How to motivate employees? Don’t.

Do this instead. Here are 6 ways to motivate your team that

doesn’t undermine their intrinsic employee motivation that
they already have.

Claire Lew Follow

Sep 7 · 7 min read

“ I need to figure out how to motivate my employees. “ When was the last time thought that
to yourself? It could’ve been the other week, when you noticed one of your direct reports
dragging his feet on a project that’s critical to the company. Or, perhaps it was the other
month when you felt frustrated that your team wasn’t being proactive about addressing
customer issues.

If either of these situations feel even remotely familiar, you’re not alone. I hear this
sentiment of “how to motivate employees” frequently from managers we work with who
use Know Your Team, and I often am asked countless questions about it.

We, as leaders, are not the only ones thinking this. Employees themselves admit that they
don’t feel as motivated at work as they’d like. According to Gallup, only 2 in 10 employees
strongly agree that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do
outstanding work.

However, this question of, “How to motivate my employees as a manager?” is a misguided

one. It implies that motivation is something we give another person. That’s patently false.

Motivation is not a thing we give to people — motivation is a thing people already have.
Employees inherently have energy, ideas, gifts, and talents that are worth being shared with
the world. We, as leaders, simply need to get out of their way and create a space for that
energy, ideas, gifts, and talents to thrive.

The question we should ask ourselves isn’t, “How can I motivate my team?” but rather,
“How can I create an environment for my team members to motivate themselves?”

I’ve been thinking about the answer to this question for the past almost ten years :-). From
research we’ve gathered across the years, conversations with leaders who we admire on
our podcast, and insights from 1,000+ managers from our online community, The
Watercooler, here are six things we can do as leaders to create the conditions for employees
to motivate themselves.

Immerse yourself in discovery.

You can’t enable another person’s motivation to flourish if you don’t know what motivates
them, to begin with. As a result, a key part of effectively creating the conditions for strong
employee motivation in your team is to figure out: Well, what motivates them?

Hopefully, you’ve gotten a sense of this when you were hiring them — as the interview
process is very much about understanding what drives a person. However, if it still remains
fuzzy, here are some questions you’ll want to ask during your next one-on-one meeting to
figure out, at their core, what your team member is motivated by:

When has been a time when you’ve felt most motivated in the work that you were
doing? Why? What project was it? Who were you working with?

What three events in your life would you say have had the biggest impact on your and
why?

Who do you admire most in your life, and why?

 What’s the dream?

What would you want to say is true about your life five years from now for it to feel
meaningful? Ten years from now?

What would you say most deeply motivates you?

Now, with some of these questions, you may be thinking, “Woah Claire, this is just way too
much — I can’t just ask these during a one-on-one meeting.” You might be right. If you’ve
never asked questions of this tone before, it’ll likely be a surprise to your direct report. Thus,
if you do decide to ask these questions, let your direct report know ahead of time. You can
say something like, “I’d love to discuss broader, deeper life questions during our next one-
on-one,” and you can also share an agenda ahead of time. (In fact you can do this, with
our One-on-Ones tool in Know Your Team.)

You’ll also want to continue to ask these questions as you continue to work with this person
over time. Discovery of motivation is not a one-time, one-off occurrence — it’s an ongoing,
consistent practice.

Individualize everything.
Motivation is personal. What motivates one person might not motivate someone else. As a
result, it’s important to have nuance in the conditions you create for motivation to grow —
you need individualize those conditions as much as you can. This means specifically
aligning projects, goals, and incentives with what the other person is motivated by, and no
one else. This seems intuitive, yet we often unintentionally (or completely unknowingly)
project our own preferences and proclivities onto another person. For example, because you
find detail-oriented work very easy, you might assume the other person does as well, and
you proceed to hand off a very data-focused, detail-oriented project to them. Then, you
notice that they’re not motivated on the project and seem to be struggling, you wonder,
“Hmm why aren’t they really stepping into it?” When you consider the individual nature of
motivation, the answer becomes obvious: It was a mismatch of aligning the project to what
motivates that person the most.

However, sometimes, there are projects that have to get done and goals that have to get met
— and you can’t customize or individualize them. What do you do in these scenarios? Read
on.
Create choice.
While you can’t always individualize and perfectly match someone’s project and goals with
what they are most motivated by, you can create positive conditions for motivation by
enabling choice in what people can do. In Edward Deci’s seminal book on human
motivation theory, Why We Do What We Do, he describes how “meaningful choice
engenders willingness” and results in higher quality of decisions, and greater motivation
and commitment to the task, all shown in research he’s done over 20 years.

For example, while someone may not be able to choose their project, you can give them
choice in how they want to approach the project. Or in another situation, instead of
assigning someone a set of goals, you can invite them to participate in the formation of
those goals and enable them to choose it. As detailed by Deci, studies have shown that when
people can actively choose their own goals, they’re more likely to follow through on them.

Stop surveillance.
What damages the conditions for motivation the most? Surveillance has been revealed in
studies to negatively impact intrinsic motivation. Anytime you catch yourself peeking over
someone’s shoulder, making a mental note of what time they log on or log off, or when they
enter the office — you’re not helping. You’re hurting.

Additionally, consider how deadlines and imposed goals undermine intrinsic motivation
and negatively effect performance. Are you arbitrarily setting targets to create an artificial
sense of “urgency” or “accountability”? Or are you trying to create a supportive environment
that is truly helpful for a person getting to where they need to be?

Acknowledge constraints and feelings.

Sometimes you can’t create a good environment for motivation. The company is tight on
resources, or there’s a toxic person who’s dragging the team down but you don’t have the
authority to let that person go. When you know that prime conditions for strong motivation
aren’t there, recognize that. Share with your team, “Here’s why I know that sucks” or “I so
appreciate you bearing with this” and you demonstrate how much you understand their
point of view.
Deci described in his research how this sharing of rationale behind why things are
constraining or not feeling good helps to minimize the pressure that detracts from
performance. Acknowledging the bad helps clear room for someone to try to do good.

Clarify expectations.
On occasion, our team doesn’t seem motivated because their behavior doesn’t match up
with our own conception of what “highly motivated” looks like in our heads. In short, we as
leaders haven’t made clear what the real output of strong motivation looks like in our team.
Does it mean that people are moving faster? Does it mean a higher quality of work? Once
you’ve determined what the product of “stronger motivation” looks like, then consider: How
well have you communicated this to your team? Do they know and are they aware that is the
output and product they should be creating?

I recently interviewed Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, on our
podcast, The Heartbeat (full episode is here, if you were curious). During our chat, he cited
a quote from Edwin Schlossberg: “The skill of writing is to create a context in which other
people can think.” Tim asserted how applicable this quote was to leadership, as well, saying:

“In some sense, in leadership, what you are trying to do is to create a context in which other
people can act.”

This rings resoundingly true for employee motivation. As a leader, when you’re trying to
figure out how to motivate employees, what you’re truly trying to do is create a context in
which they can act. You’re creating an environment for your team to motivate themselves.