5 Ways to Cultivate Intrinsic Motivation on Your Team
Photo by Pavel Danilyuk
In his TED Talk on motivation, Dan Pink says “there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.” He discusses the limitations of extrinsic incentives and encourages listeners to incorporate more intrinsic motivators into their team culture.
That talk was given in 2009 but for many leaders, the question of how to increase intrinsic motivation remains a challenge.
What is intrinsic motivation?
Before exploring 5 actions you can take with your team, here’s an easy way to think about intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation:
extrinsic motivators are outside rewards or pressure used to encourage certain behavior - like a cash prize or deadline
intrinsic motivators are the positive feelings that drive an action - like satisfaction or enjoyment
Incorporating more intrinsic motivation into your team culture may take more time and effort than offering up a set of steak knives for top performance, but the benefits can be huge, fully worth the effort.
Since intrinsic motivation is related to things like performance, job satisfaction, employee engagement, turnover, and general well-being, the impact of your efforts has the potential to go beyond your team. It can also have a positive influence on your employee’s personal lives, your customers, and your brand.
Put more simply, your intrinsically motivated employees are happy employees.
How to cultivate intrinsic motivation on your team
1- Tailor your approach to each person’s motivators
What is fulfilling to one person might not resonate as deeply with another. Figuring out what drives each of your team members will make it much easier to customize your communication in a way that taps into their intrinsic motivation.
The Attuned motivator survey is a quick way to gain that insight, but a discussion about why that employee works, why they’ve chosen this field, and what about their role is most enjoyable to them could also help you connect with their core motivations.
From there, you can incorporate that perspective into your approach as a manager. Remembering, for example, a team member motivated by competition and another who is motivated by social relationships can both find fulfillment in the same work but may approach it with a different lens. Encouraging team members to share their motivators can also make it easier to understand each other and facilitate collaboration.
2- Talk about the impact of your work
Connecting your team’s day-to-day effort to a greater purpose helps bring meaning to the work for everyone and increases motivation, which research links to prosocial behavior and persistence. Wanting to be helpful can also increase effort, productivity, and performance.
It’s easy to take this one for granted. We might think the impact of our work is obvious, but when was the last time you spoke about it with your team?
Make a point of discussing this with your employees regularly. Be sure to share testimonials and highlight the influence the team’s work is having on your customers’ lives. Talk about what your company is doing to bring about positive changes within your industry or even society.
3- Make it clear what great work looks like
The intrinsic value of learning something new, developing skills, or improving your performance is key to motivating your team. Competence (or mastery, as Daniel Pink calls it) is considered an “innate psychological need” by leading researchers on the subject of intrinsic motivation.
However, it is your role as a leader to ensure that employees are mastering the type of skills that will enable them to be successful in your team. Throughout their career the needs of the business and its customers may evolve, and your team members will be making progress to match this evolution.
To provide the most relevant feedback, start by clarifying what great work looks like in as much detail as possible. It is much easier for employees to deliver - or exceed - expectations when details like outcomes, timelines, and examples of high-quality work are shared transparently. Then, ensure that employees have everything they need to deliver work at that level and arrange regular meetings to discuss progress. Provide feedback frequently and with a focus on how to improve future performance.
4- Find ways to increase autonomy
One study found “that autonomy support has generally been associated with more intrinsic motivation, greater interest, less pressure and tension, more creativity, more cognitive flexibility, better conceptual learning, a more positive emotional tone, higher self-esteem, more trust, greater persistence of behavior change, and better physical and psychological health than has control.” That’s a long list of benefits!
Increasing autonomy doesn’t mean letting your team run wild, but it does require that employees are trusted to make decisions about how or when they approach certain tasks. This is easier for everyone when the expectations around great work are clear and feedback is consistent, as mentioned above.
Explore which activities must be performed in a specific way and which can be more self-directed. Bring your team into the conversation to incorporate their perspectives when defining goals, as well as how to achieve those outcomes.
5- Say thank you, and be specific
Saying thanks is one way to provide specific feedback about how your employee’s efforts positively impacted someone else, moved the team closer to its goal, or improved their skill set. Specific “Thanks” delivers valuable feedback while also expressing your appreciation. This type of recognition is external but can be used to reinforce intrinsic motivation. The key is to go beyond “nice job” to include the details of what you appreciate about their actions and why.
Another reason to say thank you is that expressing gratitude and acts of kindness are great not only for your happiness but for those around you as well. Cultivating a culture of support and positivity is great for the team environment. Research shows it increases feelings of self-efficacy and social worth, which can have a spillover effect where people continue to “pay it forward”.
Overall, expressing gratitude encourages the kind of behaviors that make work more enjoyable, which is at the heart of internal motivation.
Do what science knows
“The secret to high performance isn’t rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive - the drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things because they matter” shares Daniel Pink from that same TED Talk.
Let’s do things that matter. Incorporate these 5 approaches into your leadership and, through the power of intrinsic motivation, make work more meaningful.