Leverage Motivation to Succeed As You Lead

Desire.?Determination. ?Passion. ?Hunger. ?Inspiration. ?Motivation has many names. ?The term often conjures some “Braveheart” type of speech, where the leader is charismatically addressing the group to summon courage to do battle for a noble cause. ?Perhaps you visualize the coach giving a rousing speech to inspire your favorite sports team to an improbable comeback victory. These visions are often intimidating for managers not blessed with great oratory skills—those who perceive themselves as lacking presence.

The modern-day business reality, however, isn’t quite as dramatic as in the movies, sports, or on the political stage. ?In our team environments at work, we deal with “normal” people and don’t have to motivate through grandiose gestures or speeches. ?Motivation happens in more subtle ways, through the individual and in groups, and is less about direct inspiration than it is about providing an atmosphere that satisfies your team members’ emotional needs.

Why do we care about “motivation” as leaders in the modern workplace - Shouldn’t our people nowadays (if we hire the “right” ones) come with their own drive to achieve, whatever the goal? As leaders we should care more, not less, than ever before about stoking high-performance desire in our people.?The workplace of a century ago required workers’ hands and feet, not their hearts and minds. ?Heavily labor-based in nature, leaders looked for workers with strong backs and the ability to produce quantity of output under difficult physical working conditions. ?“Scientific” theories of labor caused task analysis to break down work into small parts, with specialized team members performing one narrow duty that made work repetitive and menial. ?The desire for workers to add value by sharing opinions and be emotionally driven to achieve never entered into the equation.

????Today, if leaders want to leverage hands and feet, they must capture hearts and minds to build and sustain performance. ?It’s at the heart of the performance equation, and this is why motivation is the first leadership subject we must explore. ?With motivation, the quality and source of it—not quantity—is the difference maker. ?It isn’t just about harvesting any feeling that works to get the job done through others. ?It’s about leveraging emotions that are positive, selfless, and in harmony with others’ motivations and the team’s shared goals. ?It might sound complicated, but it’s not as daunting as it seems.

There’s debate about whether a leader even acts to motivate directly or whether motivation is only internal to individuals by its very nature. ?The argument seems semantic to me. ?Whether as a leader you directly inspire, or do so indirectly by creating an environment in which team members tap into something within themselves, isn’t the net effect is the same? ?Yes and no. ?The short-term effect may be identical, as both can drive staff to meet performance goals. The difference lies in long-term sustainability of different motivational tacts.

Think of when fear and threat of punishment motivated you in the past. ?They may have worked in the short term, but what damage did they cause? ?Stress? ?Absenteeism? Morale and engagement declines? ?A job switch? ?The possible list is long. ?No one likes the sinking feeling of their job being constantly under threat—being one mistake or bad performance away from the unemployment line. ?In such cases, team members simply take their skills elsewhere. ?Contrast that with a time you felt highly motivated at work. ?It came from a more positive place, one that likely aligned well with your personal drivers, values, and aspirations. ?Was it ?Appreciation? ?Inclusion? ?Personal growth? ?Purpose? ?Achievement? ?These are deeply held emotions that individuals and their leaders can leverage time and time again to satisfy mutual needs. ?That’s the strong oak of motivation that weathers well.

Internal versus External Motivators - A fundamental difference exists between intrinsic, or internal, motivations and external ones. The latter are provided as an end result of accomplishing the work. ?These are the things that must be given to individuals for desire to be satisfied. ?They can also be withheld. ?Bonuses, prizes, awards, promotions, and recognition are external motivators. ?The satisfaction of these types of motivators doesn’t lie within the work itself but in accomplishing the work to gain some reward. Work efforts that don’t result in external motivators being satisfied sometimes leave us bitter and unfulfilled.

Intrinsic motivators are those that we don’t have to wait on or depend on anyone else for, because they’re provided as an inherent part of doing the work itself. ?Performing the task itself satisfies the internal driver and, unless the job is taken away or significantly changed, the motivation to achieve remains steady. ?Achievement, personal growth, purpose, significance, and professional pride are examples of intrinsic motivators.

Likely, we view external motivators as those that the manager directly influences and internal motivators as indirectly shaped by leaders. ?Those that speak of indirect leadership influence contend that leaders only create the circumstances in which individuals access their internal motivations, rather than directly acting as the catalyst by which those desires are fulfilled.

One prominent school of thought is that internal motivators are more powerful and sustainable than external motivators and that a leader’s role is merely to cultivate an atmosphere in which people can tap into their intrinsic motivations. ?Passions that run through our veins run deep, and withstand the adversity and change that inevitably come to pass in our lives. ?Leveraging these desires is more sustainable than the short-game of providing external incentives for performance. When you use the latter, you need to keep feeding the machine to receive the desired outcomes, and as people build up a tolerance to the level of reward you provide, you have to give more and more to receive the same level of performance in the future. ?This is the epitome of the law of diminishing returns.

If you provide all of the motivation and it does not come from within the person, your team members are responding only because that is what they need to do to receive the short-term benefit they perceive as valuable. ?That’s precisely why motivation can appear as a zero-sum game. ?The more external motivation is employed the less internal motivation can be leveraged. ?Overreliance on external motivators, particularly in the form of compensation and special award programs, may be counterproductive for the long-term motivational health of an organization.

External motivators are a commodity; they are the easily repeatable aspects of the employment relationship that any company, with enough money, can provide. ?Base pay, bonuses, or benefits? Anyone with a higher offer or better deal down the road can draw your people away. ?Promotions, job title, or recognition? ?As an employee, you might receive them in the future, or you might not. There are lots of risks around dependence on external motivators, as they may never come to pass despite your best efforts. ?Internal motivators, on the other hand, remain to some extent whether or not the goal was achieved. ?In the long-term, the ability to fulfill at least part of your team member’s work aspirations provides the emotional fuel to keep going in the face of performance setbacks. ?Contrast that with the disappointed face of the person expecting the bonus that never came, and you will see a significant difference in sustained individual motivation to perform in the future.

What drives you more: internal motivators or external rewards?

What do you rely on to motivate your people primarily: internal or external motivators?

Do you know what motivates your individual team members more: internal or external motivators?

Individual versus Collective Motivators - Because each of our people has drives and aspirations that are different from their teammates, we must appreciate and adapt to them to move the team toward our goals. ?We’ve got to relate the aspirations of our people to the goals of the team and organization, aligning individual talent to the environment in a way that helps the work experience become even more rewarding. ?When team members take meaning and intrinsic reward from their work, grow personally and professionally, and leverage their talents to be successful, synergy arises between the job and personal drivers that results in high motivation. ?This is why leaders should try to match tasks to individual interests and allow people to participate in initiatives that align with both their skills and their individual drives where possible.

You can’t identify and leverage the unique drives—particularly the powerful intrinsic motivators—of individuals on your team if you don’t get to know them. ?Leadership is a relational endeavor. ?To operate effectively, you need to forge ties with your people and learn about their talents and dreams. ?People expect you to learn about both if you’re to be useful to them, just as you expect that they’ll be useful to the team’s objectives. ?Learning about and aligning individual talent and passion to tasks is not only good leadership, it’s good business. ?Increases in performance are a part of a virtuous motivation circle, along with higher employee engagement and retention, that benefits organizations and teams.

While responding to individual motivators is important, leadership has to balance this with the need to forge shared purpose that is also motivational for all. ?Because leaders are tasked with reaching common team goals, a shared purpose with broad appeal should be identified and communicated. ?This is also important to team culture and identity, which is best formed around purpose. ?From this, leaders can then align individual drives with the shared purpose so that team members understand that they can also satisfy their motivations by supporting the team’s aims. The priority in the end, however, is shared purpose. ?Where individuals can support shared purpose through their performance and behavior, an effective team results. ?When individuals cannot align themselves to the reason the team exists it detracts from group synergy and performance, at times to the degree where a leader must decide whether to keep them on the team.

What are your own individual motivators?

Do you know what each of your team member’s motivators are and how they differ?

How do you use your team members’ individual motivators to help your team achieve its goals?

Money as Motivator - Money is the ultimate workplace commodity. Everyone—except those seeking volunteer workers—offers it. There’s nothing unique about money except that some employers may offer more of it than others. It doesn’t buy better relationships with coworkers, a better boss, or increased meaning from performing the work itself. It doesn’t make mundane tasks more interesting or the mission of the company more appealing. It’s simply a means to an end, rather than the end itself. It cannot purchase meaning.

Money is an external motivator. ?Like other external motivators, it’s provided in the hopes of sustaining motivation to keep doing the work, or in the case of performance incentives provided at the end of a work period as a reward. ?Like other external motivators, it often has limited usefulness above a certain point. ?As long as we feel competitively compensated, providing more money doesn’t adequately compensate for the problems of the job itself or other shortcomings of our work experience. It’s just a temporary dressing on a wound that won’t heal.

We all have either witnessed someone in, or personally experienced, a job where no amount of money would lead to a return to a former employer. ?While the absence of what we believe is adequate pay can demotivate us, there is a point above which more does little to motivate us, particularly in light of fundamental issues with our work experience. ?Yet employer after employer pays above market rates and dangles heavy bonuses and retention incentives in front of their people to literally overcompensate for deficits in their employees’ work experience. ?There is also likely to be little proof of positive ROI that they can point to as a result of doing so.

Once spent, money fades into memory rather quickly and there’s a decreasing return on the investment for the team. ?The first time that bonus is achieved, the feeling is sweet, albeit temporary. ?The money is used somehow, likely in ways few of us remember in the long term. And the next time the incentive is dangled in front of team members, it takes more of it and/or the ability to earn it more often to elicit a similar level of motivation as in past. ?As counterintuitive as it may seem, money is simply a bad long-term investment in the motivation and retention of people, particularly if it’s the primary tool in your leadership toolbox. ?If you only have a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. ?The problem with this? ?Once you drive the nail home, you can’t keep pulling it out and doing it again to have the same effect.

Generally, a company’s desperate effort to retain an employee who has quit by throwing more money at them proves unsuccessful. ?That’s because the team member’s primary motivation to leave in the first place is rarely about money (although likely they received more of it as a byproduct of their job search) and the employee wonders about the company’s sincerity and timing of its effort. ?They’re likely to think: Oh, NOW you want to tell me that I’m valuable and appreciated by giving me more money. ?No thanks! I already got that down the road, as well as satisfying the other parts of my work experience that were missing here. ?A steadfast reliance on money as the main tool of motivation is a crutch that denies a leader’s responsibility and ability to use other forms of motivation to achieve objectives.

How heavily do you rely on money as a motivator for your team members?

How many of your team members have described money as one of their top two motivators?

Have you ever attempted to “throw money at the problem” in motivating and retaining a staff member, rather than try to fix the core problem with their experience in the workplace?

* The above is an excerpt from the book "The Leadership Core" by Will Schirmer, available in print and on e-book.

www.willschirmerofficial.com