Five questions for Sharath Jeevan, Intrinsic motivation specialist

What motivational challenges face businesses and individuals today?

We’ve been treading water motivationally for a few years, it’s not been a period of flourishing. There is a sense now of wanting to swim again, and embrace life/work in all its richness. We work about 90,000 hours in our lifetime—only about 15% of us are motivated by our work. There’s a huge prize in making these hours genuinely fulfilling.

How did the pandemic change this?

When you go through a life and death experience, it raises some fundamental questions. Why are we here? Why am I doing this? The pandemic has made us think about the work we do, and that we don’t want to do it just for the pay check. We want to feel like we are making a difference in the world. The crisis has woken in every leader a desire for the next chapter to be different. That relates to themselves, but also how they motivate their teams. There is a temptation to go back to how things were before, but I would encourage leaders not to succumb to that.

How do different sectors respond to this?

There are a lot of commonalities—from bartenders to prime ministers—around the deep motivators, and one of those is how what we do impacts others. Results are important, but if we do the right thing as regards people, the results we get will be even better. 

How does this apply to publishing?

There is a purpose piece here. How do we best serve authors? What tends to happen in big businesses is that you become overly focused on internal measures, but if you can help motivate authors then that will help the business. One of those motivations might be around creating a feedback loop, so authors can learn from each other and their experiences. Every book has its own path. But if that fails, don’t think about it as a failure. It’s a step back in terms of results, but a step forward in terms of learning.

At the conference you will lead a session on motivation. Tell us about this?

I’m not a big believer in arriving with an answer—the experts are those coming into the room. Together we’ll develop solutions around pillars of purpose, autonomy and mastery. The aim will be to think of a way of energising teams, but also to inspire them to connect more deeply with the authors. What I’d like to come out with is a set of principles, framed in a way that can help any M&P department.

Sharath Jeevan is the executive chairman of Intrinsic Labs. He is a leading expert on motivation, direction and potential and he will run a workshop at the Marketing & Publicity Conference, aimed at helping leaders nurture and get the best out of their workforce. Heads of department can sign up by emailing  polly.smith@thebookseller.com. Places are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.