As a leader, one of your primary tasks is to achieve organizational goals through other people.  Since you can’t do it all alone (really, you can’t-I’ve tried that and have failed miserably), part of your job as a senior executive is to motivate members of your team.  In the “bad old days”, managers and leaders relied on their formal authority roles (I’m the boss-do as I say) as the predominant way to motivate people.  That didn’t work, as any parent of a child over 3 years old can tell you. In today’s work world, many times you are working on a team that has people from various parts of the organization who band together in an ad hoc work group to accomplish a goal, then disband.  How do you help motivate people who don’t report to you?

In this 18 minute video from TED, Daniel Pink gives some surprising science behind motivational theory.  Grab a cup of coffee, soda, or water, and listen in on his TED talk. Mr. Pink is a journalist, who has written extensively about people in work, motivation, and trends in human behavior.

What parts from Mr. Pink’s presentation do you agree or disagree with?