Are You Losing Motivation At Work

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Hi, and welcome to The Fulfilled Leader. How motivated are you at work at the moment? How often are you having to make yourself do something, or you're feeling like you're dragging yourself to work? Or do you have a sinking feeling of dread about work, or even low mood in relation to work? As I've been listening to people talk about their experience of work at the moment and their observation of others who are also feeling like this, I've been wondering if we have a motivation problem. There are a lot of problems at the moment, too much work, increasing pressure, et cetera. But I began to wonder if this was triggering low motivation. Motivation is something we don't often talk about, and yet it can be at the bottom of frustration and unhappiness at work. And if we focus on it, we can restore some joy

A Client Story And An Aha

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in our work. In this short episode, I'm offering a way of looking at how work is for you at the moment, and sharing a frame to help you identify a way forward. Many years ago, I worked with a client who was experiencing very low mood about work. We did a lot of exploration. We looked at values, the company, personality preferences, career trajectory, but nothing quite fitted the cause of their problem until we began to explore motivation. And we did this using the model I'll share today, and we both had an aha moment. This individual was missing all of the three key motivators, and when we worked on these to get them back in place, work changed, and their mood improved and fulfillment at work returned. This mirrored a conversation we had in Flourish recently, which brought motivation back into my mind again. We were talking about how, for many people, work is a struggle at the moment, and we were exploring the causes for this. I began wondering if motivational theory might give us some clues about why things feel so bad. So before we get there, I feel I need to share a little of motivational theory, and I promise I'll keep this brief Motivational

Motivation Basics Maslow And Herzberg

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theory was built to consider how to motivate other people, how to get people to work harder and faster, basically. But today I'm curious about how we find motivation in ourselves. When I studied motivation in my educational journey, I saw it in both in a school setting and then in a leadership and organizational setting, and I was introduced there to two key motivational theories. You'll probably be familiar with these, Maslow's Hierarchy of Need and Herzberg's Motivational Theory. Maslow identified five levels of a pyramid, and he said that we needed to build the pyramid from the bottom up. At the bottom was the physiological need of air, water, food, sleep. The next was safety, security, stability, health, income. The third was love and belonging, relationships, being part of a group. And the fourth was self-esteem, which was about self-respect and competence and recognition. And then the fifth and final one was self-actualization. That was about becoming the fullest version of yourself and realizing your potential he suggested that the first four of these are deficiency factors, so when each is not met, we're not able to move up the pyramid. For example, when our physiological and safety needs are met, we're able to focus more on our esteem and status. The second theory was Herzberg, and he had a similar framing. He suggested we have hygiene factors and motivational factors. The hygiene factors are very work-focused. They're about pay and benefits, company policy, quality of your boss, relationship with your peers, working conditions, and so on. Jo- job security and status is also there, which is curious at the moment. The motivational factors were achievement, recognition, enjoyment of the work itself, responsibility, and growth. So both of these theories are saying that we need the core areas to be in place before we're ready for growth and advancement. We also talk about intrinsic motivation and ex- extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is about the external rewards we receive, pay, for example. Intrinsic motivation is within me. It's about how I'm fulfilled and satisfied in my work. So I was living with these motivational theories, and then in 2009, Daniel Pink published his book Drive, and he looked at the latest

Daniel Pink On Autonomy Mastery Purpose

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research to see what else we could say about motivation in this century. And he created a new model, which is much more relevant now and is the one that we're going to focus on for the rest of this podcast. He found that for many of us, the hygiene and security factors were in place, and that there was much more nuance about how we find motivation, and that was much more intrinsic, and especially for those of us working in knowledge work, leadership, or professional careers. He identified three key areas for motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. For autonomy, this is about the desire to self-direct your work. So if you remember, there was a time when Google allowed people to work 20% of their time on self-directed projects. Mastery is the urge to get better. This is about completing a challenging task and doing it to a high standard. And purpose is the desire to do something that has meaning, and That meaning might be about the performance of your team, it might be about making people's work lives better, and it could be about being aligned with the people you work with. In fact, some other motivational theories say that this is really about connectedness and relationship. We don't ne- necessarily need all three of these to be in place all the time, and we'll each have a different threshold for what each one looks like. So for me, autonomy is hugely important. I love freedom to do work I love, and can feel very caged in when this isn't possible. But I've worked with a call center a few years ago, and for them, autonomy was about being able to choose their shift patterns. They knew they worked within very strict rules and guidelines about their work. It was about when they worked that they wanted autonomy. Okay, the theory lesson is over.

Why Leaders Feel Caged Right Now

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Let's come back to how this relates to the current state of work I think many people are actually missing all three of these at the moment, autonomy, mastery, and purpose. And let me use senior leaders as an example because I believe that if senior leaders are feeling like this, the trickle-down effect will be felt in the whole organization. So if we start with autonomy, I hear things like everything is accelerating, and when things are accelerating, we feel a need of urgency, and we feel that we have to do what we have to, not what we choose to. We know that boards and shareholders are increasingly concerned. They're pushing senior leaders to take decisions quickly, to follow trends. You might want to go and see Aaron Sorkin's new film about Facebook, The Social Reckoning, to see some of this in action. It doesn't make for very happy watching. The pressure on the organization to perform is leaving leaders feeling like they have to follow what they're told, and the autonomy that they sought in becoming a leader is lost. So they wanted to lead strategically. They wanted to be able to develop blue sky thinking, and, and so they are feeling like they've lost some autonomy, is my guess. And there's some evidence of this in organizations. I believe that the return-to-work mandate is a symptom of this, and of course, that reduces autonomy in employees. Mastery is really curious at the moment. Mastery is about growth and improvement, becoming better at something, taking time to master a new skill. And under enormous pressure, this is increasingly hard. There's no time to learn something new in a meaningful way. And sure, we're all learning AI, but we're having to do it in a huge hurry and without feeling a deeper meaning to the growth that we're doing there. The other challenge is that we're often resorting to AI to solve our problems for us instead of having to think them through for ourselves, So we're losing the satisfaction that we get when we achieve it. And finally, purpose. For many organizations and leaders, purpose has become about survival in a challenging market and a desperate sense of trying to make things work rather than for the greater good. Even in sectors where there's a very clear purpose, like the humanitarian sector, recent cuts have left everyone racing to keep their jobs and to work out how to do more with less. And when that's happening, it's really easy to lose sight of purpose and why we're here. And if purpose is connected to our relationships and the working together, when we're under pressure and stressed, we become more task-focused and less relational. And so we take less time to be with each other, to build meaning together, and we just keep our heads down looking at our computers. So if we look at all of that, it's no wonder work feels hard at the moment. We are losing three key motivators, autonomy, mastery, and purpose, and connection. And alongside this, even some of our hygiene factors are missing. For example, people are worried about their jobs in the future, and that is a hygiene factor.

Practical Ways To Restore Motivation

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So what can we do? We can use the exact same framing to fix the problem for ourselves, and if we're a leader, we can look at how we can support others in this. For example, we can look for ways to create more autonomy, like working on a project we own, negotiating working hours with our boss. Even carving out one hour a day for deep work that we are directing and owning will help. Turning off notifications and giving ourselves some autonomy for one hour a day will make a difference. We can find something to learn or master. If this is too hard at work, do something outside of work. Learn a language. Learn to play chess. Doing, doing something that's going to stretch your mind. In work, look at the next role you want and identify any gaps in your experience or knowledge, and then intentionally make time to fill that gap. Learn what you need to in order to be ready when those roles become available. And maybe next time you have a tricky problem, don't ask Claude. And finally, purpose. We can reconnect with why our role matters, and we can take time to be with others. We can bring our team together to talk about how what we do connects to the wider purpose of the organization. We could do some voluntary work as a team. We can pay it forward by mentoring and coaching others. Anything that's bringing meaning and purpose back into our day. Motivation is very personal. What mastery means for me will be different to what mastery means for you. I'd encourage you to take the three of these, autonomy, mastery, and purpose, and rate how important each is for you. Autonomy may be more important than mastery. Purpose may be more important than autonomy. then rate where you are now. And if one of them is too low, look for a way to increase it. See if you can do some incremental moves. If all three are too low, just start with one. Life's too full to try and dial up all three at the same time. But choose one and say, "Okay, next month I'm gonna focus on this one." I think this simple framing is so helpful in giving us clues in how we can have a better day and a week and find some intrinsic motivation again, so that when Monday rolls around, we're happy to get up and go to work.