The third pillar of leadership: Motivation

There are 3 pillars of strong management in a team:

• Priority: Choosing the right work
• Competence: Ability to do the work
• Motivation: Effectively doing the work

Motivation is essential because the work needs to actually be done in order for it to add value to the business.

While there are several ways to improve it, the core of motivation is in autonomy and responsibility – ensuring your team owns the work they're responsible for, and that they have the autonomy to do it.

You improve autonomy by being really clear about what and how is being delegated.

You improve responsibility by giving your team ownership over their goals, by letting them choose it.

From enthusiastic to skeptical

My first few jobs taught me that not every employee works with the same dedication. While some employees are motivated and dedicated, others are skeptical and distracted.

I was often that skeptical and distracted employee, but never at first.

For some time I just didn't "believe in leadership" – a common refrain that us leaders sometimes forget is all that common.

I still did work and hit my goals, but I left so much in the tank.

When I became a leader in, I got caught in the middle: now I was the leader that the team didn't believe in, while still not believing in my leaders.

What did not believing in leadership, not believing in me, meant exactly? How could I fix it? And why was I still unmotivated?

It never started this way. I often started motivated and enthusiastic, but the more I ran into walls, the more I contracted, and so did my team. Eventually, we were just doing the day-to-day.

I also often didn't know how my work played a part on the success of the organization, or even if it did. I had no control or idea over what needle I was moving every day

Or if the work I did every day even mattered.

Clarity in autonomy and responsibility

Autonomy and responsibility are two crucial factors of team motivation.

• Autonomy is the your team and team members's control over the work
• Responsibility is the outcome over which they're held accountable to

Autonomy is about clarity. You must ensure the team knows what they can, and can't, do on their own.

Sometimes the team will go in a direction under the illusion of autonomy, only to be told by the manager: "no wait, that's not how I was thinking about it." This deflating feeling ensures that the team won't give their all next time.

Responsibility is about clarity. You must ensure the team knows what they must accomplish.

Sometimes the team will try to accomplish a goal under the illusion of responsibility, only to be told by the manager: "no wait, that's not what I was thinking must be done." This deflating feeling ensures the team won't give their all next time.

Autonomy and Responsibility must be aligned so the team has enough autonomy over what they're responsible for.

If your team runs into too many areas they're responsible for but are unable to change, they'll realize they don't have control over what they're responsible for. This deflating feeling ensures the team won't give their all next time.

As a manager, your job is to clearly define and align your team's autonomy and responsibility.

The 5 levels of delegation

In organizations, autonomy works through delegation: The shareholders delegate responsibility to the chairman and board, who delegates to the CEO, who then delegates to the CTO, then to Director of Engineering, to the Engineering Manager, who finally delegates the work to their team members.

Unlike a democracy where elections for who will hold power happens bottoms-up, in organizations the decision-making power is granted top-down. This granting of decision-making power is where clarity in autonomy must happen.

In Michael Hyatt's book Free to Focus, he describes with precision what he calls "The 5 Levels of Delegation" and starts with a story where a manager is unclear about his expectations when delegating, and is criticized for it:

Tom was planning a special event, and he was surprised to discover someone on his team had completed a project he didn’t authorize. As we spoke, I could tell he was frustrated. He thought his team member had gone way out of bounds, taking more initiative than he was given. After listening to the situation in detail, I finally said, “This isn’t your team member’s fault. The problem is that you didn’t make your expectations clear when you delegated this task.”

Hyatt, Michael. Free to Focus (p. 150). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

With delegation, there are 3 important parts of control, in progressive levels of autonomy.

• Task: Whether they control how the work is done
• Decision: Whether they control the decisions that are made
• Informing: Whether they control whether to inform the manager

At the lowest level of delegation, you tell them exactly what to do and how. At the highest level of delegation, they do all the work and you don't even hear about it.

Here's how the 5 Levels of Delegation are divided by Michael Hyatt:

Level 1: You tell them precisely what to do and how: "Do exactly this and report back to me. Don't change anything from what I prescribe you."

Level 2: You tell them to explore on their own but not make any decisions: "Find out more about X with your own initiative, and tell me everything you learn. Don't make any decisions or changes."

Level 3: You tell them to research and suggest a decision, which you'll evaluate and make: "Look into this and put forward some alternatives and a suggestion for how to move forward: I'll then make a decision"

Level 4: You tell them to make a decision, and inform you of what it was: "Look into this, make a decision, and keep me informed about what you decided and why."

Level 5: You tell them to make a decision without needing to inform you: "This whole problem domain is yours now. I only care about how that affects this other higher-level area."

Levels of delegation also help you clarify the scope of autonomy. Not only is decision making power clear, but the "what" over which decisions are made is also clear.

Once it's clear what decisions and control you delegated and how, the next step is responsibility, ensuring your team actually cares about the decisions they are making.

How to give teams ownership over goals

In order for teams to care about the goals they're achieving, they must own it.

In order for the team to own the goal, they must choose it.

This sometimes comes with controversy, but I think it's just a misunderstanding. When I say the team must choose the goal, I don't mean they get to decide how much revenue the company makes instead of the CEO.

It means you must ensure two steps for every team goal being set:

• 1) Share the Higher-Level Goals and Context: For goals that the team has no control over, you must share what they are precisely, and all the context around why the goals were chosen in the first place.
• 2) Ask for the Team Goals to achieve the Higher-Level Goal: Once the team understands what goals must be achieved and why, ask them to define how they'll work to achieve them through their own goals.

If the team hasn't set any goals of its own to achieve the higher level goals, then you have no clear responsibility and therefore a lack of motivation.

Achieving all team goals must mean achieving the higher-level goal. As Sean Covey mentions on 4 Disciplines of Execution: "the battles you choose must win the war"

The only reason you fight a battle is to win the war. The sole purpose of goals at lower levels in the organization is to help achieve the goals at higher levels. It isn’t enough that the lower-level Goals support or align with the higher goals. The lower-level goals must ensure the success of the higher goals. (renamed "WIGs" – Wildly Ambitious Goals to "goals"

The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals (p. 35). Free Press. Kindle Edition.

Once that expectation is clearly defined, you can delegate the Team Goal creation to your team. As the author explores in decision making of goals (emphasis mine):

Rule #3: Senior leaders can veto, but not dictate. The highest levels of execution are never reached when the strategy is devised solely by the top leaders of the organization and simply handed down to the leaders and teams below. Without involvement, you cannot create the high levels of commitment that execution requires. While the senior leaders will undoubtedly determine the top-level WIG, they must allow the leaders at each level below to define the WIGs for their teams. This not only leverages the knowledge of these leaders, but also creates a greater sense of ownership and involvement. Simply put, they become more engaged in a goal that they choose themselves and that supports a worthy organizational goal. Senior leaders then exercise their right to veto if the battles chosen are not going to win the war.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals (p. 36). Free Press. Kindle Edition.

Without clear team goals, it's unclear what the team is being held responsible for.

If there are team goals that the team didn't choose, one of 3 things happened and none of them are good:

• The team would have chosen that very same goal, but now they have no ownership over it and lack motivation to achieve it.
• The team would have chosen an even more effective goal than the leaders would, and now they're working on a sub-optimal goal.
• The team would have chosen the wrong goals, and you either haven't shared the right context and higher-level goals or you don't have the right team to delegate to.

What's valuable about the levels of delegation is that you can now think about goal setting within the framework of levels of delegation.

You must delegate Team Goal setting at a Level 4 of Delegation: The team sets the goals. You can only veto it if it won't achieve the higher level goal.

Once you have a clear framework for delegation and empowered goal setting, you have clear principles for aligning autonomy and responsibility.

Motivation in practice

Clarity of autonomy and responsibility requires clarity of delegation and ownership of goal setting. These are the building blocks of the motivation pillar.

Putting these pieces in place is hard, but here's how you start:

1) Clarify the currently existing levels of delegation the role for each of your direct reports. Your team members must know what they can do, what they require approval for, and what they must inform you on – precisely. Not caring about this is not caring about their motivation.

2) Clarify team expectations for goal setting. Start by inviting them into the goal setting process, explain you want to give them more control over team goals to both create better goals and increase their ownership over it.

3) Work with your team to define team goals that achieve high-level goals. Share precise high-level goals and the context around them. Then work with your teams to ensure they're building team goals that achieve the high level goals.

This will give you the starting point, the third pillar of motivation, to work from.

While you can further polish the motivation of your team, you can't build from what you don't have. If autonomy and responsibility isn't clear, you must create this clarity to create motivation.

By ensuring a clear and aligned autonomy and responsibility, you will have the fundamental piece to build motivation on and the core of what we need to be highly engaged in our work.