Dan Gregory @DanGregoryCo
Whether you’re a leader or manager trying to motivate your team, or a professional trying to lift your own game, there is no shortage of advice on how to inspire and drive peak performance. Common factors include: clear goal setting, fair remuneration, professional development, a sense of purpose or meaning beyond money, a collaborative team environment, autonomy and reduced micro-managing, as well as non-punitive feedback in the face of failure and an avoidance to pointless meetings.
All of these are critical factors in motivating performance, however, the concept of motivating for performance is somewhat flawed in itself. Few people actually want to perform poorly in their work, in fact most people want to feel a sense of accomplishment and capability in what they do, so perhaps performance is as much about what we take away as what we add.
If you consider traditional sales training and methodologies for “handling objections” as a metaphor for performance, it might be worth thinking of how we handle obstacles to performance before we beat ourselves, or our teams, up for not hitting our targets.
Following are four obstacles that get in the way of our performance and motivation and a few ideas for how we can hack each of these issues.
1. How we perceive - Blind spots, opportunities and what we ignore
The truth is, “One size doesn’t motivate all.”
Seeing team motivation or encouraging performance as a single skill is a mistake. We all filter the world through a unique frame of reference and different individuals are motivated by different core motivators. For instance, once a certain level of survival-based safety has been achieved, different people with have widely varying attitudes to risk and adventure based on their own personalities and personal experiences and backgrounds.
Some professionals are motivated by the new and shiny and they’re easily bored, others seek the rewards of teamwork and being part of an organisation that has shared goals and ambitions, some seek the intellectual challenge of solving complicated problems, whilst some professionals are driven by commercial outcomes (occasionally at any cost).
The point is, trying to motivate each of these types of people will require a nuanced approach.
What’s more, where these professionals will often fall short of their performance targets is that they are often so distracted by their own interests that they fail to see opportunities. If you’re always motivated by the next customer or sale, you might miss the opportunity to build a deeper and more rewarding relationship with an existing customer.
2. How we feel - Blocks, mindset and what we avoid
Our emotional state is fluid and how we feel on a particular day may not be how we feel the next or even typically. This may manifest as procrastination or avoidance behaviours as if we’re not “feeling it” we’re often reluctant to do it.
It’s useful to understand the psychology that sits beneath the emotion if we’re to move past our blocks and embolden our mindset.
For example, a fear around a particular challenge or workplace activity might not have any basis in rationality or reality but be fuelled by a pre-existing definition of self that we had very little to do with creating.
A fear of sales may be motivated by a belief that “I’m not a people person,” which may be true, or it may simply be anchored in a single past experience.
It’s critical here not to ignore or dismiss the belief, but rather to shift it by aligning preferred behaviours with other existing beliefs. In other words, align behaviours with beliefs.
3. How we think - Biases, knowledge and what we prioritise
Despite all we’ve been told about playing to our strengths, our weakness is our greatest opportunity for performance uplift and increased confidence.
There are a number of problems in “playing to your strengths.” Firstly, it reinforces existing biases - when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Secondly, our strengths are often category generic - in a room filled with carpenters, being good with a hammer is essentially worthless and hardly differentiating. Thirdly, it also offers the least opportunity for performance uplift - You might be 95% efficient with the hammer, but have loads more upside when it comes to running the business of carpentry.
This means our existing knowledge often biases our behaviour, whereas exercising our weaknesses can often change the game for us and lead to exponential growth.
4. How we behave - Breaks, skills and what we do poorly
In the long run, design beats discipline and motivation. Not that motivation and discipline are bad, they’re simply short-term strategies. No one is disciplined in every area of their lives and no one is motivated every moment of every day.
However, by using systems and process design, and by hacking human nature, we can create a bias away from failure and towards success.
Consider where your breakage points are in your profession or when they occur during a particular day and then design a system that increases the chances of success. Many of us already use this thinking in our daily lives - we set an alarm for 6:00AM and another for 6:05AM, knowing that we can’t be trusted to wake up and stay up. A friend of mine goes to bed in his train clothes so that when he wakes up, he has to train or else face the shame of taking his gym gear off without training.
The point here is that rarely do we, or our team seek to underperform and often adding metrics and techniques on top of what we’re already doing, can be counter-productive. A better starting point might just be removing the obstacles from our path before we hit the accelerator.