Motivating Teams Takes More Than a Speech
I want to be really clear, I am NOT a David Goggins fan. That said, in the beginning of his book, he adamantly states that motivation is worthless. As someone who has been motivating teams for over 20 years, that made me pause. It also resonated.
It’s easy to be motivated when you have energy and resources. When you don’t, motivation usually fades, leaving us tired or even burned out. When we don’t have energy or resources, grit and discipline become much more important and less ephemeral.
Below, I outline some ways to think about motivation that can help you reduce friction, focus on the right things, and build the grit you and your team need when motivation inevitably crumbles.
Key Points on motivating teams
Motivation is simply the reason we do something (or choose not to). We can have good reasons or bad ones, and those reasons could be extrinsic or intrinsic. In The Art of Impossible, Steven Kotler calls motivation drive – or what causes behaviour automatically. He says what we really need to succeed is grit, an ability to make the conscious choice to keep going when motivation or automatic drive is gone.
Dr. Angela Duckworth defines grit as passion and perseverance over time. Great leaders make work enjoyable (intrinsic motivation) and worthwhile (extrinsic motivation), but they also help people build the discipline and grit it takes to persevere when motivation wanes.
In the Handbook of Character Strengths and Virtues, Seligman defines discipline as the ability to make yourself do what you don’t feel like doing, basically, taking up the slack when motivation ebbs.
If we want to get the right things done and avoid doing the wrong things, we need a potent mix of motivation, discipline, and grit. Here are a few keys to success.
Below you’ll find a much more in-depth discussion of all of these.
1. Start by reducing friction or constraints
→ Forget motivational speakers; the benefit will come to a grinding halt in the face of organizational friction. Ask any highly motivated US military veteran who has struggled for hours with archaic computer systems to complete basic tasks. Ruthlessly seek out blocks that you and your people face and eliminate them. This is a lower-cost and more effective approach to motivating teams.
2. Add enough fuel to overcome the remaining constraints
→ We get caught up on identifying the one thing that will motivate our people. In reality, you need a layered approach that is tailored to personality and the moment. Ask what people need and give it to them when you can. This will almost certainly include a basic level of pay, a sense of autonomy or control, a sense of belonging, opportunities to learn, recognition, and a sense of purpose. Layer extrinsic and intrinsic motivators for the greatest impact, and reframe people’s perceptions to the key motivators when constraints take up too much of the collective headspace.
3. Make it interesting
→ Grit requires passion, and passion does not just happen. When things are interesting, they get our attention. That attention grows into passion over time. We have to make things interesting, or people will lose interest when it gets hard. Our fellow Trevor Ibsen points out that extrinsic motivators can become intrinsic motivators over time if leaders can keep them interesting long enough.
4. Build a culture of discipline
→ Organizations are successful when they do the boring little things consistently over time. Nobody wants to do boring little things, so you need a culture of discipline. When your team identifies as a group that consistently does the little things well, you’ll get brilliance in the basics. Then you can go after the big-ticket fun opportunities.
Start motivating your team by reducing Constraints
Imagine getting into a sports car, putting the accelerator to the floor, and forgetting to release the e-brake. Your vehicle will go fast, but it will feel sluggish and eventually catch on fire. Often, leaders try to add money or motivational speakers in hopes of adding fuel to their organization, but they forget to cut red tape, update slow systems, and eliminate silly rules that drain motivation first. Herzberg called these motivation sinks hygiene factors. Fixing them does not motivate us, but letting them remain dissatisfies people. To be hygienic about it, imagine a clean restroom at your workplace. Few people come away from using a clean toilet excited about work. But if it smells bad in there, people lose motivation at work. Dan Ariely makes it even simpler by framing it as fuel or friction. As a leader, it’s your job to eliminate friction because you’re often the only one with the power to do so.
Here are a few common friction points we see with our clients:
Lack of vision: Companies fall apart when leadership does not clearly articulate purpose. This means you need a vision AND you have to communicate it effectively.
Unaligned strategy and culture: When we say our strategic advantage is high quality, but our culture is doing more with less… well, people get frustrated.
Feeling unheard or unable to speak up: We need to feel like we belong to be motivated. Dr. Druskat basically says this is THE key to high performance on Emotionally Intelligent Teams. If there is not enough psychological safety to speak up and enough mutual respect to listen, you will never motivate people effectively.
Feeling unappreciated: Appreciation and positive feedback are underutilized superpowers. Read this article to learn how to give feedback more effectively.
Bad systems and processes: Asking people to be motivated to do their work and then giving them suboptimal systems to do it on… a recipe for disaster.
Teams need a lot of fuel to go fast
There will always be constraints, think budgets for companies and energy for all of the other parents out there. Once you minimize them, start layering good reasons to do the task at hand, or motivators. A good place to start is with extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic is often billed as transactional, but it’s important and useful. It simply means the reasons you have for acting are not linked to the action itself. You work for money, go to the gym to get in shape, and go to school to get the degree you need to advance your career. Researchers Ryan and Deci note that extrinsic motivation exists on a continuum, depending on how much control you feel you have (see the graphic below). Doing work because your boss said so feels less motivating than choosing to do the tasks your boss gives you because you understand the long-term benefit to the company, your team, and yourself. Intrinsic motivation means the activity itself motivates you. Dan Pink outlines three key intrinsic motivators in his book, Drive: Purpose, Mastery, and Autonomy (see this video for a primer). We also love feeling like we belong. Any time a leader can infuse a task with one of these, people will have more motivation in the moment. Research also indicates that extrinsic motivation often increases the quantity of output, while intrinsic motivation increases the quality. |
 |
Another way to look at all of this is in terms of needs and wants. This gets existential quickly, but imagine needs as things you have to have to accomplish stated goals and wants as nice-to-haves or ways to accomplish the goal more easily. I need bookkeeping to run a business. I want a system that is seamless and integrates with inventory and invoicing. Leaders can provide needs (often removing constraints) and focus on wants (likely motivators). Imagine Maslow’s hierarchy of needs built for a business leader below. McClelland’s research indicates that people all have some mix of basic needs, including a need for power (autonomy and control), affiliation (belonging and social acceptance, and achievement. As a leader, it is worthwhile to audit how many of these needs you provide for your people. It’s relatively easy to meet these needs, but leaders often fail to do so. Empower people on a project for power. Use off-sites or team lunches to build cohesion and affiliation. Reward good work with a note to provide a sense of achievement. |
Make work interesting to motivate your team
From learning how to walk as an infant to new ideas at work, humans have more curiosity than any other organisms (though I am curious what other animals would say about that). From marketing to motivating your team, if you can make it interesting, people will stick with it. Even transformational leadership, one of the foremost leadership theories today, includes intellectual stimulation as a key aspect.
Angela Duckworth says grit means passion and perseverance over the long term. It’s not sticking with something because you’re afraid to quit. Annie Duke outlines why and when you should quit in her book by the same name. Even Duckworth says she made her children stick with a sport for a season. After that, if they had not developed passion, it was time to leave.
Here’s the catch. Passion takes a lot of work, and it starts with curiosity. Everyone (except for 6-year-olds, I guess) knows that we are rarely good at a new thing the first time we try it. From prompting AI to taking up a new sport, mastering new skills takes a lot of time. We also rarely jump into a new pursuit or business strategy full of passion. We start with interest or curiosity. Great leaders stoke that curiosity into passion, which allows us to develop grit around a specific goal. The passion then becomes a driving purpose, and that’s when the magic happens.
Tips to prompt more curiosity:
Listen to new ideas instead of shutting them down.
Fund conferences and travel to learn, even when it’s not directly related to a job description.
Ask open, curious questions about your people’s work. “I wonder what’s possible here.”
Practice the improv skill of “yes, and” instead of saying “ok, but…”
Motivating teams requires discipline
Kottler says we incorrectly think of motivation when we really mean grit or discipline, and the second part of grit is perseverance. The dictionary calls perseverance “persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success.” We are back to Goggins and his disparaging remarks about motivation. Drive is fickle, and it usually dries up when constraints (time, energy, resources) grow, or the task takes much longer than expected. In military training, drill sergeants count to 10 pushups, but repeat numbers over and over, “1,2,3,3,3,3,3,3…” This kills motivation quickly because recruits no longer know how long the task will take. It also builds discipline to quiet the mind and just keep going.
If you want to do great things as a team, the going will get hard. Increasing pay or offering learning opportunities will only go so far. Building team character will take you the last mile. General McChrystal defines character as having the discernment to know the right thing to do and the discipline to consistently do it in his book On Character. Leaders who encourage critical thinking get the first half of that equation. Leaders who craft a culture in which going the extra mile or consistently doing quality work when it is not motivating complete the second half.
The teams where I have experienced the most trust had a lot of discipline. Part of trust is reliability, and when the team expects discipline, everyone knows everyone else will do their part, even when they don’t have the motivation to do it. That’s a rare and wonderful thing I like to call team character.
Start with a motivation audit
Ok, so motivation is not trash. It is a critical part of high performance, along with grit and team discipline. If you want to increase your motivation or your team’s drive, learn how to conduct a quick (or in-depth) audit of your motivation. Reply to this email for a template, but here are the basics.
1. What friction and constraints do we face?
2. What extrinsic motivators do we have (benefits down the road from completing the task well)?
3. What intrinsic motivators do we have (what do we enjoy about doing the task itself)?
4. Can we make it more likely to engage in flow on the task?
5. Do our core values align with the task? If not, can we align them? (I like this core value assessment for virtue-based values and this one for pragmatic values.)
6. Do our personalities and collective personality (culture) align with the task?
Even with a cursory exploration of these questions, you will likely be able to remove some constraints, increase some extrinsic and intrinsic motivators, and better align the task with your values, personality, and culture. Also consider reframing the situation to highlight the motivating factors instead of fixating on constraints, which is basic human nature.
