You want to motivate your employees. You want to say or do something that makes them perform better. And you are certain they could perform a whole lot better if they had more motivation.

You're right, of course. Most people perform far below their potential most of the time. And your quest for the right things to say or do is a sensible one. There are better strategies, many of which you'll find in the pages of this book.

You are not alone in seeing your challenge this way. Every manager senses the potential for higher motivation and better performances in his or her people. Every manager suffers from the same frustrations. And every manager wishes to motivate employees (or students, or children, or team members, or even pets). Why? Because:

Whenever we must accomplish our goals through others, their motivation is our greatest limiting factor.

But if you are like most managers, you actually don't do a great deal about this employee motivation problem each and every day. You probably feel some frustrations about their motivation levels most days, but it is hard to find the time to research and try out new options in your busy schedule. It is all too easy to stick to the old routines and let your frustrations simmer on the back burner of your mind.

Even when you try something new, you may find the result disappointing, since the vast majority of incentive and reward schemes fail to create lasting improvements in motivation or performance. And that tends to discourage us from further experiments (although it ought instead to encourage us to admit our conventional approaches are flawed, as you will learn in the coming pages).

Let's start by reaffirming your instincts here. Your frustrations with your employees' level of motivation are right on target. Listen to that inner voice! Don't let lethargy, tradition, or frustration keep you from cracking the motivation nut.

Your gut says motivation is the key issue, and your gut is definitely right. Just because most managers do more grumbling than real fixing is no reason for you to push the motivation problem to the back corner of your desk.

In fact, if you'll follow your nose on this for one more minute, you'll soon discover that the motivation problem is a lot bigger than any of us likes to admit out loud. (That's the bad news. Fortunately, there is also good news because if you solve the motivation problem, a lot of other good things begin to happen almost as if by magic!)

You can achieve exceptional levels of motivation when you align your supervisory goals with employee opportunities to succeed.

You can achieve exceptional levels of motivation when you align your supervisory goals with employee opportunities to succeed.

This relationship between opportunity and motivation is key and should be your primary focus as you explore ways of achieving high motivation in your work force.
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"Average" Motivation Is Actually Quite Low

We are used to the average motivation level of employees in a typical workplace, so it seems reasonable to us. By long custom, supervisors create average expectations and employees more or less fill those expectations, and everything seems "normal," "okay," and "fine." ("How's it going in your department, Joe?" "It's okay. Everything's fine. How about you?")

But if you think more deeply about motivation, you'll agree with me that normal is not just fine. The reason is that:

People are capable of far higher motivation and performance levels than we see in the average workplace.

I'll support that statement with evidence in a minute, although I think you probably agree with me once you see it written in black and white. And you no doubt "get" the implication of it, too: that the average workplace evidently does not motivate people to a large degree.

And yet it took me a long time to come to these simple conclusions. In researching this book, I decided after talking with hundreds of people in conventional workplaces to "get out of the box" and search for peak motivation and performance levels wherever they could be found.

I wanted to recalibrate my sense of what true motivation looks and feels like. And I was sure I'd seen true motivation in many contexts, in fact, wherever people strive for things they believe in and wish to accomplish. So I went farther than the typical companies of the consultant/trainer beat. I looked for highly motivated people everywhere and anywhere, and I found them on sports fields, in medics' uniforms on the field of battle, in ministries, and in the lonely struggle of the eager entrepreneur. I found them in places like:

• The collectively owned copy shop on the ground floor of my office building, where the employee-owners cheerfully work long days and nights, and always go the extra mile to satisfy their customers, while managing to make enough extra money to set 10 percent of all their profits aside for local charities.

• The members of the youth soccer teams I've coached who voluntarily work themselves to exhaustion for zero compensation. They taught me the true value of motivation by showing me that when I built commitment to the sport and the team and gave them lots of positive feedback and learning opportunities, they would transform themselves from bumbling beginners to league winners in the course of a single season. I hope they'll still be able to teach that lesson when they grow up and go to work for some manager who hasn't learned it yet because I'd hate to see all that youthful enthusiasm and commitment give way to the average employee's punch-the-clock mentality.

• A photographer whose work I admire (one of his photos is in this chapter) who, like most artists, works entirely on his own, often photographing from early in the morning to sunset, and then logs long, difficult hours in the darkroom, in order to prepare for an exhibition or deliver new prints to one of his galleries. Not only do artists do tougher work for longer hours than any employee could legally be required to do, but they continually struggle to perfect their art. And all this with no one to supervise, motivate, or reward them but their own desire to create great art.

• The amateur mountain climbers and triathletes who spend many hours before or after work each day training for their sport. As I write this book, I'm sitting in a turret office in an old summer house in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and there is a steady stream of runners passing by my window at all hours of the day. They are training for the Falmouth Road Race, which starts a couple of miles from here and is a high point of the summer in these parts. So all I have to do is look up from my pile of papers to see what true motivation looks like. Tens of thousands of ordinary employees and managers train all spring, then plan their vacation time to compete in this race. How many of them display the same level of dedication and commitment to their work? Some, I'm sure, but certainly not the majority. I'll bet many of them sneak time away from the office if they can to spend more time on training. Some are no doubt "out sick" today so they can get here early to practice on the course.

• The foster parents who adopt a dozen homeless children just because it feels like the right thing to do. Well, I know what's right, too, but I sometimes have a hard time doing it. (For example, I struggle to find the money in my large household's budget to make substantial donations to charities. I can't imagine how we could take on many more children, but somehow people do.)

• The volunteers who rush to a disaster area to give aid to the victims. I remember when Hurricane Bob smashed into Cape Cod a few years ago and devastated the towns of Woods Hole and Falmouth. We were without water or power for quite a while, and I was amazed to learn that utility workers from other states had volunteered to come to our communities and get our power lines up and running again. They were staying in makeshift shelters and working round the clock to do a job that they probably took far less seriously under more normal circumstances, when there wasn't a disaster to motivate them. What makes it a job on some days and a calling on others?

All these people exhibit remarkably high motivation levels. They sustain a high level of motivation and achieve performance peak after performance peak in spite of (or perhaps because of) the lack of traditional supervision and rewards.

Nobody tells them to do it. Often nobody even pays them for doing it. Most remarkably, nobody offers them special rewards or incentives in order to induce them to do it. Sure, a "thanks," a "good job," or an occasional trophy help. But the motivation is independent of these external factors. It bubbles up from within.

Far from having to make these people perform, you simply need to let them perform. You probably couldn't stop them from performing if you tried! The opportunity they pursue is so personally compelling that they are highly self-motivated. If only people could be so motivated in the work they do for you. (And they can! In this book, we'll explore the secret of achieving true motivation. Stay tuned.)
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The Dark Side Of Motivation

My research also led me to another, more sobering example of high motivation. Inexpensive freight transportation has made it easy to subcontract manufacturing abroad, and as an unfortunate result, abusive labor conditions involving lock-downs, captive workers, child labor, and unsafe working conditions are increasingly common in many countries. According to the experts at Verit?, a nonprofit that inspects overseas factories for U.S. companies, the odds are good that one or more of the articles of clothing you now wear was made under inhuman working conditions for just pennies an hour.

In these sweatshops, employees work twice as long hours as your employees do, typically in work spaces that are dirty, excessively loud, and poorly lit. And they endure much higher injury and death rates, in exchange for roughly a hundredth of your workers' pay. Sometimes they aren't paid at all. In such circumstances, doing even an adequate job is a remarkable thing.

How can they sustain motivation under such extremely unrewarding conditions? Because they face severe threats. Living in poverty, they may have no other options for supporting themselves and their families. And once caught up in an abusive job situation, they are fearful of the consequences of resistance. Many of these factories are patrolled by heavily armed guards; beatings by supervisors are common; and even access to water, food, and bathrooms may be withheld.

Under such threatening conditions, survival is a highly motivating proposition. People will do amazing things when their backs are against the wall. If you doubt this, talk to a mugger about motivation. Muggers can get you to do something you don't want to do, and you pay them instead of the other way around! To a mugger, motivation is as simple as a shiny gun displayed near someone's torso, along with some variant of that magically motivating phrase, "your money or your life."

If you wish to truly understand motivation, you must consider the full range of situations in which people are highly motivated. And some of those situations are ones in which extreme coercion is applied, and people are motivated by the desire to survive, rather than the desire to succeed. Although you obviously don't intend to apply this lesson directly to your people, there is still much to be learned from it. For starters, I'm sure you noticed, as I did, that the strongest levels of motivation come from within, whether they are based on the desire to succeed or to simply survive.
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Rethinking Motivation

And so my search for the extremes of motivation led me to redefine the motivation spectrum. It led me to see that high motivation is commonplace where there is either great opportunity or great threat. People rise to either occasion, but are typically less motivated between these extremes, as the Figure below illustrates.

Yet the average workplace is about midway between the extremes of high threat and high opportunity, as shown in the figure. The personal stakes are relatively low. The threats are nothing like those imposed by a mugger or a sweatshop boss. Unless your company is faced with a major disaster, there is no way you can create survival threats sufficient to sustain a very high level of motivation, even if you wanted to. And you don't. We all know motivation by threat is a dead-end strategy, and we are naturally more attracted to the opportunity side of the motivation curve than the threat side.

Yet it is also an unfortunate truth that most supervisors make casual use of threats, forgetting that they do not have, or want, the coercive power to motivate by fear alone. Threats, of course, move people toward the survival side of the motivation curve, which moves them away from the opportunity side. So threats tend to move people away from the high motivation of genuine opportunities. Yet they generally fail to move them up the survival side of the motivation curve sufficiently to create high fear-based motivation. So threats are generally counterproductive. In fact, we can state as a general rule that, in any civilized workplace:

Threats are always demotivating.

Do you use threats in a misguided effort to motivate your employees? Of course not! Threats are not nice, and you see yourself as a fundamentally nice person (and I bet you are right). Most managers say they never or rarely use threats.

But most employees say their supervisors do hold threats over them on a routine basis. Most employees feel that their bosses use their power to withhold opportunities and rewards and on occasion to actively punish and do harm. In my work, I've interviewed and surveyed thousands of employees in all sorts of organizations, big and small, and I'm willing to bet that your employees are convinced that you use threats to try to coerce them into doing what you want.

And if your employees think you use threats, then you do. What matters in motivating (or trying to motivate) people is what they perceive. Their understanding of the situation drives their behavior, so your understanding of the situation is really quite irrelevant.

You need to "get into their heads" and understand how they see you so you can manage the impression you make, not just your intentions! Ken Blanchard, a wonderful trainer who says his goal is "to take the B.S. out of behavioral science," often tells audiences that "motivation is a six inch job. It all comes down to the space between your ears." Then he holds his hands up to his ears to demonstrate that it's what people hear and what they think of it that matters. Anything outside the space between the ears is superfluous!

And the truth is that most people hear the following comments and actions as threats:

• Annual performance reviews in which the supervisor tells them what they did wrong, and also how much of a raise they will or won't get. The link between the manager's judgment of long-past events and the manager's control over compensation is powerful in employees' minds, so formal performance reviews are actually the worst place to review performance. Many managers sense this and tend to overreport performance so as to minimize the "damage" their people feel from the reviews. Then companies say they have a problem because managers won't report employee performance accurately enough. Well, believe me, it's a much bigger problem than that. And it's called threat-based management.

• Cash rewards and incentives in which managers have control over the allocation of the rewards, whether based on individual supervisor judgment or committee. Often employees focus on who didn't get the rewards (the majority don't after all). And they may feel there is a veiled threat of withholding rewards from those who don't "kiss ass" and "suck up to" their supervisors. It is sad but true that employees will often view a well-intentioned reward program in this contrary and negative light.

• Bonus programs often degenerate into threat-based motivation, too. When employees see it as a case of "If you don't do X, you won't get a bonus," then it's a threat, not a reward. And that is what happens all too often because employees come to see bonuses as their due, not as something out of the ordinary. And when management withholds something you feel you are due, that pushes you down and away from the positive side of the motivation curve.

• Supervisors sometimes say things like, "If you don't get this project on track by the end of the month, I don't know what I'm going to say to the V.P. You know they're looking for ways to cut the payroll." But is this a genuine sharing of vital information, or just a veiled threat of downsizing? Most employees will take it as a threat and feel angry or resentful rather than motivated.

• Whenever decisions are "handed down" from on high, those affected by them tend to see them as attacks. Lacking access to the dialog behind the decisions, they immediately worry about the personal impact of those decisions. Arbitrary, apparently random, and heartless changes reduce one's sense of control and create resistance and fear. The result is the exact opposite of the optimism and hopefulness that characterizes the truly motivated individual. Every time somebody makes a decree, everybody else feels threatened by their raw use of power. And the result is demotivating instead of motivating, as are threats in general.

• When a supervisor loses his or her temper at a "difficult" employee, he or she usually resorts to direct personal threats. "This will go in your file." "I'm keeping track of the number of days you've been late this month." "That's grounds for dismissal." These are direct personal threats, of course, and even the supervisor giving them perceives them as threatening and negative. So if we see them that way, and we know the employee does, it shouldn't be hard to kick the habit. But does that mean you have to be a pushover? Not a bit of it. The ultimate sign of strength is to make no threats and to take firm, appropriate action only when necessary. If someone really messes up, just make the proper note of it for his or her file. But never threaten to do so! Then, if your positive approach to motivation (the one I know you'll have by the end of this book) brings your employee around, you can make a note of that improvement for his or her file, too.

So please rethink your own behavior as a supervisor in order to ferret out any unintentional or intentional uses of threats. Threats don't motivate. Opportunities do. Move them toward the positive side of the motivation curve, not the negative side please! All threats do is create distrust and fear.
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Are They Afraid Of You?

I've often slipped a few questions into employee surveys to find out if they fear their managers. And guess what? They usually do. Distrust and fear are in fact the norm in traditional workplaces. The same workplaces where managers keep trying motivation programs, and keep complaining that the programs are no darn good.

Oh, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that a good spanking used to be considered healthy for a child. Or that the "real world" is tough and you have to be, too. Maybe you've read an interview with one of those tough-ass execs like "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, whose plan for Coleman when Sunbeam acquired it (according to a Wall Street Journal article of August 19, 1998) was to "start whacking people." Well, just remember that you can't find examples of highly motivated people in negative, threat-driven environments. Not unless you are willing to go all the way to survival issues, like a sweatshop or a mugging. And even then, compliance is the best result you can hope for, not personal development and excellent performances. Threats are no substitute for true positive motivation.

By the way, Al Dunlap was fired by his own board shortly after he made that comment about whacking people. His threats cost a lot of people their jobs, including many of the best who quit because they couldn't stand working for him. But threats failed to produce the performances Sunbeam and Coleman needed to succeed in the marketplace. So I guess Chainsaw Al taught us a valuable lesson about management after all.

Unlike self-proclaimed tough guys like Dunlap, you probably make only casual, even accidental, use of threats. You probably follow your more sensible instincts and focus on the positive side of the motivation curve much of the time. But what happens when you send mixed signals, some positive, some negative? You get an average at best-in general, negatives outweigh positives about four to one in terms of their emotional impact. So the occasional threat can undo a lot of positive efforts. And when you cancel out, you end up in the middle, which is the lowest part of the motivation curve. Oops.
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Moving Up The Motivation Curve

If you focus on the opportunity side of the motivation curve in Figure 1-1, you can think of your challenge as moving your people up the curve, toward higher levels of opportunity.

You know that people who are pursuing compelling personal opportunities are highly motivated. So "all" you must do to break through to higher levels of motivation is to increase the opportunities for your people. (That is in fact easier said than done until you learn new approaches to management, which is why there is more than one chapter in this book. But it isn't nearly as hard as motivating them any other way since it actually works and other methods don't.)

If you stop thinking about it as a motivation problem, and start thinking of it as an opportunity problem, you will theoretically be able to bring employee motivation and performance levels to the extremes you see in special circumstances, but so rarely see in your own work force. As you develop creative ways to put this theory into practice, you will be surprised at the amount of natural, internal motivation you release in your employees. To help you implement this theory, I've sprinkled motivation idea boxes like the following one throughout the book. And you will also find that later chapters explore different aspects of implementation in detail.

The concept that we can motivate people to their highest levels of potential by presenting them with opportunities to succeed instead of telling them what to do is a theory I arrived at after researching and working on motivation for many years, and I have subsequently been able to find compelling examples of its validity, and to collect and develop lots of practical ways to put it to use. When I realized that none of the so-called employee motivation programs could motivate people as well as an opportunity to succeed at something they cared about, I stopped looking for external "motivators" and began to seek ways of "turning on" people's natural internal motivation to succeed. (It's interesting that the word motivator isn't even in many dictionaries.)

In truth, there is no such thing as a motivator. You can't just apply the right treatment and "get" employee motivation, as if you were doing some chemistry experiment. People who are highly motivated are self-motivated. Period. They have a strong will to achieve, to succeed, to learn, to perform. External factors are insignificant in comparison with internal motivation to succeed. Impose external threats or incentives in too heavy-handed a manner, and these self-motivated people will lose their strong commitment and become as careless as the rest.
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Why People Think They Needs New Careers

As Edward Deming, the father of modern quality management methods, was fond of saying, nobody goes to work to do a bad job. And, I might add, people don't go to work to do a mediocre job either. Doing a bad job makes people feel bad. It's demotivating. It leaves you feeling that your work was a meaningless exercise in pushing paper or punching the time clock. It makes you feel that life is passing you by.

But the truth is that, in the typical workplace, people are doing something far short of a great job. They are not performing anywhere near their potential. They are not reaping that most compelling of all rewards, the satisfaction in a job well done.

It is not our nature to un-excel. We don't even have words in our language for the opposites of words like motivation, potential, excel, and excellence. That's not a place we want to go. Who'd bother getting up in the morning if his or her goal was to "mess up" or "blow it" or "perform well below my potential?" Yet we've just agreed that that is what many employees are doing. We've just agreed that the typical workplace keeps people in the unrewarding middle of the motivation curve. We've just agreed we have a motivation problem.

And if it's a problem for managers, believe me, it's a far greater problem for employees.

I have an interesting perspective on employee motivation because I wrote a little book called Adventure Careers many years ago with an adventurous friend. We interviewed people who were doing really amazing and different things with their lives. Then we told their stories to "the rest of us" in the book.

I've written a lot of books over the years, but I've never gotten as strong, as many, or as emotional reactions as I did from that little book. At book signings, people followed me around as though I were their guru, begging me to help them figure out what to do. And people continue to send letters requesting help or effusively thanking me for inspiring them to transform their lives. Why? What nerve did we touch, and why is it so amazingly sensitive?

The common theme in every one of the many and varied personal stories I heard was a quiet sense of desperation. People feel trapped in dead-end lives, even if their careers appear to be on track. Their work simply is not fulfilling. It's a job, not a calling. It pays the bills, but who wants to live for bills? It gives them some small successes, but it never allows them to truly spread their wings and find out what they are fully capable of doing. And it keeps them busy, but they often feel that it does little or nothing to improve the world or benefit anyone else. In short, their work is meaningless.

And you would be amazed at the people who echo this refrain. Many of them hold jobs others would die for. I remember being interviewed by a successful, grossly overpaid host of a television show who confided to me during a commercial break that he wished he could have an adventure career but was too afraid to quit and start all over again in some new field.

I told him that hosting a TV show is one of the most popular "fantasy" careers for Americans. But he just shook his head and said, "not after you've done it a thousand times."

In a sense, jobs are like relationships. Once the blush is off the rose, once the honeymoon is over, it is easy to fall into boredom and dissatisfaction unless you make a real effort to grow the relationship and develop it into something that is constantly new and rewarding.

But most people's jobs don't offer them that kind of development path. Most jobs are emotional dead ends. Most workplaces keep people in the dull middle of their motivation curve. Where you soon long for adventure and worry that your life is becoming a meaningless routine.

Since their employers don't give them the opportunity to move up the curve, employees seek their own opportunities. They naturally need to find meaning in their work and lives, to seek a calling, to increase their value to society. But the workplace stifles these healthy urges. So they desperately seek other avenues of growth.

That's why so many people came to my book signings when I wrote Adventure Careers. But for many of them, a radical new direction in life was economically risky and difficult to undertake. A far more practical and simple approach is to make their current job more meaningful and challenging. Why should people feel trapped in their jobs? Why should they have to "give it all up" and start all over again in order to find the challenge and meaning their work fails to provide? A far better solution to their problems is to help them move up the motivation curve in their current work.

And you know what? Giving people meaningful adventures in their current jobs is not some soft-hearted exercise in spoiling your employees. Nor is it an expensive perk or special benefit. It is the simplest and least expensive way to get them moving up that motivation curve. The solution to their problem is the solution to your problem, too.
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The Psychology Of Optimal Experiences

It is sometimes hard to understand why one task or activity is highly motivating and rewarding for a person and another isn't. Why does your employee find it boring to do that project you really need her to do? Why doesn't it turn her on, no matter how hard you try to get her excited and motivated? Until we get good at understanding why certain activities are intrinsically appealing, it is hard to match people with the right opportunities to keep them motivated.

And one very good answer to this question comes from the work of psychologists who study what is termed optimal experiences, or experiences where people are totally caught up in what they are doing, wholly focused on it, and able to perform at a very high level with ease. The condition is also termed flow, and you want your people to experience flow because it is an excellent indicator that they are properly prepared for and aligned with the right activities to make them highly motivated.

The easiest way for me to explain flow is to describe my own experience of it. When I write, it's a flow experience. When you do, it probably isn't, since writing for most people is a difficult chore. But when I sit down to write, my mind clears itself of extraneous thoughts and worries. (I'm writing right now with a huge pile of unopened bills next to me, and it doesn't bother me in the least!) My thoughts bubble up eagerly, and my hands fly over the paper or the keyboard. I feel a sense of exhilaration and pleasure when the writing goes well. It's hard work, sure, but I can sustain it for many hours without a break because it just flows and carries me along with it. As a result, I am a very productive writer-people are often surprised by the amount of work I do. But I don't feel worn out by my writing. In fact, it gives me energy. And I sometimes experience flow in other situations, too. When I'm giving a presentation or when I'm doing my favorite sports, for example.

Your optimal experiences are probably different ones from mine, but they nonetheless feel the same. Golf is torture for me and I'm terrible at it. But when I watch Tiger Woods play I can tell it just flows for him, as writing does for me. I know how he must feel when he plays, and I know that he couldn't have achieved such mastery without first learning how to make golf into a flow experience.

Interestingly, psychologists have discovered that the pleasures of these optimal experiences are sufficiently great that most people describe themselves as more happy when in the flow state than when relaxing or hanging out. When we look back on our lives, the times we remember most fondly are by and large these optimal performances in which we were experiencing flow. In other words, life's peaks coincide with periods of peak motivation as well. Please read the quote in the margin to see how a leading researcher explains it.

Children instinctively understand this point, without the need for a psychologist to tell them. They constantly badger their parents with the complaint, "I'm bored. I don't have anything to do." Of course, they do have many things they could do, but they need a little help getting involved in the right activity so that they can "get in the groove" of another flow experience. Csikzentmihalyi points out that optimal experience is "something that we make happen," and observes that, "For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built."

Parents rarely appreciate the need to help children make these optimal experiences happen. They take the "I'm bored" comment too literally, and simply offer any old alternative instead of creating the next optimal experience. The truly great teachers, on the other hand, are keenly aware of the distinction between a generic activity and a truly engaging, optimal one, and they are able to transform a rowdy classroom into a productive one just by offering the right activities.

The motivational manager would do well to make a study of optimal experiences. What things catch people up and keep them engaged and alert? What things don't? Do you need to increase or reduce the level of challenge to make something more optimal? Or is it that the activity doesn't seem important? Or is it that the feedback about personal performances is too unclear to make it engaging?

These helpful questions are actually formalized in a method for leading people to high motivation called commitment-based leadership. I'll show you a detailed method for designing tasks and managing performances that increases the amount of flow in your workplace in later chapters, when I introduce you to the commitment-based leadership model. But a general sensitivity to the flow issue will stand you in good stead whether you adopt that specific methodology or not.

And it is vital to remember that, when people move up the motivation curve, it is generally by becoming highly engaged in their work. High motivation produces, and is produced by, flow experiences.
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Parting Shots

In this chapter, I've shared an exciting new perspective on motivation and encouraged you to go with your instincts and treat your current level of employee motivation as the beginning of a journey, not the middle or end. I've shared my own quest for a deeper understanding of what motivation is really about. This quest for motivation reveals a number of essential insights for all who wish to achieve higher employee motivation and performance levels.

First, it reveals that we as a species are capable of amazing feats of endurance, commitment, and determination, and that these often take place outside the traditional structures of the workplace. Though we can truly "walk on our will" instead of our feet as the saying goes, we rarely do so at work. And as a result, work is far less meaningful and rewarding than it ought to be. It is no wonder most supervisors and managers are frustrated with the levels of motivation their people display. And it is no wonder that so many people report they are dissatisfied with their work and seek new adventures and alternatives. As Deming said, we don't go to work to do a bad job. So when work leads us to do anything but our best, we feel bad somewhere deep inside.

Second, our quest for motivation reveals that the truly motivated people are moved far more from within than from without. Yet most workplace approaches to motivation seem to use external influences, from compensation and benefits to incentive and reward programs, to try to motivate people.

Third, it reveals that when people are pursuing compelling opportunities, they behave very differently from when they are just "doing their work." It is no longer a job when you are excited about the potential opportunities it represents, whether they are opportunities to accomplish personal goals or to do something for the good of others (and in the highest levels of motivation, these two coincide).

Fourth, it reveals that the work is its own greatest reward when you are pursuing a compelling goal and are able to perform "in the flow" by becoming totally absorbed in your task. People who regularly work in this optimal state are far more motivated, enthusiastic, and healthy than those who don't. Yet we are not particularly good at creating these flow experiences that make work intrinsically motivating and enjoyable to do.

And fifth, it reveals that we are all naturally inclined to pursue higher levels of motivation. The motivation curve calls to all of us. And when work fails to satisfy this natural urge, we feel trapped and defeated and fantasize about finding something new and better to do with our days. But this is simply the employee's side of the motivation problem. Employee and manager alike benefit from any efforts to move employees up their motivation curves. It's a "win-win" solution and a natural one that all of us are eager and able to pursue once we recognize the wisdom of this positive approach to motivation.
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