Reflections on how to unlock the intrinsic motivation of your colleagues

Performance appraisals is the standard many organizations are following when they aim to check the status among their employees, adjust the skills and salaries. This solution have been around for ages usually presented as 360 or 180 degrees reviews. Sometimes it is done annually, twice a year or more often. Many leaders think this is the tool we need to use to motivate our fellows (colleagues, employees, etc…). Unfortunately, it shows up they are mistaken. In many cases we see that performance of our colleagues either stay the same or drops after these reviews. The one who did not get a salary increase has already left the company and those who have got high scores still perform the same or maybe less. Today, we believe that motivation must come from inside, but how can we unlock that? This article is the result of some of the reflections based on my experience and my coaching sessions both as a leader and as volunteer in different community services.

What is Motivation?

Motivation is the fuel which when applied in the right portions creates a massive willpower to drive our behavior and attitude. We already know that our behavior and actions are based on our habits. Thus our intrinsic motivation creates at the end of the day the good habits that make us excel and grow.

Of course we still need to pay attention to the extrinsic motivation as it also have significant impact on our behavior and actions.

It is important to understand the difference between these two types of motivation to be able to lead people and create environment where people can really flourish. I like to say that the extrinsic motivation is associated with things that you are interested in, but not committed to. For example: If you are planning to build a house, you may be interested in making much money fastest possible. This interest will decrease after you have built the house. Money is an extrinsic motivational factor and the house is the external goal you wanted badly. Living happy inside that house may be your end goal. Happiness is an internal factor that influence your way of thinking, acting and living. What makes you happy is the intrinsic motivating factor. If I, as your leader, identify that factor and provide you with the means to reach it, I am sure you will do whatever it takes to make me also happy = do an excellent job 🙂

You can think of it as the things you are interested in are the WANTS while the things you are committed to are the NEEDS. The need creates the required sense of urgency for you to take massive action in the direction of satisfying that need. It is the internal nudge from within asking me always to act. If I do not need a thing, I may not stretch myself enough to make it happen.

Motivation is the fuel which when applied in the right portions creates a massive willpower to drive our behavior and attitude.

Looking again at work life: Salary and material benefits are extrinsic factors that might help creating a motivation for people in a certain life phase. Of course for people who are (re)establishing themselves, money is a central factor as a compensation for the work you ask them to do. Anyway, after a while and when this need disappears, there will not be any reason for them to do whatever it takes to reach the goals you have agreed on. They are interested, but not committed. On the contrary, if you eliminate the money question and satisfy the internal drivers of each of your coworkers, you will relax as a leader since they will chose to do whatever it takes to make their selves even happier.

Different personalities have different intrinsic motivational factors like; influence, curiosity, self-sustaining, eagerness to create and discover and how genuinely committed you are to the idea or goal. Our goal as leaders is to get many enough, preferably all, colleagues to the state of «Ba». This is the place where we move from the conscious of one to the conscious of many while sharing knowledge. It is here we can be vulnerable, helpful and move forward as a team and not as a group of individuals. For a deeper dive into the «Ba», please search for «The power of Ba» or «Kitaro Nishida» who has initially proposed this concept or talk to me!

Colleagues with the right portion of intrinsic motivation exhibit strong belief in the ideas and goals they work with

Here is a technical example from my own experience: Years ago, I worked as Lead Software Architect at company having a lot of software components exchanging data via COM, DCOM and RPC Protocols. We had a complex system crash in production environment. Developers did not manage to reproduce the behavior on their own PC or somewhere else. The only way to see it was to watch how things go down in the production environment. Many of us tried to solve it, but failed. Logs showed almost nothing useful and different tracking tools led us into endless forests. Simply, we did not see the light at the end of the tunnel. We used up many hours and days of intensive trouble shooting together with experts from other suppliers. One late night I sat behind my monitor stirring at the code and the binary logs while sipping my tea and thinking how this can be solved. I was completely obsessed by the complexity. Suddenly, I saw the defect in one of the operating systems components open up in front of my eyes. I jumped with tears in my eyes, rewrote the code, compiled, deployed and tested in production environment…all was good. It was almost 2am that night. I sent SMS to my boss and a couple of colleagues telling what happened. Seconds later the boss was on the phone with me. 30 minutes later five of us were in the office gathered celebrating the victory. You can imagine how much satisfaction we had. This is what we call «going the extra miles for your passion».

You see; our intrinsic motivation was completely aligned with the business needs. our leader was supporting fully and going the extra miles needed to create an environment where we could really flourish. He could have chosen to continue sleeping and not answer the SMS. He could have also waited till the morning to celebrate. But, no. He knew what this defect has meant for us, how much efforts we had applied to solve the issue and could understand the happiness that was unfolding in us in front of his eyes. He was there for us, let us have the responsibility, provided us with feedback, support and recognition. These ingredients are the corner stones you also need to build on to be able unlock the intrinsic motivation of your colleagues.

responsibility, feedback, support and recognition are the building stones of intrinsic motivation

Today, I practice the same at work: keep close to my colleagues, decentralize decisions and resposibilities, give ongoing feedback, discuss skills and improvements and give recognition. I do not wait to do this on quarterly or annual basis. I do it all the time, often with no written scripts or reports. At the end of the day, it is the real doing that matters. Building upon the intrinsic motivation will always result in improvements of the work moral which in its turn results in fewer people quitting, better working environment, better productivity and performance.

Did you recognize the receipt? to unlock the intrinsic motivation you need to:

• Identify yourself/colleagues with the big WHY NOT only that this is the job you get paid for
• Be present NOT having a big distance from the team
• Let people take responsibility NOT giving responsibility
• Give frequent feedback NOT annual feedback
• Provide people with support NOT leaving them alone

While it is possible to run a business using the statements on the right side of «NOT«, your team will excel if you follow the statements on the left.