This is the second of two postings related to Cooliris, a Silicon Valley software startup I learned about during a presentation at Stanford’s d.school. What’s unique about Cooliris is the way they involve student interns. These interns are among the most committed and hardworking people I’ve ever encountered. I think every business owner, leader, and parent should do their best to understand and clone Cooliris’ success with people. 

In my first post, I described what Cooliris does to engage Personal Motivation (Source 1). This time, I’ll look at the role Social Motivation & Ability (Sources 3 & 4) play at Cooliris.

SOURCE 3: Social Motivation: Do others—peers, managers, friends, relatives—provide sources of motivation to perform necessary vital behaviors?

First, let’s be clear: Cooliris is “cool.” Attending parties at Cooliris is cool; the Cooliris founders, managers, and employees are cool; and students who care about being cool want to be a part of it. But “cool” is just a label. What is it that makes Cooliris cool? A part of it is their product, but the rest of the cool factor stems from three sources: the managers, their teammates, and the customers they support.

Cooliris managers: The students clearly have a lot of respect for the Cooliris founders and employees. These leaders have created something from nothing purely through their hard work and ingenuity. And these same leaders give students an amazing level of recognition and appreciation for their work. I bet these students remember every time a Cooliris leader takes the time to listen to them, cares enough to coach them, and values them enough to praise them. What’s the ultimate reward? Imagine being a student intern and having the founder of your firm invite you to present your project to entrepreneurs and faculty at Stanford’s d.school. That’s what we witnessed, and it was amazing.

Student Peers: How did the students first encounter Cooliris? Through other students, of course. They were invited to parties at the Cooliris headquarters, where they were invited to join a team. My bet is that you won’t find many Cooliris interns working solo. They’ve created a fun happy family. In fact, their family is so seductive that parents began to worry that their sons and daughters weren’t spending enough time at their studies. In response, Cooliris invited parents to their headquarters so they could see the work and learning their children were accomplishing.

A quick note here on what some readers might see as “manipulation” or “taking advantage of” student interns. The student interns at Cooliris are learning more than they could in most any Stanford class, and the students know it. I think everyone is benefiting from the incredible opportunities.

Customers: One of the interns who manages a help desk laughingly described her customers. We all want our customers to be “surprised and delighted,” but how many of your customers are delighted enough to propose marriage? That’s got to be rewarding. These students are immersed in immediate customer feedback—nearly all of it positive. In addition, they’re empowered enough so they can legitimately take credit for a lot of their customers’ great experiences.

SOURCE 4 Social Ability: Do others provide the resources and assistance required for the person to perform the vital behaviors?

Again, I bet there aren’t many Cooliris interns working solo. Given that there seems to be little in the way of formal education or training, learning and creation happens within the project teams. People help each other. The pre-admission project was the picture of supportive teamwork. One team member had the idea to shift their outreach strategy from groups to events; another recognized the pre-admission weekend as the perfect event; and they all dropped whatever their weekend plans had been to support the team effort.

Cooliris is a nice example of positive deviance. No, I’m not talking about deviants working with student interns. I’m talking about a leadership team that has created an unnatural level of engagement and commitment. Cooliris is an example we can all learn from.

If you want to be cool, check out Cooliris. Their products are exciting, and their company is even more exciting. I learned about Cooliris last week at the Creating Infectious Engagement conference hosted by Stanford’s d.school.

Cooliris leaders described how they engage Stanford undergraduate interns in their development, testing, and marketing functions. The students led about half of the presentation, and they were amazing. They showed levels of engagement, creativity, and effort any firm would kill for—and they were doing this as volunteers.

I want to take a couple of blogs to describe how Cooliris builds and maintains this level of engagement. In today’s post I’ll focus on how they engage students’ Personal Motivation.

Source 1: Personal Motivation: Do people derive enjoyment, fulfillment, identity, or self respect from the Vital Behaviors?

Tough tasks—The interns described waking up in the middle of the night with ideas, then working from midnight until 3 am to get them on paper. They described getting an idea on Friday night, calling the other volunteers on their team, and having all of them drop their weekend plans to put the idea into practice. And a lot of the tasks sounded fairly tough—as in approaching hundreds of strangers, taking their pictures, making sure each person takes a business card, then loading all the photos onto a Web site that night. This level of commitment doesn’t stem from the tasks being fun.

Identity—Here is the magic. In crucial moments when an intern decides whether to work in the middle of the night, to give up her weekend, or to perform any number of unpleasant tasks, she doesn’t think of the tasks as “beneath her” or as “mind numbing.” Instead, she takes pride in them. These tasks define her as an entrepreneur, as charitable, and as smart and creative.

Entrepreneurial: Cooliris is the epitome of an entrepreneurial company. Being a part of its success makes these students entrepreneurs—and defines their actions as what it means to be an entrepreneur. This invests all of their actions with special meaning.

Charitable: it’s very clear that students are providing value for no monetary gain. For many, this is probably the most valuable donation they’ve ever been able to give to any cause. They believe in the Cooliris cause, so their generosity contributes to their self respect.

Smart & Creative: students are creating real value by translating their good ideas into concrete actions and results.

Flow—The students’ projects have all the ingredients to encourage what the psychologist, Mihalyi Chicksentmihi , calls “flow.” These include reasonably challenging goals, control over their part of the project, and clear, frequent feedback. These are the elements found in most popular games. The challenge, feedback, and improvement make the tasks engrossing, rewarding, and fun.

What does Cooliris do to engage these sources of personal motivation? They invite the students in. They may have some kind of selection process that puts value on the students. They give the students a lot of free reign, so that each can take responsibility for, and gain self respect from his or her accomplishments. At the same time they provide enough structure so that inexperienced students don’t fail too often or become lost in lengthy or unfinished projects that lack meaning.

Cooliris has done an amazing job of engaging students’ personal motivation, but they do far more than this.  Some of the most powerful reasons the students are so committed involve the social parts of the job. In my next post I’ll describe how Cooliris makes working there cool—how they create teams that rival a family’s pull and attraction.

Personal motivation, a passion to change, is essential whenever you’re up against persistent, resistant problems. In fact, it’s the only common success factor across a wide variety of psychotherapies. You can treat an addiction or stubborn personal habit in many different ways, but none of them will succeed unless they somehow stimulate the individual’s desires, values, or moral imperatives to change. People need to have a personal reason to want to change or they won’t.
 
So, how can you motivate someone who isn’t motivated? The short answer is, “You can’t.” That’s the bad news. The good news is that people are always motivated. They just aren’t always motivated to do what we want them to do. The key is to tap into their existing values, rather than trying to create new ones.

Psychotherapists as varied as Sigmund Freud, Carl Rogers, Aaron Beck, and William Miller have all employed careful questions to help people discover their values on their own. They’ve used their ears instead of their mouths as their preferred influence tool. In this post I’ll share a couple of examples of how to use this approach.

William Miller calls his technique “motivational interviewing,” and I find it curiously powerful with both teenagers and senior leaders—as well as with most people in between. It avoids lectures, sermons, and data dumps—the strategies many of us gravitate to—in favor of questioning and listening. In this post, I’ll give a teenager example. In my next, I’ll show how I use this method with senior leaders.

A Teenager Example. Your son doesn’t like school, doesn’t like homework, doesn’t read much, and avoids everything that smacks of self improvement. It’s tempting to resort to nags and rants. Have you ever done this? I know I have. So, what would William Miller have you do instead?

He’d have you ask your son about his future. Pick a time when neither of you are focused on his studies, when things are copasetic between you, then open a discussion with a comment like, “I’m curious about where you see yourself in five or ten years. I have so much faith in you, and you have so much potential, I wonder where you want to take it.” Then restrict your responses to supportive phrases like, “That’s interesting, tell me more,” or “How cool. Why does that interest you?”

Of course, your son might reply with an “I dunno,” in which case you might try a couple of probes like, “It’s hard to ever know for sure, right? But what goes through your head? What kinds of careers or jobs sound sort of fun to you?” Do your best to get your son talking and don’t interrupt.

After your son has talked himself out, after you feel you’ve really heard from his heart, then change the topic a bit. Ask, “What do you see as the biggest obstacles to turning that dream into a reality?” Then again try to draw him out. Don’t criticize or talk for him. Let him lay out all the challenges he sees. The goal is to let him “self discover” the obstacles he needs to overcome. If his aspirations are similar to most teenagers, they can only be accomplished through a good education. But let him say that.

Finally, offer your help. Tell him you want to help him overcome these obstacles. Ask him to write out a plan. He may need your help with the plan, but try to give him as many choices and options as possible. The more the decisions are his own, the more he’ll accept and follow through on them.

Next week: how to use motivational interviewing with senior leaders.