How McClelland’s 3 universal motives can illuminate your blindspots
- Behavioral drivers in business include the three universal motives identified by Harvard organizational psychologist David McClelland.
- McClelland’s motives are the desire for achievement, the search for affiliation, and the quest for power. How we prioritize them sends a clear signal to others.
- Finding and addressing a “motive blindspot” can enrich your philosophy of business.
What directs us comes from deep within, and isn’t always obvious, either to others or to ourselves. At a basic organism level, humans are driven to move toward pleasure and away from pain — but what defines pleasure and pain is different for different people, and different in different circumstances. The psychologist Abraham Maslow gained fame for his 1943 paper describing a hierarchy of human needs: physiological needs (air, food, water, shelter, clothing, sleep), safety (employment, health, security), love and belonging (friendship, family, connection), esteem (respect, status, recognition), and self-actualization (the desire to be the most that we can be). We start with the need to satisfy our most basic requirements, and from there we advance to higher and higher levels. If we are well-fed, safe, loved, and praised, we get to the final level, where we look to feel as if we are living up to our greatest potential. But what it means for each of us to fulfill our potential is different — and those differences are driven by our deepest motives, which are often hidden from our conscious awareness. In other words, they can become blindspots.
Motives in business come in different varieties. The first set to think about contains the three universal, shared motives that the Harvard organizational psychologist David McClelland has said drive all of us: the desire for achievement, the search for affiliation, and the quest for power. How those translate to the business world: achievement is success for success’s sake — launching a new innovation, making people’s lives better, or accomplishing something difficult; affiliation is social connection, recognition, love, or fame; power is control, or the freedom to act as one wishes, often represented by money. While these universal motives are likely present in some amount for each of us, the weights we give them, how we prioritize them, and how they show up in our behavior signal to others what is most important to us.
I often think about a client and friend named Robert, who commands pretty much any room he enters — tall and handsome, with a deep baritone voice. Phenomenally smart and creative, with extreme interpersonal warmth, incredible storytelling skills, excellent business acumen, and a decisive presence, Robert would seem from the outside to have every ingredient necessary to be an effective CEO. Indeed, Robert has launched perhaps twenty different companies over the years. Investors never hesitate to put him in charge, yet Robert has a long resume largely filled with surprisingly small returns and disappointed stakeholders.
Why? Though he insists (especially to investors looking to write him a check) and though he genuinely believes that he cares about making a profit, Robert’s behavior, time and again, reveals that he has a motive blindspot. His core drivers are achievement (innovating to change the world) and affiliation (working on a rewarding team), not the pursuit of financial success. When it comes to money, Robert has every reason to care, every intention to care, every desire to care — yet he simply doesn’t.
It’s not for lack of knowledge. Robert is well-versed in the world of finance — and in fact his comfort talking about his companies’ cap tables, balance sheets, and financial goals is part of what makes investors so eager to go on the journey with him. But Robert wakes up every morning far more excited about his products and his people and invests his energy there. He’s happiest when trying to solve a problem, with a team of gifted all-stars around him. He wants all-hands-on-deck meetings, strategy sessions, audacious goals, world-changing products, and broad ambitions. Those are the elements of business building that motivate him. The financial objectives are left aside. Until they can’t be anymore, and another venture bites the dust.
When it comes to money, Robert has every reason to care, every intention to care, every desire to care — yet he simply doesn’t.
This isn’t to say that Robert is a failure. He has led a life of excitement and has achieved a great deal in terms of innovation and product breakthroughs. And he has built a community of loyal friends and colleagues who would drop everything to follow him anywhere, knowing that his companies will be incredibly fun, rewarding, and inspiring places to work. But his investors have lost millions of dollars, and Robert lives almost paycheck to paycheck — because even though his motivational blindspot was pointed out to him long ago, Robert loves his life and doesn’t crave financial success enough to actually make a change. Robert’s push to achieve something new and interesting everyday has driven him to create product after product, company after company — but that motive has also made it hard for any of those companies to succeed long-term.
