Demotivation

Irreversible damage

Energy is the limiting factor to achieving anything.

If you’re a leader, energy is everything. Because it takes the concerted will of many humans to come together, to work hard, to convert energy into action in order to achieve anything of value. It is your job to cultivate and ensure that your team has the energy required to accomplish the objective. In other words, your team must be motivated.

The most damaging thing you can do as a leader is therefore to demotivate the team. It is effectively irreversible. When you demotivate a team, you destroy your upper bound. Energy is not symmetrical — it can take months to build something and literal seconds to drain it.

You might be wondering why in the world you would ever demotivate a team. Well, no one really sets out to demotivate their team; it happens because you’re typically trying to achieve something else. As a leader, it’s important that you aggressively avoid these tactical errors. The most common ways a leader demotivates their team are:

• taking credit

• removing autonomy

• lack of follow through

• insincerity

• not listening

Taking Credit

It’s important to recognize people for their efforts. You create irreversible damage when you take credit for work that was achieved by someone else. Very few leaders reading this will think I like to steal credit from my team. That’s not the nature of the offense. It’s more subtle than that – you use the word “I” too much when the whole team did the work, you make yourself the hero when you should be the supporter, you accidentally hog a moment in the spotlight because you were excited. Very rarely do leaders actually mean harm when they take credit; there are obviously exceptions, but those people shouldn’t be leaders, period. Instead, it’s about a careful reading of the winds – push yourself to be exceptionally precise with your words. Even when you’re excited, give credit to the team. Don’t be the centerpiece – and your team’s motivation will grow because they know you’ll always showcase their contributions.

Removing Autonomy

People are hypersensitive to slight changes in autonomy. A person who has 1 degree of freedom will feel just as snubbed as someone who has complete freedom when a tiny basis point gets peeled away. This is because any reduction in autonomy signals a reduction in trust. If you’re not trusted, why would you stay motivated? Now, removing autonomy is sometimes required – this is the entire reason why we have chains of command. But again, let’s consider the subtle nature of this problem. Imagine how you message something that isn’t really meant to be a reduction in trust. Would you be better off carefully observing when it’s for and explaining your reasoning or just assuming they’re “fine” and it’s “not a big deal”? Play it wrong and you create irreversible damage.

Lack of Follow Through

If you say you’re going to do it, do it. Otherwise don’t say it. If you don’t follow through enough times, your team stops trusting you. How can they trust you? You say one thing, but do another. How can one dedicate themselves to an objective when they can’t trust their own chain of command to accomplish their own? Leaders generate behavior that is modeled whether they like it or not. Produce the wrong behavior and it will get modeled. If your team seems lackluster in motivation, look inward at your own behavior first.

Insincerity

An insincere leader destroys motivation. One of the leader’s biggest tools is the power of communication. When you’re insincere, you poison your own well. If your words do not have any truth to them, no one will listen. Every accolade sounds false, every urgency seems fake, every priority seems manufactured. Sincerity is achieved by simply being honest. And that honesty starts primarily with being ok with where you are as a leader. More often than not, the tactical error is to try to always appear in charge. If you do this, stop and ask yourself if you really need to play pretend. If you don’t know something, be sincere that you don’t. You’ll be surprised to find that your team will pick up the pace and become motivated to help – because you trusted them enough to do so. It is a good team’s nature to rise to the challenge.

Not Listening

It’s all about respect at the end of the day. Hierarchical chains are designed for efficiency purposes around organization of resources and information management. It does not make one superior to another. Respect is completely separate from such structures. The more you respect a person for their expertise, their contributions, and their efforts, the more trust you engender and the more motivation you create. You destroy this when you don’t listen – because listening is a sign of respect. When you don’t listen, you show disrespect. And as you can imagine, it is near impossible to be motivated to achieve something positive when you’re being disrespected. Sometimes leaders can be too dismissive of those they haven’t worked with before and too used to the power that comes from organizational structures. This is a mistake. No matter how powerful you get in your organizational structure, listen and be respectful. A leader is nothing without their team.