The Employee Energy Solution

With so many employees and leaders reporting fatigue and tiredness, the big question is, "How can we help them find new and sustainable reserves of energy?". In next week's episode, Gerard explores the science of motivation and shares leadership techniques for energising others more powerfully and sustainably.  

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Transcript

Episode 17 - The Employee Energy Solution

Project Length: 00:44:01

FULL TRANSCRIPT

It's not about the ordinary. We've got enough of that. It's about the extraordinary. And we need more. 

I'm Gerard Penna and welcome to the Xtraordinary Leaders podcast, where we spend time with recognised leaders and global experts exploring the art and science of remarkable leadership. 

The last couple of months have been both novel and familiar novel, in that I've been spending time with people, yes, face to face with people in rooms. And whether that's been one on one executive coaching or as a facilitator of some of our programs with our clients where we've had 20 or 30 people in the room at the same time. It's novel in that it's something that we weren't able to do for such a long time, at least here in Melbourne, where we've pretty much for two years were locked down, unable to gather with other people in our workplaces. 

So it's new and novel and at the same time familiar because it's something that prior to the COVID pandemic and prior to the lockdowns was something that I was doing on a weekly basis. So it was novel, it was familiar, and it was energizing for both me and the other people in the room. What I noticed in myself was that my energy levels, my motivation, my engagement, my birth, the sense of energy with inside of me was really high. It was sustainable. And even though some of the days were long, it. 

didn't disappear at all. I felt like I had fuel in the can, fuel in the motivational can to really do good work. And I noticed that in other people, too, that every time we had the opportunity for people to break into small groups or larger groups and have conversations where they were genuinely connecting, there was energy in the room. You could hear it in the volume, you could see it in people's behavior. And it showed up in how people were talking about things, the way that they were perceiving things. It was having a motivational effect. 

It seemed to be lifting everybody in the room. And this experience has got me thinking a lot about this question of of energy.

The energy that we need to meet the demands of the moment. The reason that it's gotten my attention is also because I'm hearing from a lot of people. These are the clients that I'm talking to who are looking around their organisations and noticing that people are turning up this year tired even though they've had a good break over Christmas. They're just weary. This is something that I commented on last year. One of my clients talked about what they call November turning up in in April, where normally by November, most people are pretty tired after a long year of work. 

But last year that was showing up in April. And this year I'm still seeing this depletion. I'm hearing of this low level of energy, this fatigue, this tiredness. And the problem is, I'm not sure that it's going to go away. Well, at least the circumstances that are creating it are not going to go away because it's the volatility and the uncertainty and the complexity and the ambiguity, the VUCA that we're experiencing in the world, which is tiring us out. And if that's not going to go away, because the world remains a complex place and for all intents and purposes, it looks like it's going to remain that way. 

We can't rely on the world around us, our environment, changing sufficiently for us to start to be able to recover and rebuild our energy. We're going to need to find different ways of restoring ourselves, different ways of not just energizing ourselves, but energizing others, finding that energy, that motivational fuel to be able to bring ourselves to our lives, to our work, to our relationships, to the things that matter to us in a way which is going to sustain us. 

This question of the energy depletion. In an environment in which work demands have ramped up. We're we're still being asked to do a lot. And some of my clients people are actually asked to be doing more. One of the consequences of the COVID pandemic and its impact upon. The economics of markets and businesses is that there are many businesses which are having to undertake transformational action, and that's demanding. That's not business as usual, where it's actually where you have to keep doing business as usual whilst you engage in transformation activities. 

And that takes a lot an enormous amount of emotional energy, intellectual energy, psychological energy, even physical energy from people. So if the demands that were being placed under for our energy are ramping up both inside our organisations and just more broadly in the world. 

The need for us to meet that energy demand is heightened. And it seems to me that this is where the problem lies, that the ways in which we currently generate energy in ourselves and in others is insufficient potentially to meet the moment and that we need to undertake an energy transition in many ways, like the energy transition that most economies and societies are having to undertake at the moment. We have to move from an old way of generating energy, which is insufficient for our current needs, and move to a new way of generating energy which is much more aligned and sustainable. 

And there's something quite important in this idea, and it's incredibly relevant for leadership. Is there a way of tapping into a more sustainable, productive, energising source as leaders other than the one that we've been tapping into in the past? So if we seek to mobilise other people, mobilise them to do the work that needs to be done around the things that matter to us. 

Then how do we motivate them? How do we help them tap into a source of energy which is sustainable, which is sufficient to meet the moment? 

And this is the big question that I'm pondering now and the one in which I want to explore in this podcast episode. 

This is the energising episode of The Xtraordinary Leader's podcast. And I'm looking forward to sharing it with you. 

Recently, I had to contemplate a decision that I didn't really expect that I would have to be thinking about so soon. A little less than nine months after having published my book Xtraordinary: The Art and Science of Remarkable Leadership, I find myself having to make a decision about a reprint. We've almost sold all of the copies that were originally printed and when needing to engage in a second print run. It's a wonderful place to be as a first time author. Yet it has presented me with some questions. 

I'm sure other people have the same experience. When you produce something, you can look back through it and you can identify all of the things that are great. But there's often things in there that you would like to change if you had the opportunity. And in rereading sections of my book, there are aspects of it that I think would change that. The next time I'd do that a bit differently, I tell that story a bit differently, or I'd reorganize the way that I'm presenting that information in a way that might be more helpful or use a different way of talking about things. And that's with the book. That's true for me in this moment. 

And there's one particular aspect of the book that I wrote about, but I didn't amplify or magnify as much as I would now have liked to in retrospect. It's a notion in the book of Catalyst leadership, which is a less common but extremely powerful way of leading that I observed in all of the more remarkable leaders that I talk about in the book, as well as the research into what makes for more effective leadership. But first, to understand the notion of catalyst leadership, you first have to understand what a catalyst is.

This is a term that may be familiar to you through your high school chemistry classes. The notion of a catalyst, which is usually a small amount of something which is added to a large amount of inert substance, inert material. And by introducing that small amount of catalyst, it releases energy from that otherwise inert other material. It transforms it and in the process produces energy. A familiar example to me of a catalyst is when I work with fibreglass to repair my surfboards. 

Occasionally, I'll end up with some damage to one of my surfboards, and I'll need to mix up some fibreglass resin and apply it to some fiberglass cloth on over the damaged part of the surfboard to repair it. Now fiberglass resin itself is a goopy liquid and if you were to place it out in the sun for any period of time, it would remain a goopy liquid. It's certainly not the the hard material that you need it to become to act as a sufficient repair on a surfboard.

So to transform that material, you add a small amount of catalyst. It's really just a drop or two of catalyst into a small cupful of resin, liquid resin, and you stir it around. And what that catalyst does is it starts to transform the resin and you can feel it heating up in your hand as you stirring it around in the cup. And then you apply it to your surfboard and you spread it over the surf board. And then after a very short period of time, it might be 10 minutes, maybe 15. The resin has dried to a incredibly hard substance, but without the catalyst being applied, that wouldn't have happened. 

The resin would have remained goopy and soft. The other aspect of a catalyst, if I remember my high school science classes accurately, is that the catalyst itself is not consumed in the process. In other words, the energy that is being released is being released from the otherwise inert substances that the catalyst was introduced to. The catalyst itself remains unconsumed by the process. And I think this notion, this notion of transforming other material, this notion of releasing energy, this notion of not being consumed in the process is incredibly relevant to the work of leadership, because there is a way of leading in which if we do it well, we can release the energy of others, we can transform the relationship between them and the work that is to be done.

And if we ourselves do it well, we're not consumed in the process as leaders. It doesn't deplete us. So we are then able to keep doing that work with more and more people. Over time, we become much more sustainable. 

In my research into this style of leadership, this pattern of leadership, catalyst leadership, I found that there were a number of different behaviors that were important in the exercise of catalyst leadership, all of which I talk about in the book. There's one in particular, though, that I want to focus on. It's our ability to release energy from the other person through this act of, let's call it, motivating to motivate someone else or to release their motivation. You need to connect with what drives them forward, what compels them to action. 

And this is rather problematic, though, for a lot of leaders. Because they don't really understand what motivates that other person. This is what I call the motivational problem or the catalyzing problem. And I see it showing up all the time in the exercise of leadership in many workplaces and in many organizations. Once a leader, however, works out how to overcome that problem, their leadership becomes infinitely more powerful and exponentially more effective at releasing the energy of other people for the work that needs to be done. 

So what is this catalyzing problem? 

Well, simply put. It's a problem created because when many leaders attempt to influence and mobilize other people, they make the mistake of appealing to what they find motivating, not what the other person finds motivating. 

The other part of the problem is that the leader may assume that they know what motivates the other person. Without having really any evidence or even a reasonable hypothesis to support it. 

The third part of the problem is that they don't they fail to recognize that. Individuals are complex and that what motivates them at one point in time or in one situation may not be the primary motivation in a different situation or at a different point in time. And a lot of this is caused by the underlying deficit in their attention to the other person. So they're simply not paying enough attention to what that other person needs. 

And in the absence of knowing what they need, they're unable to tap into those needs as a source of motivation. So in seeking to release the energy of other people, this two things that really matter. The first is to understand what motivates that person and what motivates their action. The second is to connect the work to be done to what motivates that person. You're, in effect, helping that person find a reason to act that is meaningful to them, to tapping into what exists inside of each individual, what motivates them. 

The infinite energy source that if the individual can tap into, can compel and motivate and propel them in a much more sustainable way. Because what we've found is that intrinsic motivations and all of the research over the last few decades points to this absolutely conclusively that intrinsic motivations, the motivation is infinite in. It can keep propelling and motivating and driving a person forward. Whereas those extrinsic motivations, those things like pay or those things like punishment, they only have a short term effect. 

And the other problem in organisational life is that as a leader, if you're using those as motivations, you've only got a certain amount of them. You've only got so many sanctions you can place on a person. You've only got so many rewards that you can give them before your budget runs out. Whereas the internal intrinsic motivations of an individual are infinite and they're endless. And in many ways this represents the idea that we're dealing with in energy more broadly in the world today. We're moving from fossil fuels, which is a finite source. To renewable energy, which is an infinite source, is billions of years left before the energy of the sun is going to run out. 

And in the meantime, our tides will continue and the winds will continue. And all of those other sources of energy that we are now learning to tap into are available to us. 

It's the same fundamental transition that we need to be making in energy, in motivational energy, in helping individuals tap into the energy that they need to continue to do the work that really matters. 

To them and to us. 

To tapping into what exists inside of each individual, what motivates them. The infinite energy source that the individual can tap into can compel and motivate and propel them in a much more sustainable way. Because what we've found is that intrinsic motivations and all of the research over the last few decades points to this absolutely conclusively that intrinsic motivations, the motivation is infinite in. It can keep propelling and motivating and driving a person forward. 

Whereas those extrinsic motivations, those things like pay or those things like punishment, they only have a short term effect. And the other problem in organizational life is that as a leader, if you're using those as motivations, you've only got a certain amount of them. You've only got so many sanctions you can place on a person. You've only got so many rewards that you can give them before your budget runs out. Whereas the internal intrinsic motivations of an individual are infinite and they're endless. And in many ways this represents the idea that we're dealing with in energy more broadly in the world today. 

We're moving from fossil fuels, which is a finite source. To renewable energy, which is an infinite source is. Billions of years left before the energy of the sun is going to run out. And in the meantime, our tides will continue and the winds will continue. And all of those other sources of energy that we are now learning to tap into are available to us. 

It's the same fundamental transition that we need to be making in energy, in motivational energy, in helping individuals tap into the energy that they need to continue to do the work that really matters. 

To them and to us. To us. 

Choice, mastery and relatedness. The three fundamental and powerful motivations of all human beings. But there's actually a fourth one. More recent research has shown one called beneficence. What's beneficence? Essentially, it's about a motivation to serve a higher purpose, a motivation to serve something which is bigger than the self. Abraham Maslow, who developed also developed a very influential theory of motivation in the 1950s, talked about this in the area in which he called self-actualization 

the ability of an individual to move beyond their own underlying individual needs, self serving to actually serve something bigger than themselves, to serve the greater good. So the easy way of translating beneficence is to be living in life with purpose, a purpose that is bigger than self. And this is something which is playing out quite strongly in the environment today. We've noticed that for some reason, as a consequence of the last couple of years, the struggles of COVID in the pandemic and lockdown is that people are really questioning the lives that they're living and the organisation that they're working for and the work that they're doing. 

And I've commented on this in previous podcasts. They're looking for purpose, they're looking for their work to have meaning, for them to work in organisations that are doing something that is bigger than just making money or producing a widget or providing a service. 

Purpose is the fourth fundamental motivator of human beings. 

It's a motivation which relates to our consciousness. As human beings. We're constantly capable of examining what it is that we do and for what reason do we do what we do? And asking bigger existential questions about Why do I exist? 

The more challenging the circumstances we find ourselves in, the more difficulties that we have to confront and overcome. The bigger this question becomes because life's not easy. Life is a struggle. Life becomes a challenge. And we ask ourselves. For what reason? Therefore, am I here? For what reason do I continue to toil? For what reason do I continue to persist? And this is why purpose really matters in this moment, in this. 

era in human history. And so we now have four fundamental motivators of human behaviour. Four fundamental drives: choice, mastery, relatedness and purpose. 

The question for us as leaders is how do we reflect those in our leadership? How do we align the way that we lead with those motivators so that we can engage other people, we can connect to other people and we can energize other people for the work that needs to be done. Ideally because they want to do it. I want you to think about this in two ways. I'll think about it and describe it as what I call broadcast leadership or broadcast motivation and narrow cast leadership or narrow cast motivation. 

Broadcast leadership. Broadcast motivation is concerned with the behaviours that I project in a broadcast fashion to all of the people around me. So if you were to watch me during the course of the day, if you were to be exposed to me through a town talk or a zoom, or if you were to experience me in a range of interactions, these are the, the behaviours that just keep showing up, the behaviours that you're able to observe and access fairly easily independent of your relationship with me. 

And these are the behaviours that. Comprise my shadow. What is it I do? What is it I say? What is it that I recognize? What it is that I pay attention to and measure? And that shadow, that broadcast set of behaviors has an enormous effect on other people's willingness to engage with me, but also the levels of energy and motivation. And what we've found that leaders who were able to show up in a and broadcast a set of behaviors that clearly indicate to other people that they have choice, and that allows them to achieve mastery and efficacy and helps them understand what their role and relationship in the scheme of things. 

And in particular, how does their work connect to purpose is the kind of leadership which is much more motivating and much more compelling and produces high levels of discretionary effort and engagement in organizations. And it's you think about some of the more motivating leaders that you've worked and worked with or had exposure to. You'll be able to see all of these things. So, for example, in terms of providing choice, what they do is they provide information in a way which is open and candid. They let you know, well, the good news as well as the bad news. 

They're not selectively giving you the little bits of information that they need to to manipulate you into a place where you're going to do what they want you to do. They understand that as a human being, you actually need to understand the full picture, the good and the bad, to actually be able to step into the work that needs to be done. 

In terms of mastery, they're helping you constantly make sense of the world stretching you and challenging you to step beyond what you're currently confident in, into something new and different, but also instilling the belief in you that you can achieve that, that you are entirely capable of stretching yourself into the future, into a new set of skills and and capabilities that will allow you to thrive, not just survive. In terms of relatedness, they're constantly helping you understand what's your place within the tribe, what's the unique role that you have and why you matter. 

And that you do matter. 

In in terms of purpose, perhaps most importantly, they're always talking about purpose. I remember very clearly one particular leader that I had the wonderful privilege to observe who was leading. One of the biggest transformation is in Australian corporate history. 

And at the beginning of every single group address, town talk analyst briefing, the first thing he always spoke about was purpose, a purpose for the organization, which was bigger than just making money or making profit. It was actually about the customer and it was about what it was that the customer deserved and how the organisation was in a unique position to give the customer what they deserved and what they were entitled to. And that was powerful because the customer or the customers. A bigger than any individual. 

Those people out there that your organisation is seeking to serve is bigger than you as an individual. So it overcomes my individual tribal factionalism and my self-serving needs that we then have to work collectively together to satisfy our customers needs. That's a powerful motivator for many people. 

I've spoken before in previous episodes around the role the purpose plays. For example, NASA has one which is to reach higher, reveal the unknown, so that all that we learn and discover can benefit humankind. I mean, what a fantastic, compelling, energising purpose that any leader who if they continually tap into that and help people see how their work. 

Whether you're cleaning the floors of a NASA facility or whether you're running the calculations on a space vehicle and its trajectories, you can connect your work to something that really matters, to something which is bigger than you, bigger than us. 

And this is the broadcast motivation, the broadcast effect of leadership on releasing the energy of others. These are the behaviors that when a leader shows up with them, they catalyze a release of energy in all those who are exposed to that leader. All of those who see and hear and observe that leader. 

But let's contrast that with narrow caste motivation or narrow caste leadership. This is leadership which pays attention to individuals and the motivations and the needs of the individual, that the leaker that the leader is seeking to mobilize and influence and engage. And this requires two things leaders ability to understand will be able to identify what can be motivate what might motivate that individual in this context, in this point in time, as well as an ability to connect. 

The work to be done to those motivations that exist in the individual. Let's start first with understanding needs. This is not necessarily a difficult thing, particularly with people that you have relationships with and interactions with that you can even ask them questions about what do they find motivates them, what do they find motivates them? And you can make it behavioral and ask them about the times and moments where they've felt themselves highly energized and highly engaged. And what were the conditions that existed at that point in time? You can also ask them the same sort of question around when they found themselves being particularly demotivated. 

We start to then uncover what are the motivations of that individual. This is problematic, though, in two ways. If we only deploy that method. The first is that there are some people around us that we can't have that conversation with. They might be more. There might be people that we haven't yet had an opportunity to have a conversation or interaction with, but nonetheless, we're going to need to influence or mobilize them. Or they might be the kind of people that we don't feel like we've had the permission to have that kind of conversation with. For example, they might be much higher up in the hierarchy, boss's boss or our boss. 

And if we don't have that kind of relationship with them, that conversation might not be something that we feel is possible. 

The other problem with asking other people what motivates them is that sometimes their assessment or their view of what motivates them is not actually what we would say if we watched them long enough. Part of the human condition is that we are compelled so that we feel okay about ourselves to interpret our past behaviors and actions through a generous lens so that what we will say motivated us to do something is usually noble or. 

generous. The truth is, sometimes we behave in ways that are not noble, nor are they the sorts of things that we would declare from the rooftops. They are things that are based upon fears. For example, I might yell at someone because I have a fear that I'm not going to get what I want, or I might withdraw from something and avoid taking a risk because I'm fearful that I will fail. I'm fearful that I am incapable. I'm fearful that I won't be successful. So these fears, these anxieties, these worries and concerns, we rarely declare openly to other people unless we have a particularly vulnerable and open and trusting relationship with them. 

So therefore asking other people what motivates them and what motivates them. Part of the challenge of that is that they need to be particularly self-aware if you're going to get good, accurate, balanced data from them. So what are we left with then? If we can't have a conversation with people about what motivates them and collect our data that way? What we're left with is our observational abilities. We have an enormous amount of capacity to observe other people in action and develop our own hypothesis about what's motivating them. 

And that hypothesis can easily be supported by understanding one fundamental truth about motivation. That human behavior, human action. Typically reflects a motivation at that point in time. And I can illustrate this by paying attention to some of the fundamental motivations that all living systems have or, let's say, animals have. Let's take food and water. So we have a motivation to acquire the food and the water that we need to sustain ourselves. So if I see a person looking for food or if I see a person eating, that behavior is clearly being motivated by hunger. Now let's take this fundamental principle and apply it to some of those more uniquely human motivations. 

Choice. Mastery, relatedness and purpose. 

I want you to imagine you're in a team meeting and your bosses have said to one of the other team members that this is the way a policy is going to play out or a procedure or new system or initiative. And the leader has largely just dictated and told everyone how it's going to be. And you notice one of your peers is starting to challenge that in there, saying things like, Well, I'm just wondering whether we could do it this way or how about we look at option B, or is there any reason why we couldn't whatever? Net individuals motivation that an individual's behavior at that point in time is being motivated by potentially choice, that what's happening is they're experiencing a moment where they don't feel like they've got choice, where they're being overly controlled, they're being just told what to do. 

And this individual's motivation is to start to exercise some choice, some autonomy. Said the behavior exists because of an underlying motive. Now it's quite possible that as you observe individuals around you, they might be members of your team or some of your peers. You'll notice that some of their behaviors are more acute than others. So, for example, you'll notice that some people have a much stronger propensity. Or apparent motivation to exercise choice. You'll see this by then, constantly seeking to influence what happens to them and exercise some level of control on what's happening around them. 

Or they might be seeking to influence, engage with mastery and show mastery. For example, they will often share what they think and what they know. Oral relatedness, where they have a very strong desire to connect with other people. So they pay a lot of attention to other people. They spend a lot of time engaging in connection behaviors. Or even people who are constantly saying, why are we doing this? And they're really asking, why are we doing this? How does this relate to the greater purpose that we're seeking to serve? What's the relevance of this? Two, what really matters. 

When you see those behaviors showing up in a particular context or more consistently with an individual that starts to tell you something about a what is a strong motivation of sorts for that individual. And if I am then going to seek to influence them and mobilise them. They're the sorts of things that I should be connecting their action to. For example, if I wish to influence a senior leader who had strong autonomy, needs choice, needs to take a particular action such as endorse a plan or provide support or sign off an investment. 

I might wish to point out how taking that action could help them maintain their independence or exercise control over something critical. The key here, though, is to give them the choice and respect their autonomy needs. The moment they feel like they're being forced into something, they're much less likely to agree and more likely to become obstructive and defiant. I often find with individuals with high control or choice, needs to use a questioning approach. I might say something like you've said that you want to get there first. Which option that we presented. 

Do you want us to pursue by giving them that choice? You're tapping into their motivations, influencing them to be to do what needs to be done because they want to do it. Let me give you another example, one that is based upon the fundamental motivation of belonging and relatedness. I want you to imagine that you've got a member of your team and you would like them to take up an important but challenging assignment. You would want to help them see how by taking up that assignment, that it would meet their need for belonging. 

And you might do this by saying something like. How do you feel that your teammates would feel if you took up this important task on their behalf? 

You'll notice here that I'm not only appealing to relatedness and belonging needs, I'm appealing to that individual's potential need for choice. 

In fact, this is a really important point in the research around self-determination theory. Underpinning everything was a fundamental need for people to be able to self-determine, to be able to choose. So if you were to say of of the four motivators around autonomy, mastery, relatedness and purpose, which is the most important probably choice wherever you can provide an individual with some amount of choice so that they can self-determine. 

Purpose is one I use a lot in my work. So in my work I'm often appealing to individuals to engage in challenging learning experiences, really stretch and push themselves into uncomfortable territory so that they can really develop and grow as individuals. They have to have a pretty compelling reason to be willing to be held in that space of discomfort for a long, sometimes a long period of time. And this is where purpose becomes particularly important for many of them. Many of them have a purpose that they can only search for. 

They can only pursue. Or they can only realize if they grow into being the leaders that they need to become, if they can start to master aspects of leadership that today they haven't yet mastered. So I'm constantly connecting the difficult work that they need to do to that purpose, whether that purpose sits outside in terms of their contribution to community or organizational success or family. It doesn't really matter what that purposes. It's the connecting their action to a purpose that is meaningful to them, which motivates and compels and energizes and gives them the motivational fuel to keep going and to do the work that's important. 

You know, amongst all of this. I think we need to be pretty open and honest about the sorts of concerns that leaders will have when they contemplate using these sorts of approaches to to motivating and engage, energizing and engaging others. You know, one of the often common questions that will come up is, isn't this manipulative? And I agree that when a leader's intent is generally perceived as purely self-serving, your attempts to motivate other people through appealing to what matters to them may be experienced as manipulative. 

For example, I once worked with the senior leader who tried to motivate me by appealing to my desire to make lots of money. And that's a motivation that he had. But I didn't share it, and as a result, I felt quite misunderstood and manipulated and demotivated. 

If, however, a leader's intent is generally perceived to be of service to the individual and their real needs, their genuine needs, 

then. 

The benefits will largely be interpreted and experienced as genuine. 

Because you are paying attention to the other person's needs, not your own. But what if no benefits exist? What if there is no real positive outcome that could be connected to that individual taking action in terms that are relevant to to what motivates them? 

Even if you can't help them connect their action to a specific upside or a benefit, you may be able to highlight a negative consequences that they can avoid through their own actions. 

I once worked on a fairly significant program of work at a very large automotive manufacturer where the biggest issue was that people were often turning up late for work or not turning up at all, so they had high absenteeism levels. The typical approach was to sanction the individuals through punishment. And what they learnt was that in a lot of the subgroups that existed in that factory, there were cultural groups, ethnic groups. And then what was happening was when a team member wasn't turning up, that other people were having to pick up the slack, they were having to work harder, their work day was harder because that individual didn't turn up. 

And these were people who had relationships not just at work, but outside of work. So what the leaders started to realize that they needed to do was to appeal to other things, so that for many of those folk, for example, who were turning up late or not turning up at all. That that was creating a negative experience and a a negative perception amongst their teammates of them, and that if the leader was actually able to help the individual understand that their needs for relatedness, their needs for belonging was potentially being put at risk. Then that could be enough to motivate a shift in behaviour. 

So questions like, how do you think you turning up late? Or How do you think you constantly being absent? Is having an effect on your mates, on your friends? What do you think their experiences of when that happens? Just simple questions like that helped individuals connect their behavior and their choices to what motivates them and therefore make different choices. 

And the third most common question that I get is, well, what about those sort of A-type motivators, those extrinsic motivators, the external motivators like carrot and stick? Can I still use them in my responses? Yes, you can. There's nothing wrong with carrot and stick motivations. If you're unable to find or connect to the individual's motivations or the I type motivations, as long as you realize that any type motivations have limitations. And they make your leadership much less effective if you use them as your default motivational strategy. 

The general rule here is to appeal to Type II motivations before type motivations wherever possible. And I neatly sum it up in the phrase in the word motivate. I comes before A. 

I hope this episode of the Xtraordinary Leaders Podcast has provided you with some food for thought around how we can take up leadership in a way that  is more likely to release the energy of other people so that we can energise them and help them do what needs to be done in a world which seems quite demanding at the moment, and people are feeling quite energy depleted. There's a wonderful example of a client that I've been working with recently where we've taken these ideas and we've put them into practice. The client is a leadership team who have a very large function in an organisation, and this function is made up of a lot of people who have not only had to deal with all of the things that we've all had to deal with in the world today as a result of COVID lockdowns and instability in the world. 

But they've also had to deal with a lot of stuff, which is to do with their organisation, where the organisation has been restructuring and has been being split apart into two. And that's creating all sorts of uncertainties and concerns for people about their futures, let alone the impact that it's having on their regular day to day ways of working. So how do they continue to serve their internal clients and meet their needs in an organisation which is rapidly changing? There's a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty at play. His client had noticed that the engagement levels, as indicated by engagement surveys, were showing that team members were really depleted and that they were struggling to be engaged. 

And so what we've done is we've very deliberately started working as a leadership team to craft a series of experiences and to deploy leadership in a way which is, wherever possible, providing people with choice, providing them with the opportunity to acquire the skills and the knowledge and the techniques, and to be able to meet the moment and continue to grow into the experience that they're having. Mastery. And in terms of relatedness, even though people have been fractured and separated by lockdowns and zoom fatigue, bringing people together wherever possible in much more meaningful ways to create trust and to create connection and engagement. 

And constantly coming back to the fundamental question about why are we doing all of this? What's the purpose in all of this? And what we're seeing is that by the leaders doing this, they are fundamentally transforming the experience of the employees, where the employees have gone from describing the experience they're having as being demotivating and frustrating and upsetting to using words like, I'm excited. I'm optimistic. I'm positive. 

Nothing's changed in terms of their external world. All of those challenges remain the same. All of the demands on their energy remain the same. What's changed, though, is their internal state and their internal state change because the leaders have been much more effective at tapping into and releasing. 

The motivations of every individual. Their fundamental human needs are now being met. And I encourage you,  the listener, to think about this in your leadership, paying attention to what motivates other people and releasing their energy so that they can meet the moment. 

I hope that you've enjoyed this episode of The Xtraordinary Leaders Podcast. As usual, if you want to connect with this, please do so by emailing us at podcast at Xtraordinary Leaders dot com dot au or reach out to us via the Xtraordinary Leader's Instagram page. If you want to dig deeper into this topic of motivation or some of the other topics that we've covered in an Xtraordinary Leaders podcast, many of them are covered in my book Xtraordinary: The Art and Science of Remarkable Leadership. 

Or alternately, we're running programs that you can join us on and learn more about leadership. And just like us, continue to experiment with your leadership in the laboratory that is life. But for now, thanks for listening. See you next time and lead well.