Career

The 3 Motivators That Will Make You A Better Manager

Work has become more creative and far less routine, making traditional management theories outdated and obsolete. Autonomy, mastery and purpose are the new drivers that set brilliant bosses apart.

By Natalie Cornish

Career

Work has become more creative and far less routine, making traditional management theories outdated and obsolete. Autonomy, mastery and purpose are the new drivers that set brilliant bosses apart.

By Natalie Cornish

Good management used to mean incentivising staff with money and keeping a close eye on their performance. Now work has taken on a different meaning, and employees are rightfully demanding more from their roles – and their bosses.

As Daniel H. Pink explains in his seminal book on modern management, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, in the twentieth century many jobs were “algorithmic” or routine. Roles, such as accounting, where you did the same set of tasks over and over again in one set way. Then, with the development of computers and the advent of the internet, much of this routine blue-collar work could be completed “off-shore wherever it can be done cheapest” – either by low-paid workers or specially-designed software. This left “heuristic” or creative work to fill the void. And that meant a change in the work on which modern economies now depend.