I started a 4 hour class on motivation and influence with the words; ‘If you came here to learn how to motivate your team, I’m sorry to say, you won’t. You can’t motivate people.’ After the awkward chuckles and sideways glances, that class learned what you can do instead. Because the truth is, you can’t motivate your team, but you can encourage them to motivate themselves. In an earlier blog, You Can’t Motivate People, you learned how to encourage that motivation with 3 C’s. You learned to get Clear, Curious, and Communicating. Over the next few weeks we’ll be breaking down each C on a deeper level so that you can make the most of motivation on your team. Learn to encourage motivation, and how it looks different today, on YouTube with How to Motivate your Team (get clear) here!
What is motivation?
What does it mean to encourage your team to motivate themselves and why is clarity so important? Motivation is the reason, or reasons, someone has for acting or behaving in a particular way. It is that particular way that we’re focused on first. We will get to the reason, or reasons, each individual wants to take the action, but first we need to know what the action is. Motivation, even as recently as the early 2000s, was much more clear cut on the particular way, or direction you wanted people to move in. As a leader 20-30 years ago, and in any decade pre Information Age, change took much longer to occur. There might have been 3-5 initiatives for a business in 2005. In 2025, there are countless goals and completed initiatives, not to mention the start and stops that occur. When this happens, the direction you’re going gets murky.
Motivation case study
A simple Google search of the largest company of the early 2000s that is still thriving today highlights the stark contrast. WalMart was an international brand that had an online retail presence for years by 2000. They were early to market in these and several other areas so you would have fully expected a focus on leadership and change management to stand out as they worked to motivate their team in each of their new frontiers. And they were.
WalMart’s annual report from 2000 spent almost half of their total 20 pages focused on leadership and anticipating and moving with change. Move ahead to 2025. WalMart’s latest annual report is 100 pages long and has a QR code on page one if you’re interested in a note from the CEO. There was so much going on at WalMart last year that it took 100 pages of forms, charts, and reports just to summarize all they’ve done and achieved. Scrolling through it is enough to give you anxiety from the overwhelm of information. Attempting to actually act on it all, without clarity, would absolutely leave you with a short circuit and nothing accomplished. But they do act on it. The company actually accomplished everything that is written in that 100 page report in 2024 by making those goals incredibly clear to every single person impacted.
Clarity comes before you motivate your team
All great journeys start with the end in mind and leadership is no different. For the most part motivation is exceedingly personal. The uniqueness (the reason someone has to do something) is written right into the definition. When you want to motivate your team however, you need to have a common goal. That means that it starts with your singular, unified, focus. Imagine if each of those thousands of employees within the WalMart organization weren’t clear on the goal. They may be motivated by hopes of a promotion, a pay bump, getting singled out in a huddle for their efforts, or getting an extra chance to put their feet up but they could get those any number of ways.
Leverage clarity to lead at home
Imagine a complete open Saturday that you’ve dubbed spring cleaning day. The kids and your husband have a long list of things they’d rather be doing. Your son was hoping to meet his buddies for batting practice. Hubby has projects he’d rather tinker with in the garage. Your daughter had planned to spend the day getting coffee and window shopping downtown. You have things you’d rather be doing too for that matter, like reading (or scrolling) in a quiet house and getting in a little yoga.
You decide to use spring cleaning to earn downtime. So you could say, you can do your thing when the house is clean. Or, you could unify everyone with a clear goal, saying, We’ve been living every day in this house for months through the winter. Let’s get it ready for sleep overs and team parties with some general maintenance. If you all declutter, scrub down, and vacuum up your bedrooms and bathrooms, I’ll tackle all the common areas. Toss what you don’t need. Organize what you want to keep. Then wash walls, switches, and drawers and vacuum. I’ll shampoo carpets once I have the kitchen, living room, and halls done.
You would have a mutiny of complaints, questions, and push back with the first option. The second says the same thing while working much better. With a focus on clarity, let’s break down why.
Clarity comes first, why?
Clarity prevents confusion
Everyone has a different definition of clean and they don’t know why they should care about yours. Just like everyone has a different definition of efficient, customer friendly, and even accurate. Your son may never have considered that he needs to declutter his closet for a team party. The first step in getting him motivated to get it done is to make him aware of the need.
This is no different at work. When you ask Susie to escalate issues she sees, she likely has no idea what kind of issues you mean. Do you want to hear that her co-worker came in late? Should she escalate that the processing software is slow? No, you want to know if there are gaps in the process you trained her on. Avoid frustration on both sides by expressly telling her what you want to hear about. She can feel empowered to identify problems and solutions without bogging you down with reports that you never needed. This lack of clarity comes up most often with leaders with a dominant attribute of Connection. They are focused on relationships and forget that the relationship you’re building at work is around the job. Brené Brown says, Clear is Kind. To get the working relationship you want, provide clear expectations.
When you’re clear people are able to hit your expectations. Your team not only has an idea of what you want but knows exactly how to deliver. Which really means you will get higher level results in less time because no one is wasting time guessing, and mistaking what you wanted. One Operations Director was training a brand new employee. The express clarity she gave this new employee on how to identify and bring up problems meant they could stop errors in their tracks. What used to take months to catch on quarterly reports was identified in days based on the new employee following the problem solving plan.
A clear goal creates a problem to be solved
One of the best ways to unify a group is to have a common enemy. In our home example, the enemy could have been mean old mom who makes us clean. Or, as in the second example, it is the grime of winter that we can all rally against. When you have a single problem you become the team that can solve it together.
Think of that time the state came in to audit you and your whole team had to work together to create a united answer. Or the time the system crashed and you had to handle customer calls without being able to see their files. Think about those first few weeks of the COVID shut down. You all went to work from home not knowing what that meant. Suddenly we were crystal clear on keeping the lights on and making sure our teams were emotionally and physically well. We’re clear because we’re in crisis mode against one common enemy, one problem.
You don’t have to wait for forced clarity. You can make every single goal as clear as a crisis mode and get all hands on deck. Giving your team a clean focus, clear goal will help motivate your team to hit it because they know exactly where to go individually and as a group.
You can tie your motivations to it
I’ve mentioned a couple times now that you start with clarity and your motivation will tie to it. Some of that you have to do intentionally as a leader. More on that next week when we get into curiosity and then in communication. But some of it happens automatically in your brain. Neuroplasticity is your brains ability to create new pathways for neurons to travel in the brain. Also known as, learn something new.
Your brain is intelligently designed to not only want to create these pathways but also make them a habit as soon as possible. That means you can train your brain simply by telling it that you want to accomplish the goal set out and you’ll get better at hitting it over time. So, even if those WalMart employees don’t fully understand what they get out of everyday low prices, when they know that’s the goal, they start moving toward it. Eventually it happens on autopilot. Employees start making every decision based on cost efficiency because that is the new pathway.
You will need more than clarity to motivate your team
As I mentioned in the beginning, you can’t actually motivate your team. So, while you can start making an impact with clarity, you’ll only make small, slow progress until you encourage the team to motivate themselves. We started that gently in the motivational speech from mom. You can get the sleep over, party, and projects off the list when the house is clean. This gentle shift becomes a title wave when you start intentionally tying motivations and communicating it consistently.
It all starts with dropping your assumptions and getting curious. Next week we’ll dig into how to uncover motivators through curiosity and tie them to the goal. After decades of doing this work, I have yet to see a personal motivation that could not be tied to a goal. It just takes a little curiosity to get there.
Think of the situations where you didn’t have a single focus from your own boss. You’re sitting in his office and he explains just how critical it is that you prioritize employee engagement. Then he gives you 7 different ideas on how to do that.