If Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast, Then Behavior Is Lunch and Motivation Is Dinner
03.02.23

If Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast, Then Behavior Is Lunch and Motivation Is Dinner

We’ve all heard it before, right? That culture eats strategy for breakfast. Regardless of the origin of the quote (which is commonly attributed to Mark Fields of the Ford Motor Company or management author Peter Drucker) — the idea that culture and strategy are key components of business success remains a serious concept in modern management thinking.

In our last post, 5 Behaviors for Landing Top Outdoor and Active Lifestyle Industry Talent, we stressed that certain behaviors are likely to have an impact on your success in hiring and retaining the top talent inside and outside the sporting goods, active lifestyle, and outdoor industries.

In today’s post, we want to focus on motivation — the force that drives a person to act or behave in a certain way — which is something that easily gets lost in the rollup to making a key executive hire in the sporting goods, active lifestyle, and outdoor industries. Understanding motivation is essential for choosing the right candidate, because the wrong motivations are destined to result in a long process and misaligned intentions. Motivation is a tentpole for almost everything that occurs within the candidate realm of executive search. In fact, that insight into a candidate’s motivation is why our clients rely on Highline Outdoor Group.

In a perfect world, among the many things we do, we seek to match a company’s needs with a prospective candidate’s motivations — personal, professional, and financial. Only when we understand and evaluate all three are we comfortable recommending a candidate for a key executive position at a client company.

A Parable for Motivation in The Context of Recruiting

Taking a step back for a moment — and please humor us here….

When we think about motivation in the context of recruiting and hiring candidates to fill key positions in an organization, we are often reminded of the Broadway Musical Annie. For those of you who’ve never seen the production, it’s the story of a young girl who gets rescued from an orphanage by a wealthy businessman who adopts her during the depression. The little girl goes from rationed meals and squalid living conditions to having servants meet her every need in a cavernous mansion.

However, while the wealthy businessman provided for any and all of her material needs, the little girl was still willing to leave him because he failed to give her what she desired most — a family. Consumed with work, he wasn’t there for her. He never asked her what was important to her; he just showered her with material things — what he assumed she wanted.

It wasn’t until he tried to find her birth parents that he discovered her real desire was to be part of a family. His willingness to help her find her birth parents (who had died many years earlier) gave her that sense of father and family she wanted so much. In the end (spoiler alert) she grew motivated to stay with him — not for the money or material things he could provide her but for the love and devotion he showed her.

Keeping the story of Annie in mind, when you’re screening candidates, beware of the good and bad motivations we describe next.

Good Motivations

When candidates are seeking a change in position for the right reasons, they may express one or more of the following motivations:

  • I’m underutilized (or there’s a lack of recognition for the role I play). This shows that the candidate has more to offer and the drive to accomplish more.
  • My current position doesn’t conform with my ideal geography. The candidate may have a long commute, young children, or aging parents to which they want to be close. This shows that the candidate is struggling to achieve a healthy work-life rhythm that would likely result in positive outcomes for both the candidate and their chosen organization.
  • There is a barrier to my career advancement. This happens frequently when the opportunity for promotion is unlikely because the executive currently in the role is at the top and unlikely to leave or change positions.
  • My ideas are not asked for (or welcome) and that’s unfulfilling for me. Assuming the candidate has ideas that you find interesting, the fact that another organization (possibly your competitor) is ignoring or dismissing them could be in your organization’s favor.
  • There’s a change of ownership/control. For example, the candidate’s current company is going from a family-owned company to a private equity owned scenario. This is a very valid motivation. Some people strongly prefer working in a specific environment, and when it changes, they want to move to a position where they feel supported, safer, happier, and more productive.

Bad Motivations

When a candidate desires or is willing to leave an existing position to pursue an opportunity with your outdoor, active lifestyle, or sporting goods business, you need to find out why. They could be seeking a change for the wrong reasons. Here are a few reasons that may be cause for concern:

  • I don’t like my boss. This motivation raises a yellow flag. Candidates must have the emotional intelligence to successfully manage typical relationship issues in the workplace. However, a candidate shouldn’t be excluded for refusing to tolerate an abusive workplace situation. Try to find out whether the candidate has a pattern of conflict with supervisors or coworkers.
  • I’m not compensated as well as I should be. If compensation is the primary motivation for seeking a new job at the executive level, you should have concerns. A meta-analysis by Tim Judge and colleagues for the Journal of Vocational Behavior (PDF) indicates that the relationship between pay and job satisfaction is very weak and that people’s satisfaction with their salary is mostly independent of their actual salary. There is no consensus about the degree to which higher pay may demotivate, but a meta-analysis of 128 controlled experiments shows that incentives decrease intrinsic motivation by 25 percent for interesting tasks and by 36 percent for tangible and foreseeable rewards. Higher financial rewards inhibit intrinsic motivation and job performance because people focus less on satisfying their intellectual curiosity.
  • I don’t want to go to an office. This motivation has some nuance to it and requires a deeper understanding of the individual’s situation. While working from home was never a long-term solution, the pandemic made it all but impossible not to do so. Now that business is returning to normal, having executive team members in-house is the order of the day. In this post-pandemic world, business organizations want to re-engage their people more fully by having them on site. It speaks to an organization’s culture, best practices for innovation, and the speed of transaction — the pace at which decisions can be made when people are together in same the room or in proximity to one another. When someone doesn’t want to engage in person, it’s fair to question their motivation when juxtaposed against the needs of the business and its corporate culture. That said, there is some flexibility around this issue as the last three years have shown us. If work from home is the stated primary motivator, that would be more of a concern than someone who simply wants flexibility.

The Bottom Line on Motivation

If you accept the premise that culture eats strategy for breakfast, then you need to focus on behaviors and motivation, especially when it comes to recruitment and retention. Culture is a product of the collective behaviors of everyone in the organization, and motivation is at the root of those behaviors.

When evaluating candidates, especially to fill C-suite openings, you know their behaviors: They’re looking to change careers, positions, or organizations. You need to look past those behaviors to identify and evaluate what’s motivating their desire for change. It could be good or bad for your organization overall. Be sure your screening process includes a careful examination of each candidate’s motivation.

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