motivating your team
Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation
As you can see, you’ll want to choose your motivation techniques wisely.
Many leaders believe that these types of attractive incentives like bonuses or commissions —what scientists call “extrinsic motivation”—will get their team on board. Such rewards may encourage the team to adopt a new strategy, but they don’t always make people excited about changes in the long term. In fact it dulls thinking and blocks creativity. If people do get excited it is not sustainable or useful in fostering the work culture you want to build.
Routine, rule-based, left brain work has become automated and now done by machines. Creative, conceptual, right brain work is still done by human workers and is on the increase.
Dan Ariely did a study that showed that as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance.
Intrinsic motivation which originates from our own inherent sense of fulfilment or curiosity, is a lot more reliable. The desire to do things because they matter, we like it, they are interesting, and they are part of something important.
Autonomy - the urge to direct our own lives
Mastery - the desire to get better and better at something that matters
Purpose - the yearning to do what we do in service of something larger than ourselves.
Management is great if you want compliance. If you want engagement then self-direction works better. Australian firm Atlassian tell its engineers to spend 24 hours coming up with anything they want as long as it is not part of your job. They then present it the next day to the team. They now do 20% time (like at Google) where people can work on anything they want - a radical amount of autonomy. They have autonomy over their time, their task, their team, their technique. 50% of new products are birthed this way. Gmail and Google News were invented this way.
The Results Only Work Environment - the ROWE. In a ROWE people don’t have schedules. They show up when they want. They don’t have to be in the office at a certain time. They don’t have to show up anytime. How they do it. When they do it. Is totally up to them. They just have to get the work done. Meetings are optional. What happens? Productivity goes up. Worker engagement goes up. Worker satisfaction goes up. Turnover goes down. Autonomy, mastery and purpose are the new building blocks of a new way of doing things.
A crucial part of Movational Interviewing is OARS+i, a conversational framework used by coaches, as well as doctors, social workers, counsellors, and many others, to encourage positive change. OARS+i stands for “Open-Ended Questions, Affirmative Atmosphere, Reflective Listening, Summarising, and information.” It’s a great tool for one on one meetings with team members.
Open-ended questions are questions that can't be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” and instead invite reflection.
Asking these kinds of questions will help you gain a better understanding of your employees while providing them with an opportunity to express themselves and feel heard.
Some examples of open-ended questions include:
What do you like about the current process? What do you wish were different?
To what extent do you desire the proposed change?
How do you think this change might affect your work, for better or for worse?
How can I help you make the change successful?
Affirmations are statements about an employee that highlight their strengths and validate their feelings, opinions, and ideas.
You can use affirmations to build an employee’s confidence and to show how much you value them. It is important for affirmations to be sincere and perceptive, going beyond superficial praise.
Some examples include:
I know it hasn’t been easy coordinating this change and I wanted to take a moment to recognize how professional you’ve been throughout the process.
That’s a really good suggestion. Can you tell me more about it?
You handled yourself really well in that situation.
I appreciate you being so honest with me.
Remember that affirmations are all about highlighting an employee’s strengths and validating their feelings, opinions, and ideas. When giving affirmations, you should always be sincere and should strive to go beyond surface-level praise.
There are two types of reflective listening: simple and complex.
In simple reflective listening, you reflect back what an employee has said as a way of acknowledging that you understand:
They say: It sounds like it would be helpful if you had more communication with the data team before implementing this change.
You reflect: You’ve spoken to others and they also don’t think this change is a good idea.
Complex reflective listening requires you to reflect back the other person’s hesitation or ambivalence from a new perspective.
In order for complex reflective listening to be most effective, you need to end with whatever you want your employee to continue exploring:
They say: It’s impossible to make this work because it’s impossible to get aligned with the data team. This is never going to work.
You reflect: It sounds like you do not feel well supported by the data team; if this project were to be successful, you would need to be included in their process.
Summaries are a special type of reflective statement that reinforce what has been said thus far.
They are an opportunity to show that you have been listening while validating your employees’ transparency, frustrations, and opinions. Summaries can also lead into new open-ended questions.
For example, a leader might summarize a situation as follows:
“You do your best work alone, so you have a hard time working in groups. But you show great calm when approaching obstacles and an inclination to help others. I’m wondering: where does your desire for solitude come from?”
Reflective Listening: A Closer Look
Reflective listening is more than just active listening. Hearing another person accept and reiterate your thoughts can be transformative, making it easier to understand your emotions and discover paths forward.
In reflective listening, you make an assumption about what the other person has said and offer a reflective statement in response.
Your initial response might be a surface-level reflection that simply restates what has been said. But the key to great reflective listening is recognizing that true meaning often lies beneath the surface. As the conversation continues, look for ways to articulate what the other person really means, even if they aren’t fully aware of it. This is called a deep-level reflection.
There are several other techniques that you can employ in reflective listening beyond surface- and deep-level reflections. Overstatement can help steer the conversation in a different direction by bringing an unhelpful perspective to a conclusion. Understatement, by contrast, can deepen the level of an employee’s reflection. And metaphors, though sometimes tricky to get right, can reframe a sentiment and prompt your employee to consider a new perspective.
To summarize, you might reflect the statement “Everything has just been challenging lately” by replying with:
A surface-level reflection: “The challenges have been constant.”
A deep-level reflection: “And you’re having a hard time seeing the point.”
An overstatement: “You’re worried things might always be like this.”
An understatement: “Each challenge just brings on another.”
A metaphor: “And every day it’s like you’re starting again from the ground up.”
Don’t worry if you haven’t mastered these techniques yet. Reflective listening is one of the most challenging parts of OARS+i, but also one of the most rewarding.
Like most coaching techniques, the OARS+i framework takes practice to master, but you can start using its toolset right away. Reflective statements, open-ended questions, and affirmations can easily be worked into your daily conversations. To work on summaries and information, practice finding ways to motivate conversations towards change.
Expert practitioners of OARS+i can make the method fit seamlessly into conversation. OARS+i shouldn’t feel distracting or even noticeable to others. If you are using OARS+I effectively, you will notice people saying things like “Yes, exactly!” or “You’re a good listener.”
Like any tools, OARS+i and MI can be misused. So before you try to apply them in your workplace, consider a few common pitfalls:
Pitfall 1: Righting Reflex
Many leaders have a natural inclination to try to fix other people’s problems, rather than helping them fix the problem themselves. But this approach can be counterproductive, since you are subtly communicating to your employees that other people will fix things for them and that they won’t actually have to change. Remember, a coach always helps you find the answers that are best suited for you.
Pitfall 2: Planning
It is easy to misstep during the planning phase of MI. Make sure you help your employee create their own plan, rather than dictating one to them. Coaches understand that getting too directive can decrease empowerment and ownership.
Pitfall 3: Ambivalence
Many people will agree that a change is a good idea, but will struggle to stay committed to that change day-by-day; you’ve probably experienced this problem in your own life. While there is no cure-all solution, staying in close contact with your employees can help combat ambivalence. A coaching mindset is one of consistent engagement and communication to help others thrive.
Being aware of these potential traps will help you make the most of the MI process. Remember to stay vigilant!
THe MI Checklist
It will take practice to reap the full benefits of MI and it may not always be obvious that your efforts are paying dividends.
The checklist below is designed to help you identify areas where additional motivational interviewing could be beneficial. If any of these statements don’t feel true to you, then that is an area that could use some additional MI. My employees would say that I...:
...believe that they know what’s best for them.
...help them recognize their strengths.
...want to help them solve their problems in their own way.
...am curious about their thoughts and feelings.
...guide them to make good decisions for themselves.
...help them see both sides of a problem.
...empower them through our interactions.
It’s a good idea to run through the checklist periodically; remember, MI is a constant process of adjustment, not a switch you can flip on and off.
Information giving is a supplemental part of the OARS+i process that should be used carefully; if your employee is not on board yet, burdening them with extra information could be overwhelming.
“Information” in OARS+i tends to be small pieces of information delivered as inquiries, rather than direct instructions.
Information that suggests a course of action should only be provided after asking a team member what they feel their course of action should be and confirming that they want to hear more.