Tag: Motivation

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Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose at Karos Health

I’ve written before about a book by Dan Pink called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates. I’m a big fan of the book, and the three simple things that Pink says matter to people who are working in creative positions, or positions that don’t just involve repeating the same kinds of tasks again and again.

  • Autonomy. Ideally, over what you do, when you do it, who you do it with, and how you do it.
  • Mastery. Your abilities are finite, but infinitely improvable; improvement demands effort; and mastery can never be fully attained, which is part of the allure.
  • Purpose. Within an organization, use profits to reach purpose, emphasize more than just self-interest, and allow people to pursue purpose on their own terms.

My experience at Karos Health has been one that delivers on all three.

  • We practice Scrum and other Agile product development techniques, which gives a lot of autonomy for team members.
  • We’re always looking for ways to improve on what we do and how we do it, both as a company and as individuals.
  • People find a sense of purpose in different places, but health care is an area that delivers on that for me.

We’re looking for people to join the Karos team and help build great products and a great company. Have a look at the positions that we currently have open and give some thought to how you might fit in. Feel free to get in touch with me directly if you want to learn more, or just send in an application. It’s a fun and rewarding place to work.

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Motivation 3.0: doing more at Karos Health

I wrote earlier this week about the importance of purpose in motivating people who are engaged in creative work. Karos Health has a pretty motivating mission that easily provides a sense of purpose.

We go beyond that, though. Karos has a policy of letting employees devote a percentage of their working hours to doing good out in the community at large. That could be achieved by organizing a fund-raising event for a not-for-profit, or building a web presence for a hospice, or serving meals in a homeless shelter — it could be anything. There are only two rules. First, present your idea to the team — not company management, but the entire Karos team. Second, provide updates on your progress with your activity. That’s it.

We truly believe that allowing people to pursue purpose on their own terms, as Dan Pink puts it, is an important path to growing a high performance team.

Does that sound appealing? Check out our careers and get in touch if you think there’s a fit.

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Motivation 3.0: a sense of purpose

Some time ago I read a book by Dan Pink called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates. It’s a fine read and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in understanding how to get the most out of a team (or just out of yourself). If you want to get a taste of the book, have a look at this wonderful illustrated version of a talk that Pink gave to the RSA.

Pink identifies three things that matter to people who are working in creative positions, or positions that don’t just involve repeating the same kinds of tasks again and again.

  • Autonomy. Ideally, over what you do, when you do it, who you do it with, and how you do it.
  • Mastery. Your abilities are finite, but infinitely improvable; improvement demands effort; and mastery can never be fully attained, which is part of the allure.
  • Purpose. Within an organization, use profits to reach purpose, emphasize more than just self-interest, and allow people to pursue purpose on their own terms.

At Karos Health, last week, I was vividly reminded of the role that purpose plays.

Karos Health is about improving the quality of health care through information-sharing and collaboration amongst health care stakeholders. Among the things that our products do, for example, is moving diagnostic images like CT scans from a scanner to a radiologist who will read the scan, and moving the resulting diagnosis from that radiologist to the physician who requested the images.

In a meeting with a customer we heard that in many cases their expected turn-around time for having a CT scan read by a radiologist and a result delivered to the requesting physician is under twenty minutes. Why? It isn’t for money-related or market-related reasons. It’s because for a stroke victim waiting to receive treatment, every second counts. That’s a highly motivating purpose for us at Karos.

Obviously purpose isn’t confined to helping save lives. What’s your purpose?