Motivating People to Fully Engage

Getting the job done and completing daily tasks requires focus, commitment, and effort. For the most productive and effective team members, being fully engaged and staying on task is how they outperform their peers. 

But even the highly ambitious and driven team members leave effort on the table. Performing at 100 percent all the time is a lofty goal, but nearly impossible to realize. Even for the top performers, the gap between “all-in” every day and fully committed is small but real. For many others, a deep cavity exists between what they give to the job and what is possible for them to give. 

The discretionary effort and engagement of each and every team member is an idea that weighs heavily on the minds of good leaders. Discretionary effort is like loose change in the pocket. The best leaders work to help others spend that change to the benefit of the team. Every day.

How the best leaders create more engagement, more commitment, more effort, and more focus is not a secret. They’re continually asking others to engage with them. The best leaders lead by example by involving others in their engagement and commitment. 

They constantly ask team members for their views, ideas, and solutions to short and long-term problems, opportunities, and issues. Team members who are peppered with an influx of requests and questions that focus beyond the day-to-day tasks become more engaged. 

Asking team members to contribute their thinking about strategy, competitors, market trends, performance metrics, new technology, and other big picture issues involves them in a different way. It encourages them to think about the enterprise all the time, not just during work hours. Full engagement and discretionary effort are a result of involvement, not expectation. When team members are fully involved, they become fully engaged. 

This takes a tremendous amount of work on the part of the leader. Asking for input and advocacy on many fronts in a continual barrage of inquiry requires planning, organization, and time. Not all leaders will make this commitment. But if full engagement is the goal, team leaders have no other choice. 

People need to own the enterprise or business with the leader to spend their discretionary time and effort thinking and acting to the benefit of the team. Effort jumps high whenever involvement sets the bar.