When Muraven started exploring why students who had been treated kindly had more willpower he found that the key difference was the sense of control they had over their experience. “We’ve found this again and again,” Muraven told me. “When people are asked to do something that takes self-control, if they think they are doing it for personal reasons-if they feel like it’s a choice or something they enjoy because it helps someone else-it’s much less taxing. If they feel like they have no autonomy, if they’re just following orders, their willpower muscles get tired much faster. In both cases, people ignored the cookies. But when the students were treated like cogs, rather than people, it took a lot more willpower.”
For companies and organizations, this insight has enormous implications. Simply giving employees a sense of agency-a feeling that they are in control, that they have genuine decision-making authority- can radically increase how much energy and focus they bring to their jobs. One 2010 study at a manufacturing plant in Ohio, for instance, scrutinized assembly-line workers who were empowered to make small decisions about their schedules and work environment. [151] They designed their own uniforms and had authority over shifts. Nothing else changed. All the manufacturing processes and pay scales stayed the same. Within two months, productivity at the plant increased by 20 percent. Workers were taking shorter breaks. They were making fewer mistakes. Giving employees a sense of control improved how much self-discipline they brought to their jobs.
The same lessons hold true at Starbucks. Today, the company is focused on giving employees a greater sense of authority. They have asked workers to redesign how espresso machines and cash registers are laid out, to decide for themselves how customers should be greeted and where merchandise should be displayed. It’s not unusual for a store manager to spend hours discussing with his employees where a blender should be located.
“We’ve started asking partners to use their intellect and creativity, rather than telling them ‘take the coffee out of the box, put the cup here, follow this rule,’ ” said Kris Engskov, a vice president at Starbucks. “People want to be in control of their lives.”
Turnover has gone down. Customer satisfaction is up. Since Schultz’s return, Starbucks has boosted revenues by more than $1.2 billion per year.
V.
When Travis was sixteen, before he dropped out of school and started working for Starbucks, his mother told him a story. They were driving together, and Travis asked why he didn’t have more siblings. His mother had always tried to be completely honest with her children, and so she told him that she had become pregnant two years before Travis was born but had gotten an abortion. They already had two children at that point, she explained, and were addicted to drugs. They didn’t think they could support another baby. Then, a year later, she became pregnant with Travis. She thought about having another abortion, but it was too much to bear. It was easier to let nature take its course. Travis was born.
“She told me that she had made a lot of mistakes, but that having me was one of the best things that ever happened to her,” Travis said. “When your parents are addicts, you grow up knowing you can’t always trust them for everything you need. But I’ve been really lucky to find bosses who gave me what was missing. If my mom had been as lucky as me, I think things would have turned out different for her.”
A few years after that conversation, Travis’s father called to say that an infection had entered his mother’s bloodstream through one of the places on her arm she used to shoot up. Travis immediately drove to the hospital in Lodi, but she was unconscious by the time he arrived. She died a half hour later, when they removed her life support.
A week later, Travis’s father was in the hospital with pneumonia. His lung had collapsed. Travis drove to Lodi again, but it was 8:02 P.M. when he got to the emergency room. A nurse brusquely told him he’d have to come back tomorrow; visiting hours were over.
Travis has thought a lot about that moment since then. He hadn’t started working at Starbucks yet. He hadn’t learned how to control his emotions. He didn’t have the habits that, since then, he’s spent years practicing. When he thinks about his life now, how far he is from a world where overdoses occur and stolen cars show up in driveways and a nurse seems like an insurmountable obstacle, he wonders how it’s possible to travel such a long distance in such a short time.
“If he had died a year later, everything would have been different,” Travis told me. By then, he would have known how to calmly plead with the nurse. He would have known to acknowledge her authority, and then ask politely for one small exception. He could have gotten inside the hospital. Instead, he gave up and walked away. “I said, ‘All I want to do is talk to him once,’ and she was like, ‘He’s not even awake, it’s after visiting hours, come back tomorrow.’ I didn’t know what to say. I felt so small.”
Travis’s father died that night.
On the anniversary of his death, every year, Travis wakes up early, takes an extra-long shower, plans out his day in careful detail, and then drives to work. He always arrives on time.
6
When Willpower Becomes Automatic
I.
The patient was already unconscious when he was wheeled into the operating room at Rhode Island Hospital. His jaw was slack, his eyes closed, and the top of an intubation tube peeked above his lips. As a nurse hooked him up to a machine that would force air into his lungs during surgery, one of his arms slipped off the gurney, the skin mottled with liver spots.
The man was eighty-six years old and, three days earlier, had fallen at home. Afterward, he had trouble staying awake and answering questions, and so eventually his wife called an ambulance. [152] In the emergency room, a doctor asked him what happened, but the man kept nodding off in the middle of his sentences. A scan of his head revealed why: The fall had slammed his brain against his skull, causing what’s known as a subdural hematoma. Blood was pooling within the left portion of his cranium, pushing against the delicate folds of tissue inside his skull. The fluid had been building for almost seventy-two hours, and those parts of the brain that controlled his breathing and heart were beginning to falter. Unless the blood was drained, the man would die. [153]
At the time, Rhode Island Hospital was one of the nation’s leading medical institutions, the main teaching hospital for Brown University and the only Level I trauma center in southeastern New England. Inside the tall brick and glass building, physicians had pioneered cutting-edge medical techniques, including the use of ultrasound waves to destroy tumors inside a patient’s body. In 2002, the National Coalition on Health Care rated the hospital’s intensive care unit as one of the finest in the country. [154]
But by the time the elderly patient arrived, Rhode Island Hospital also had another reputation: a place riven by internal tensions. There were deep, simmering enmities between nurses and physicians. In 2000, the
