The 4 M’s of Sustainable Team Motivation
Choose at least three to build consistently high-performing teams
In this era with …
- More than 50 percent of the US workforce quiet quitting, costing $9 trillion to the global economy
- Fully loaded costs of replacing an employee up to 200 percent of their salary
- Over 50 percent of American employees moonlighting with their own side gigs
… understanding how to fully engage and sustain team focus has never been more important, or more challenging.
Quarterly motivational speeches or one-off investments in culture-building events aren’t going to cut it for ongoing motivation when the internet connects employees to literally millions of jobs they could apply for in one click if they’re not buying into their current role.
Combining motivators
Whether teams are in person or remote, managers can’t force full mental engagement or require the extra effort often needed to drive progress without employee motivation. Of course, all people are different and their intrinsic motivations vary based on a plethora of factors — including their upbringing, community, and stage of life. However, four key motivators have stood the test of time across industries and demographics. I believe consistently high-performing teams exhibit all four traits, and building a sustainably engaged team requires at least three.
While some motivators have more impact than others on different team members, they can’t keep a team member engaged if they exist only in isolation. Similar to how different grades of gasoline will help a vehicle engine run cleaner over the long run, a car full of the best gas without oil or brake fluid won’t last long. The value of quality gas can only be realized in combination with the other essential fluids to make a car run. In the same manner, the full value of the most engaging motivators can only be realized in the context of at least two others.
Before breaking down each motivator and how they work together, it’s important to differentiate short-term and long-term motivational strategies. Motivation is a form of mental health, and much like physical health, the best short-term strategy could be the worst long-term strategy. For example, when considering physical health, pulling a few late nights to prep for a big moment may be the best approach to maximize performance in the short term, but consistently depriving oneself of sleep will ultimately result in significantly decreased performance. In the same way, motivating someone to do something one time for a short amount of time is often a different — if not opposite — approach to sustainable motivation.
None of these traits can individually sustain motivation, and indexing on only two of them eventually leads to the type of questions listed outside the Venn diagram above. Three or more, though, and the positives outweigh the negatives to mentally lean into the team’s purpose.
I’ve been part of high-performing teams missing only one of each of these traits, and while delivering on all four motivators is definitely a worthwhile goal, strategically picking the most realistic three motivators is a great place to start.
1. Money
Money requires the lowest implementation effort in terms of motivation because of its versatility, so it can represent the means to acquire a variety of things without customizing the money for the individual. Assuming the organization has money to give, it’s not hard to exchange money for a team member’s time.
However, because money is so quantifiable, it’s also easy to compare. It’s harder to determine and compare how many percentage points more meaning another job can provide, or exactly how much more mutual respect a different team can offer, but one internet search can tell exactly how much money another job is offering. There will always be another job paying more money, making money a difficult long-term motivator. And while money is required to live, Gallup’s engagement research reports no significant difference in employee engagement by pay level (based on 1.4 million employees from 192 organizations across 49 industries and 34 nations).
Just because money doesn’t have the largest long-term impact on motivation doesn’t mean it’s not the best choice in some short-term scenarios. With a tight deadline requiring a team member to pull an all-nighter, there may not be time to develop mutual respect, showcase recent momentum, or buy into the meaning of the work. The promise of a significant bonus may be the best thing to get them through the night, where napkin math makes them believe there’s no higher value way they could spend a limited amount of time on such short notice.
Maintaining motivation without money:
As most startups and nonprofits prove, believing in a worthy cause with people who respect each other collectively making progress toward their shared goal can deprioritize money for people who otherwise would not work for free.
Team members need to make some amount of money from somewhere in order to survive. For leaders without funding, invest the time to understand how volunteers are covering their living expenses and give them space and support to do so.
2. Mutual respect
While research suggests having friends at work leads to increased productivity and retention, making professional colleagues personal friends isn’t necessary to create motivation. However, interpersonal relationships with colleagues are important, and for motivation to thrive, a baseline of mutual respect is key.
Innovative teams bring diverse perspectives to the table, and diverse perspectives often come from diverse backgrounds, interests, and beliefs, which can make finding common ground more challenging. But mutual respect allows different perspectives to thrive.
In the words of the fictional (yet aspirational) soccer coach, Ted Lasso:
“You don’t need to be best friends to be great teammates. Think about Shaq and Kobe, right? Lennon and McCartney. Heck, even Woody and Buzz got under each other’s plastic … You know what all those dynamic duos had in common? Mutual respect.”
Mutual respect can be harder to implement than handing out money because each individual needs to choose to acknowledge the positives in each other’s differences and create opportunities for each person to leverage their strengths. This is more than understanding where people fall on the company org chart; mutual respect entails considering each other’s opinions without bias and being willing to learn from each other’s expertise. Having a strong foundation of mutual respect is an important foundation to build regardless of industry, team, or compensation structure.
Maintaining motivation without mutual respect:
If the mission means enough, and the team is driving good momentum toward it with a salary that can sustain its members, focusing on the progress toward the meaning can supersede challenging relationships along the way.
For teams with opposing personalities, it’s important to articulate the value each team member brings to the table and clearly distinguish the inputs and outcomes for which each person is responsible.
3. Momentum
Of the four traits, perhaps the most under-leveraged motivator is momentum. Fear of missing out is an innate human insecurity, and momentum assuages that fear by serving as evidence for both current team members and prospective team members that the project with more momentum has more promise for success than alternative uses of their time. Of course, momentum doesn’t necessarily indicate progress toward key metrics, as lots of momentum can be felt working toward irrelevant goals, but KPI setting is a separate conversation.
The challenge with momentum is its strong recency bias. While one defining moment can establish the motivator of mutual respect, it takes a series of moments continually occurring to maintain momentum. A single big win last month doesn’t create as much momentum as a series of smaller wins each day since last month. Hence, momentum requires constant maintenance to identify and call out signs of progress, but that progress doesn’t have to always be monumental. Plus, momentum can be found in a variety of places based on how many data points are tracked.
To create more momentum, track more metrics.
Closing a huge customer is a natural great momentum builder, but so are more customer reviews than last month, more tasks completed, and fewer errors committed.
Maintaining motivation without momentum:
Working toward a worthy goal with people who respect each other creates tenacity to push through times of low perceived progress, especially with a salary to create personal security in spite of low perceived progress.
Without momentum, teams need to protect against lethargy by setting goals within the team’s control to accomplish. For example, a nonprofit may not hit a donation goal, but it can control hitting a high donor outreach goal.
4. Meaning
Meaningful work unlocks the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, helping individuals find purpose in the impact their efforts create for others. Individuals who feel their work is making a difference in the world have an extrinsic motivation and urgency outside of their own feelings to drive progress toward the mission. While money, mutual respect, and momentum are focused on the personal benefits of feeling safe, feeling like you belong, and feeling like you have a future, meaning is feeling that you’re helping others achieve those other feelings. In the words of Gandhi:
“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
While meaning is a powerful motivator, it’s not easily instilled. Sure, most people wouldn’t oppose a nonprofit’s mission to help impoverished children or provide medical care for isolated people groups, but connecting every donor and clerical worker behind the scenes to the organization’s mission so they feel personal ownership and fulfillment from the mission is much harder. To make matters more challenging, most organizations are not directly saving lives or curing diseases, so connecting team members to a meaningful mission is even harder.
Meaning starts with a mission to help others, and is sustained by stories of individuals affected.
Most mission statements are meaningless, without a clear and specific focus on helping people. But every organization with paying customers has a story to tell of impact made for their customer or their customer’s customer. That impact needs to be encapsulated in a single phrase as a mission, and then continually personified in stories.
Great leaders, then, are curators and purveyors of stories exemplifying the meaning of their mission.
Similar to momentum, meaning must constantly be reiterated, with greater frequency the further a team member is removed from the impact their work creates. Giving behind-the-scenes workers the opportunity to periodically participate in more customer-facing roles can aid in establishing meaning. Once belief in the meaning of one’s work is established and consistently reinforced, motivation can flourish.
Maintaining motivation without meaning:
Working with respectful team members to advance assigned work and get paid well to do it enables individuals to be satisfied in their work as a means to an end to find meaning elsewhere. Workplaces with lackluster missions can emphasize work-life balance to provide space for meaning outside of work and help team members define and pursue personal goals that are meaningful for them.
Next steps
Every team member deserves and desires meaning, momentum, mutual respect, and money to produce their highest-quality work, and bringing out the best in teams starts with understanding their perspective on how the team indexes for each trait and which traits are most valuable to them. Motivation isn’t magic, but it’s also not entirely science either. Investing the time to learn a team’s motivational preferences will optimize their focus, and the resulting productivity will create the best form of competitive advantage.
Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more and reach out today.
