of your bicycle feeling the pavement tear at your skin? How long afterwards did that pain-memory stay with you?
People, by their very nature, are experiential; they must feel increased levels of motivation in order for the catalysts of change to take root. The pain-motivator is rooted within our most primal instincts. It helps focus our attention and is core to our very survival. However, one might argue that lasting change only seems to occur with pain. Is this true?
Pain, can serve as an acute catalyst to spur violent change. We are all hard-wired to seek escape from pain. The higher the amount of pain in a given situation (whether physical, emotional, or psychological) the more we seek refuge from it. The results are generally immediate, but not necessarily sustained unless the pain is consistently reintroduced.
Have you ever been verbally berated by a boss, spouse, or authority figure to the extent you began to create ways in which to avoid it? What happened to your vision and creativity or perception your opinion mattered?
Constant exposure to pain or fear motivators begins to have the negative side-effect of diminishing the quality of performance sought as the only real motivation becomes avoidance behavior. Eventually, the human mind becomes resistant to the same level of pain, and begins to either ignore it or shut down.
Pleasure and Reward:
If pain creates a powerful, initial reaction, but then begins to negatively impact the overall quality of production surely pleasure-motivators would work, right?
Pleasure, as a motivator, requires an ever-increasing dosage to sustain a given trend line of behavior. Think back to a time when you were parched on a hot day. You were handed a cool glass of iced lemonade, and quickly gulped it down. Then you were offered another, another, and another; pretty soon, you began to get a sick feeling. What happened to that initial burst of satisfaction? This is what is referred to as diminishing returns.
This need for increasing doses of pleasure, or reward for performance, has an interesting side effect over time: ungratefulness or entitlement. Naturally, we expect more over time. However, what is often the case over a period of time, we begin to think we are owed a certain reward for the same level of performance or type of behavior to encourage the same behavior. As an example, is it not commonplace wage-earners to expect a raise each year for what amounts to tenure alone?
However, both pain- and pleasure-motivators alone lack the ability to sustain long-lasting and high-performance results. Neither option offer long-term motivation; One is a motivator which seeks to tear down the very core of positive motivation, whereas the other motivator encourages ultimately selfish behavior. Both are good for short-term gain and survival. But what of long-term gain and the ability to thrive?
Come back next week and learn how to move beyond the simple motivators of pain and pleasure for true and sustained success.
Ken Stewart’s website, ChangeForge, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology in an information-centric world. Ken serves on the board of the Managed Print Services Association (MPSA), an international industry organization seeking worldwide best practices for the managed print services industry. He is always interested in connecting with you.
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