Why Your Team Isn’t Responding to Your Motivation
The Challenges of Group Motivation
Photo by Jovana Askrabic on Unsplash
“I’m moving the morning meetings to 7 AM,” the project manager declared.
The coffee cup paused on the way to my lips for the first sip of the day. I glanced outside at the sun that had just barely risen over a freezing January urbanscape, then my watch. 7:30 AM. During the darkest, shortest days of winter, I would have to get on a train by 6:30, so wake up by 5:30??
“Why?” I half asked, half accused. I felt much more curt than usual between this update and my lack of coffee.
“Ryan hasn’t been coming to the 8 AM meetings on time.”
From his forced-casual tone, I could tell the project manager was upset by this lack of punctuality and that the rest of the team was intended to be upset with Ryan and maybe shame him into being on time.
Setting aside that public shaming is a poor motivational technique, we would now all suffer the consequences of an individual’s actions.
My head filled with a paraphrased Bowling for Soup song:
Group projects never end…
Now, after a few years stacked between me and this experience, the question remains - how do you effectively inspire and lead a group of people with varying habits, skills, and individual life experiences?
The Challenges of Group Motivation
Understanding and harnessing individual motivation is challenging enough, but that challenge becomes exponentially more difficult with a group of people.
Seeking to improve performance, companies often roll out performance reviews to understand who is exceeding expectations, meeting them, or falling behind. Then they must decide how to allocate resources to improve the team.
Usually, the extremes (the high and low performers) receive the focus. If performance exists on a normal bell curve, however, this strategy leaves minimal effort to help the majority of people that perform closer to the average.
Taking a look from scratch, if we have only a certain amount of time and effort to put towards team development, how do we best allocate those resources?
First, we can break down the potential detractors for employees in the high performing, average, and lower performing groups. A variety of influences can impact daily work.
Among those who are exceeding expectations and thriving in their role, they may feel demotivated by:
Overwork
Lack of recognition
Feeling that there is no room for career growth
For those meeting expectations, they may be struggling to reach their potential because:
They do not have enough support
Lack of acknowledgment
Lack of resources to perform their job function
Friction in relationships with the team
For someone struggling to meet expectations in their role, they might be experiencing:
Conflict with their manager
Conflict with their team
Burnout
Poor culture fit
Skill/Role mismatch
Lack of acknowledgment/visibility
These demotivators can be obstacles for anyone, so it is worth investigating (through surveys, anonymous feedback, and candid conversations) what specific issues exist in an organization before diving into solutions. Then, once we have gathered a list like the bullets above, it can be prioritized and addressed.
The most sustainable motivation for humans is intrinsic motivation. We respond best when we feel autonomy and purpose (for a great deep dive on this topic, check out the book Drive by Daniel Pink). Helping to inspire a team at any level will require playing to these base motivators rather than aiming for reward/punishment structures that quickly go awry.
How can we apply this in practice?
Quick Wins
If we ask around, we will usually find areas ripe with low-hanging fruit that can make a big difference in employee performance and satisfaction with low effort or cost. For instance, humans will need access to sufficient resources to execute their jobs to feel autonomy. Sometimes, an organization can achieve this by simply replacing a broken printer that has become the bane of the office or subscribing to automation tools that reduce overhead hours and trivial work.
Consistent Needs
Humans work best when they understand and believe in the purpose behind their work. Organizations deliver this by developing and continually reaffirming a mission shared by all people on the team.
To semantically encourage this mission, core values should be actions employees can easily understand and act on, rather than simply company goals like a revenue target or exit strategy that is more abstract and only personally meaningful to founders.
Humans also acutely feel inclusion and acknowledgment, or lack thereof. Peer-to-peer recognition programs, public recognition for good work, celebrated failures, and a general emphasis on encouragement rather than shame will pay dividends in retention and performance for all team members.
Difficult Conversations
The most destructive demotivators are poor culture fit, burnout, and interpersonal conflict. These require a more careful approach to resolve.
With poor culture fit, the employee(s) in question may have something unique to add to the culture and needs to feel accepted. Alternatively, the mismatch might be more fundamental, and both parties will be happier separately.
A similar notion applies to burnout. Burnout emerges when a person performs work they do not find meaningful for an extended period. If the job is not significant to the person, are there other places to utilize this person’s talent, or is it time to part ways? Whatever the resolution, it’s best to start with an open dialogue rather than operating on assumptions like believing the person has become lazy or requires discipline.
When it comes to interpersonal conflict, negative emotions become highly contagious, spreading to other employees and driving down productivity while increasing burnout. Conflict drives adverse outcomes if not appropriately addressed and resolved. Any resolution requires the temporary discomfort of mediation and listening, rather than ignoring the issue and hoping it resolves itself.
Incentives to avoid
As social creatures, humans respond not only to what happens to them but what happens to those around them as well. Given the interconnected nature of groups, any motivation solutions should be empathetic at their core to be aware of potential unintended side effects.
Focusing too much on rewarding the top performers can demotivate those who are not quite at the top; focusing too much on the bottom performers can similarly demotivate those who feel like their contributions are ignored.
Because any changes will have ripple effects throughout the organizational ecosystem, it’s good to set expectations for ourselves and be ready to continue and change up our initiatives to drive change. Any time an organization changes, success depends on transparency and consistent communication. This is doubly true for cultural transformation. If we start with curiosity and listening, then build on common human motivations, we can deliberately foster high-performing, happy teams.