Motivating a team by hiding the Benjamins

At the beginning of ESPN's broadcast of last night's Game 1 of the NBA Finals, sideline reporter Doris Burke filed a story about how Boston Celtics head coach Doc Rivers motivated his team to make it to the Finals. Back in February, after the Celtics' only regular-season game at the Staples Center, home of their archrivals and the defending champions Los Angeles Lakers, Rivers got hold of an envelope and took up a collection from his players and staff. Everyone coughed up a hundred dollars — $2,600 in all. Then he told the team he was going to hide the envelope somewhere inside the Staples Center.

Rivers told them: “The only way you’ll get it back is if you come back here and get it.’’ And the only way that was going to happen was by making it to the Finals (assuming, of course, that LA also made it).

On Thursday, Rivers reached up under the drop ceiling in the visitors' locker room and retrieved the dusty envelope — and the $2,600 it contained.

Rivers is known for being a masterful motivator. But did his team of highly paid athletes really need to get their C-notes back? That's not the point. It certainly wasn't the money that motivated the team. By making a dramatic, fun gesture, Rivers got his players to visualize something concrete and real — a bulging envelope — rather than something as intangible as a championship berth four months in the future.

(Of course, the motivation didn't carry into the first game. The Lakers beat the Celts, 102–89.)

Here is the story in the Globe and the Herald.

What about your workplace? Is there some dramatic, fun, and concrete gesture that you could use to motivate your team? Share it in the comments below.

Comments

[Derek Irvine, Globoforce]

Great dissection of the difference between compensation and motivation. Of course they didn't need the cash/compensation. Doc understands powerfully the needs for motivation. It was never about getting back to LA to get the cash.

One thing that should be clarified (and resolves many of the problems of linking reward to performance) is the "currency" used for reward. By their very nature, cash recognition (or bonuses) are a problem as cash quickly becomes an entitlement and is easily confused with (or subsumed by) compensation. If the goal is to recognize above and beyond efforts of employees then recognition with a different “currency” than the cash used in compensation must be applied. That’s where strategic recognition comes in — giving a different currency for recognition with clearly defined and oft-repeated reasons deserving of recognition — to ensure employees know when they are being PAID vs. being REWARDED.

I wrote more on this here.

[Jay Shepherd]

Great comment and great article, Derek! Thanks for sharing them both. For another angle on the value of bonuses, see our post from three years ago about Apple's giving its employees a free iPhone when it was first launched: "Employee satisfaction for $2.40 a day."

Jay

[Todd]

Love the real example of a creative way to tap into everyone's competitive nature. One of the issues I've been struggling with is how far can you motivate C-Players? Which leads to how do you know when a performance gap is a training issue or a recruiting issue? Any thoughts?

[Harris Silverman]

The point about motivating rather than compensating is great, but it's important to remember that not everybody is motivated by the same things. A sports team is probably a lot more homogeneous in terms of personality types than most workplaces. For companies, some variety of motivators is needed to achieve maximum effectiveness.

[John Carraway]

I personally thought the whole money enevelope by the Celtics was pretty hokey. In my opinion, most people work b/c they are motivated by their paycheck. If you didn't pay them, most wouldn't work--which helps explain why so many people only do the minimum to get by. It's probably easier to get rid of C players than trying to motivate them in the workplace.

[Josephine Victor]

Nice article. Always appreciate your team members, even the small tasks that result in the leader saying ‘thank you’ can make people strive harder for appreciation. While communicating, choose your words wisely; be humble, use words like we instead of I.