Do You Truly Motivate or Just Bribe Others to Raise Their Game?

People are motivated by a wide variety of needs and desires, including praise, autonomy, higher purpose, status, belonging, and challenge.

Chief among the needs leaders tap into to compel action and inspire higher performance are incentives.

Incentives include anything people desire that they would change their behavior for. Promotion, title, resources, time, affection, and special privileges are on this list.

In the workplace, nothing is used more frequently or effectively than the incentive of compensation to motivate performance.

But here’s the irony, for decades research has shown that external rewards, such as compensation, actually diminish the natural and intrinsic motivation people have to do a better job. And yet leaders continue to cling to such inducements to motivate others.

The reason is simple. They work.

Incentives, especially the prize of higher compensation through base pay, bonuses, and profit-sharing, are tremendously effective in motivating others to work harder, longer, and with higher quality.

It would be foolish to suggest leaders should remove incentives from their arsenal of strategies to compel higher performance. Yet some leaders become so incentive-focused as to forget the very point of what it means to motivate.

With every incentive, they attract and reward team members for chasing a prize rather than celebrating a higher vision, a collaborative spirit, or the satisfaction of owning a project to completion.

Without realizing it, leaders who are too incentive-focused rob people of their intrinsic motivations. They would be best described as perfecting the art of bribery rather than motivation.

While compensation and other incentives are critically important to people, great leaders want to develop the internal fire inside team members that produces excellence for its own sake.

Team members are also highly motivated by investments in their skill level, the ability to influence others, the higher good of the team’s mission, and the relationships they form with colleagues, among other things.

For instance, the best team members respond well to challenge and find satisfaction in overcoming adversity without an external prize at the end.

Great leaders do their best to limit their use of incentives and authority to get things done because they know that long-term success depends on team members who are intrinsically motivated to reach for quality results.

Examine your own motivation strategies and ask yourself how incentive-dependent your approach is. Learn to use incentives wisely by providing team members with the many other features they also need and desire.

No leader wants to think of themselves as bribing others to do their best, but that’s exactly what occurs in a workplace driven primarily through external rewards.

The highest reward sits inside team members, and the best leaders find a way to tap into it.