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Respect outlasts pay
Founders' attention
At KKR, one reward for being entrepreneurial was that the founders liked you better and spent time with you. Scott Nuttall was in Henry's office a lot or on the phone with George, even when his title matched everyone else's, and they would mention they'd been talking to Scott. You could tell they respected him.
Why respect lasts
Respect is the part that can't be faked. It shows in whether someone chooses to seek you out in their discretionary time, or walks over to your desk to ask what you think. People want to earn that from the people they care about, and to respect themselves.
Across many layers
The founders gave this attention across many layers. One employee worked for people who worked for people who worked for them, and both still made time for him.
Why does pay stop motivating?
Frederick Herzberg's two-factor theory, published in his 1959 book The Motivation to Work, separated hygiene factors from motivators. Interviews with about 200 engineers and accountants in Pittsburgh led him to conclude that pay and conditions mainly prevent dissatisfaction, while achievement and recognition produce satisfaction. Later researchers have disputed how cleanly the two lists divide.
Can rewards make people care less?
Edward Deci tested this in 1971 by having students work on Soma puzzle cubes, paying some of them for each puzzle solved. When the sessions ended and students were left alone in a room, those who had been paid spent less free time on the puzzles than those who were not. The result became a founding experiment for self-determination theory, developed by Deci and Richard Ryan.
Did attention alone once raise factory output?
The Hawthorne studies, run at Western Electric's Hawthorne Works near Chicago in the 1920s and early 1930s, found that output rose when researchers changed the lighting, whether they made it brighter or dimmer. Researchers concluded that workers were responding to being observed and paid attention to. Later reanalyses of the original data found that the numbers did not support such a simple story.
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