When Frederick Herzberg lectured to industry, he found the audiences anxious for one thing: a quick, practical answer to how you get an employee to do what you want.
So in 1968, writing in the Harvard Business Review, he gave them one. He ran through the polite options and found a catch in each. The surest, most direct way to get someone to do something, he wrote, is to give them a kick in the pants. He called it KITA.
Then he told them about his dog.
He had a year-old schnauzer. When it was a puppy and he wanted it to move, he kicked it in the rear and it moved. After obedience school, he held up a dog biscuit instead, and it moved toward the biscuit. Most of the managers he spoke to would have called the biscuit motivation. Herzberg asked who was motivated, he or the dog.
“The dog wants the biscuit, but it is I who want it to move,” he wrote. “Again, I am the one who is motivated, and the dog is the one who moves.”
The biscuit, in his view, was KITA from the front. Fringe benefits and shorter hours were positive KITA too, and he noted that the cost of fringe benefits had reached about 25% of the wage dollar while companies were still crying out for motivation. Had rising wages motivated people? “Yes, to seek the next wage increase.”
The article’s real test came from a very large company, where correspondents answered letters from shareholders. On paper it was skilled, demanding work. In practice a supervisor signed every letter and checked every one, and almost all measures of performance and attitude were low.
One group’s job was changed. The pay stayed the same, apart from raises that would have happened anyway. The correspondents signed their own names. Experienced writers had their letters checked one time in ten instead of every time. Outgoing mail went straight to the mailroom rather than across a supervisor’s desk. Subject experts inside the unit answered hard questions that used to go to the boss.
For the first months, things got worse. The group’s performance index kept falling, which Herzberg put down to uncertainty about their new responsibilities. In the third month it turned. By the end of six months, the group was outperforming its comparison group, liked the job markedly more, was absent less, and later saw a much higher rate of promotion.
No one had waved a bigger biscuit. Six months later, those letters carried the writers’ own names.