There are two things about employee motivation that everyone agrees on—it’s good when employees have it and not so good when they don’t. If having motivated employees is what management wants, and if being motivated is what employees want, why aren’t employees motivated all the time?

Motivation is what drives a person to act or behave in a particular way. In business, the typical default mechanism used by management to motivate employees (read: to do what managers want them to do) is to create incentive by saying, “If you do… [blank], I will give you… [blank].” If the incentive is compelling enough, the system works: management achieves its goal and the employee reaps the incentive.

External Motivation

This is an externally-based motivation system and it has its limitations. First, the incentive must be compelling. And after it has been compelling once, it has to be compelling again and again. Managers are forced to continually refresh incentives to keep them alluring. And to complicate things further, what compels one employee may leave another cold.

When managers realize that an incentive is not compelling for enough people enough of the time, they typically regroup and come up with a different carrot with which to elicit the desired results. The manager is continually tethered to the make-motivation-happen treadmill. No wonder they pay managers so well! (That’s a joke.)

Externally-based motivation systems have their place. They can be highly effective for quick, short-term projects. However, they often falter when applied to long-term or day-in, day-out work. Because they don’t know what else to do, many managers spend a lot of time tweaking these short-term motivators in an effort to gain long-term results, ending up with lackluster outcomes.

Internal Motivation

A better type of motivation system for long-term, routine work is the internally-based system—the kind that taps into each individual employee’s hardwiring.

Every employee has an innate pattern of work methods and interests that, if tapped, can help produce an intense work ethic. Encouraging an employee to work in sync with her talents and interests draws on her natural sense of intrigue, which produces pure motivation, without any tricks. And this deep-seated motivation can be sustained over time.

Why don’t more managers motivate in this way? One reason is that most employees have no conscious awareness of what their innate motivators are. They got off track in their earliest school years, when they were taught to strive for external, rather than internal, rewards. George B. Leonard, a pioneer in the field of human potential, wrote in 1968 in Education and Ecstasy,“It is an exacting and exhausting business, this damming up the flood of human potentialities. What energy it takes to make a torrent into a trickle, to train that trickle along narrow, well-marked channels!”

There are some people whose innate motivational patterns so dominate their consciousness that they have no choice but to live them. Stereotypical examples are the starving artist and the eccentric research scientist. But in our compulsion to live up to other people’s expectations, most of us have squandered our innate motivational patterns. The manager who can tap and fully utilize each employee’s innate motivational patterns will become the boss every employee would like to have.

As a manager, you have a choice. If you spend most of your time using externally-based motivators, you will make a lot of unnecessary work for yourself and fail to leverage the power of the natural intrigue of your team. On the other hand, to tap each employee’s innate motivation current, pretty much all you have to do is get out of the way.

About the Author

Mary McCoy is a recognized expert on how humans relate to the work they do, specializing in sustained engagement. She is the decisive resource for issues that arise at transitional phases of an employee’s workspan within an organization. A popular speaker on the dynamics of employee engagement, Mary is able to articulate, in user-friendly concepts, how employee engagement happens and why sustained engagement remains so elusive. Visit her website, MaryMcCoy.com, for more information.

Read more articles by Mary McCoy.