The key to achieve the best results

This article was originally published in Danish HR, vol. 2, 2015. The below is a translated version of the article.

- But how do you unlock potential

Have you found all the keys to unlock the potential for motivation in your organisation? If not, keep looking, as employee motivation is a key factor in relation to increasing turnover, efficiency, customer satisfaction, performance, quality and ­reducing absenteeism. In fact, studies show that employees who consider themselves highly motivated are up to four times more productive than employees who do not (Towers Watson Global Workforce Study, 2012). In other words, finding as many keys to motivation as possible in your organisation is a good idea – and to succeed in this, leaders play an essential role.

For many years, most of our knowledge about leadership has primarily focused on extrinsic motivation and only to a small degree on intrinsic motivation. The concept of extrinsic motivation refers to performing an action or behaviour that obtains an external reward or result.

People who are extrinsically motivated are not driven by whether the action is interesting or pleasurable. They are driven by the results of the action. The concept of intrinsic motivation refers to performing an action or behaviour for the sake of enjoyment and satisfaction. When people are intrinsically motivated, they pursue an activity for its own sake out of personal interest and engagement (Deci & Ryan 2000, 2008).

In this article, we will focus on perspectives that can help you unlock the potential of intrinsic motivation.

How do you unlock potential for intrinsic motivation?

One of the most important keys to intrinsic motivation can be found in situations where employees feel that their work is meaningful, and they can see the purpose of it. Work becomes meaningful when employees couple their own needs and interests with those of the organisation.

Thus, the leadership’s task is, to a greater extent, to support employees in making these couplings. It calls for leaders who know how to motivate and engage the individual employee.

The Self-Determination Theory, a much-respected motivation theory, focuses on how leaders can establish the right framework for creating meaningful work. The theory suggests that employees may be more or less motivated by a given work assignment, and that the degree of motivation depends on the fulfilment of three basic needs:

1. The need for autonomy
2. The need for competence/mastery
3. The need for relatedness

The better management understands how to build a culture and an organisational set-up that supports the three needs, the better the foundation is for achieving good results with the employees through intrinsic motivation.

So how do you fulfil these three needs and unlock the intrinsic motivation in practice? Here, we will focus on the evidence-based method called motivational interviewing.

Motivational interviewing was developed in the mid-1980s by William Miller (professor of psychology and psychiatry) and Stephen Rollnick (clinical psychologist and professor of healthcare communication). Rollnick and Miller’s work focused on understanding how to create motivation between people in situations, where it is typically very difficult to evoke motivation (Miller & Rollnick 2013). Over the past 30 years, they recorded conversations, which were then subsequently decoded to identify the behaviour that makes the difference between success and failure. They found that the people who succeeded in evoking motivation in others had the following behavioural traits in common:

• Their first priority was always to establish good relationships (not necessarily agreement, but respect for each other as human beings).
• They focused on autonomy and co-decision-making to the highest possible extent.
• Their conversations encouraged all stories related to the importance of a given action and confidence in own abilities to succeed.

What can leaders do in practice?

There are two simple, but nevertheless, important things to work on, if you want to become better at establishing good ­relationships with your employees, ­making room for autonomy and co-decision-making and evoking more stories about importance and confidence in own abilities to succeed:

1. Listen and reflect what you hear.
2. Ask questions.

And in that order! All too often, the listener asks too many questions before actively listening.

Listen and reflect what you hear

Most leaders think that the challenge of listening to employees is keeping quiet and listening to what is said. However, your reaction to what you hear is crucial, making reflective listening a good technique (Miller & Rollnick 2013; Erichsen & Tolstrup 2013).

Reflective listening is a technique that enables you to reflect what employees say and mean, while remaining both curious and present. The assumption is that the employees you talk to are trying to express something that is important to them. The trick is not to be presumptuous about what employees will say. Instead, reflective listening is a tool for you to discover what employees are trying to say.

The advantage of reflective listening is that employees feel they are being heard and want to elaborate on the subject. At the same time, you get an idea of your understanding of the employees’ arguments, and the conversation continues in a constructive way. Reflective listening can be quite simple – you may simply choose to repeat some of the words that employees say. Or you may choose to reflect what employees say to continue the line of thought and create progress in the conversation.