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How do you motivate your team?
You're asking the wrong question.
I've coached one-on-one with over 400 different leaders. One recurring concern is, "How do I motivate my team?" There's usually frustration and a sense of being stuck. No matter what you do, it's just not having the desired impact. People can't or won't respond to your best efforts. It seems like people just will not be told.
It's time to get out of the "do loop" and reframe the situation. Let me give you a different way to think about this.
We've got this part of leadership all wrong. There's a better quality question than "How do I motivate my team?" (Not all questions are created equal.)
Your primary job is not to motivate your people.
People are more powerful motivators of themselves than you ever will be. Intrinsic motivation eats external motivation for breakfast.
What are the necessary conditions for generating intrinsic motivation? And how, as a leader, do you create these necessary conditions?
What if you stopped trying to motivate people and instead focused on creating the conditions in which your people thrive for themselves? Try that as the basis of some experiments. What might you create?
We already know plenty about the conditions in which teams access their innate high performance.
Autonomy, Purpose And Mastery
Daniel Pink points us to a better understanding of "drive" and the three motivation factors of autonomy, purpose and mastery.
Autonomy
Feeling a strong sense of agency is expansive. What you see as possible expands when you are the master of your own destiny.
Building autonomy exercises key leadership skills and behaviors—delegation and accountability. Good delegation is more than tossing the ball over the hedge and walking away. Accountability appears to be mostly absent in many organizational structures.
Purpose
Purpose is being able to connect the dots, seeing the impact of your work and how it creates value for the community you serve.
Just like motivation, purpose is most resonant when you find it for yourself, within you. It's the difference between what has you leaping out of bed five minutes before the alarm goes off and what has you sluggishly rolling over and hitting the snooze button.
As a leader, you can normalize the conversations around purpose by talking about your own, often and openly. It models what it is to have pride; it invites people to step back and look for the bigger picture and how the pieces fit together; it invites clarity—and meaning-making.
Mastery
Motivation is fueled by the feeling that you're getting better at what you do—moving from conscious incompetence to unconscious competence across a broad range of skills and capabilities. By the way, notice that as you travel this road, your impact grows, creating more awareness around and validating your purpose.
Support your people in the lifelong pursuit of mastery. Support opportunities for learning, teaching, networking and experimentation (and the right kind of failure).
Grow your own mastery with feedback—developing it and deploying it. Observe more. Look for behaviors. Find clarity on values, beliefs and, yes, your own purpose.
Psychological Safety
We face existential challenges. Organizations are on the front line.
If we are to make meaningful progress on our most pressing challenges, then leaders need everyone (I'll repeat that—everyone) to bring their best thinking and creativity every day and for them to feel safe enough to give voice to it.
Psychological safety has been shown to be quite simply the table stake for accessing a team's innate high performance. In itself, it's no guarantee. Yet without it, your team is not even in the game.
It's not about building "happy teams." It's about high performance.
Go listen to a team that experiences high safety. You'll hear the most challenging of conversations. Attitudes to open conversation, willingness to help, risk and failure and inclusivity are openly discussed. There are disagreements, tough exchanges of ideas and ultimately agreement and alignment.
Holding space for these conversations and holding your people to these conversations is not for the faint of heart. It requires you to lead with backbone and with heart.
In Review
Building psychological safety is helping your team generate intrinsic motivation. Instilling within each person a real sense of agency, purpose, impact and an ongoing path toward mastery is helping your people amplify intrinsic motivation.
Focus less on motivating people. Your people have an abundance of motivation potential. Instead, focus on building the container and the conditions where they expand their own motivation and develop easier access to it.
Leadership Is...
Leadership is creating a space where everyone can show up fully.
Invariably the first domino to topple here, the one that you can guarantee to succeed with, is to get real honesty about where you're at with all of this.
Ready to lead? Lead when ready.
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