How to Reignite Motivation in Your Team With 9 Simple Tactics

Read Time: 2 minutes 13 seconds

Quick Question

One of the best ways to be armed as a leader is data. But getting unbiased leadership data you can trust is expensive.

But what if we used this community of 11,000+ leaders to change that?

If I create a leadership pulse survey of no more than 15 questions and gave free access of the summarized results to anyone who participated, would you be in?

What is Motivation?

We have a tendency to make things more complicated than necessary.

Want proof?

The market size of Todo List Apps is $3 billion dollars a year. That’s bigger than the GDP of 30 countries for the ability to write down a task and cross it off when complete.

What does this have to do with Motivation?

This is another place where we’ve built a concept into something more complicated than it is.

When we think of motivation, we picture sports teams exploding out of the tunnel. We imagine software developers sleeping under their desks. Our minds conjure visions of palpable energy deployed to overcome nearly insurmountable obstacles (like living in a van down by the river).

Or perhaps 4,000+ pull-ups in a day is your version of pretty darn motivated.

But check out the actual definition:

The motivation hurdle is much lower.

It’s less of a maximum and more of a minimum. It is that trace amount of energy that tilts us from inaction to action. And not a drop more.

So how do we use this knowledge to motivate our teams?

Raise the Energy. Lower the Hurdle.

If we’re trying to get someone to do something, they can either increase their desire to do it, or we can reduce the friction preventing them. That’s it.

Most of the attention goes to raising the energy. Who doesn’t love an impassioned locker room speech?

But we wildly overestimate our ability to influence sustainable change in others.

So what do smart leaders do?

They put their effort where they can have more impact:

The environment. The process. The culture.

And here’s how I’d do it.