Blog

Daniel Pink's Drive & The Surprising Truth About Retail

March 3, 2011 by Bob Phibbs — CEO, The Retail Doctor

I finally picked up a copy of Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us due to all the press and read it cover to cover.

Sorry, but its not applicable to most retail.

That's right I said it, not applicable.

You see, his overarching idea is that carrot and stick rewards, or Motivation 2.0 as he calls it, doesn't work for anything but routine or piece work.

Using design firms and computer software engineers as case studies, he convincingly shows that once creative types have been paid well, such carrot and stick measures hurt performance.

But here's the rub, he's talking about creative types who I expect, make very good salaries...

Precisely for the fact that retail is not creative and does not pay well, many employees are paid with a bonus structure to help reward those who do the hard job of selling the merch.

Pink talks about a need for autonomy-control over their time, mastery-seeing something gets done, purpose-something bigger than ourselves. Those are all great.

But...

You can't get past this advice from his toolkit at the end, "Pay more than average so you take money off the table... The more prominent salary, perks and benefits are in someone's work life, the more they inhibit creativity and unravel performance."

So a store that has profit-sharing is bad? 

If we were talking about the Walt Disney company or Intel or IBM, paying more than average keeps top talent from jumping ship - agreed.

But people who work retail are rarely in it for anything but the money - and the employee discounts.

I have never seen paying top dollar to someone without them being able to make sales. That is unless you were some kumbaya type thinking all employees are equal. 

Many will read Drive and think rewards, perks and commissions are bad.

But retail is a performance-based system - or it should be.

In an environment where employees are not satisfied at work, where demands are higher and work has become less interesting, we have to do something to get them to perform.

It may be old-school but commission sales can be a motivating force to reward the Driver and Expressive personalities for their risk at trying to make the sale.

In other words, you can't tap into their intrinsic need to do more without the pay carrot. That's why I think you need to commission their sales in some manner. If you want to see how I've done it successfully, go here. 

If you were trying to get employees to come up with iPad27 or a new logo design for Gap, I'd follow Pink's advice.

But if you were a retailer concerned about giving your employees 20 percent free time to not work on the floor, or even your business; expecting them to connect to a higher purpose; or paying them more in the vacuum of performance with no carrot, you might want to pick up another book.

About Bob Phibbs

---

None

Connect with Bob: