The 2 Authors you don’t want to miss if you are a HR professional.

As HR We enable people to work, we manage their aspirations for growth, we enable decision making. If there is any time left we think and work towards the welfare of employees and organization. Irrespective of the function we are in within HR – Recruitment, compensation, business partnering, Learning and Development, the main challenge remains to be meeting the expectations of individuals and bringing in changes to keep them happy and motivated. We sell, try to convince, bulldoze. But after all these being done, every now then we get disappointed by the so called "irrational expectations" of employees like someone is not happy with the percentage of hike  though we think he/she got a decent pay raise, we complain the business is not co-operative, lacking long term vision. It is easy to get frustrated and say we are dealing with a bunch of unhappy minds and disappointed souls which we do comfortably. But that by any chance will not solve the problem we are dealing with every day

Now these 2 authors I am talking about are going to revolutionize the whole landscape of HR thinking. Few organizations have already started embracing their ideas.

The biggest influence I think would be -HR leaders realizing the need of shifting the fundamental concept in managing people from “group of people” to “The Individual”.

The second one – HR departments are going to spend less time on mulling over bell curves, budgets or trying to make the statistics about percentage of hikes look good. Beatifying turnaround time or employee turnover. For the very basic reason that these guys are advocating the staggering theory of  “Money is not the biggest motivator.

Daniel Pink

When I started reading the book Drive – the surprising truth about what motivates us, I thought I have a serious disagreement with the author because he says money/extrinsic rewards are not the prime motivators, but as I continue and complete the book I realized – his idea is around money could be a basic motivator but what comes on top of it matters a lot to achieve excellence. Which is a truth. We don’t come to office everyday thinking about the hike we are going get after 12 months, the challenge for that day, things we need to finish, a meeting where we present our ideas matters a lot to us than the performance review at the end of the year. This theory is not far from what Maslow said - to keep it simple - we look for something else once the basic needs are met. What makes Pink great is – so far nobody dared to translate this truth so effectively and presented it to the world so far.Interestingly he mentions the example of Wikipedia  - how a bunch of self-motivated volunteer built the most comprehensive knowledge base. Would it be possible with a group of 1000 employees working for salary? The answer is no. In the same way think about the scientists who have given most valuable things to human race, did they work for salary? What motivated them??

His blog - http://www.danpink.com/

Dan Pink TeD talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y

Dan Ariely:

I first encountered his masterpiece TeD talk on YouTube and immediately bought the book Predictably Irrational. What makes him so attractive and compelling to listen/read is: he deals with the day to activities we do and the kind of decisions we take in our life. He brings out the point of “we making decisions by the temptation of that moment rather thinking long-term” so well and convincingly. Paying attention to Dan Ariely can help us do away most of our day to frustrations because he helps us understand the anatomy of Decision making, motivation. One of the cute examples he gave is “if you are passing by and saw someone who struggling to fix  car Tyre which went flat” if you are asked to help, you might consider and help. What if “he offers 1 dollar for the same?” the possibly of not helping him is 99%. The point he makes predominately is money and motivation is not directly proportionate.

His blog - http://danariely.com/

Dan Ariley TeD talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aH2Ppjpcho

Books of these authors are not expensive, even if you want to test the quality and practicality of their thoughts you can watch them on YouTube, I wish Indian universities consider including their work in the curriculum for at least HR students across India.