Here’s a scary thought: Engagement is a gift that you might not have earned.

Pause.

Engagement is a gift that you might not have earned.

It’s true, but fear not; step 5 will help you improve employee engagement and be the kind of manager your team wants to work for. No, my advice will not include handing out cupcakes, but feel free to do that because everyone loves cupcakes.

But seriously, let’s talk about engagement. Did you notice that the name of this step does not contain the word engagement? That’s because engagement is not something you can do or control. Engagement happens when employees are motivated to give discretionary effort to a task. These moments transcend the basic employee–boss relationship and show a higher level of connection and commitment. It’s lovely when it happens, and it is a required ingredient for employees to do their best work. That’s why every company in the free world is launching employee engagement initiatives and paying trillions of dollars to consultants to proctor 40-minute surveys that employees take because their managers bribed them with delicious cupcakes.

Sorry, do I sound a jaded? I love cupcakes, but I’m not a fan of using surveys to force managers to behave better because they fear what a bad score might mean for their career. It doesn’t work that way, anyway, and you’ll learn more about why and what you can do to affect employee engagement in this step.

Distinguish Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

Before we explore managerial techniques, it’s important that we clarify key terms. Your success will depend on your understanding of them. There are two types of motivators:

• Extrinsic motivator—something happening external to the person with the intent of improving motivation. For example, “I’ll give you a $1,000 bonus if you meet your productivity goal.” Extrinsic motivation is behavior that is driven by external rewards, such as recognition, money, notoriety, or praise.

• Intrinsic motivator—something happening internal to the person that motivates them. For example, Sally was determined to find the error in the process because she loved solving tough problems. Intrinsic motivation is behavior that is driven for its own sake and personal rewards.

Think about your current company and department. Can you list the extrinsic and intrinsic motivators? Use Exercise 5-1 to practice distinguishing motivators. (You can find my answers to this exercise at the end of the chapter.)

Extrinsic and intrinsic motivators are neither good nor bad; both are useful and alive in our organizations. But if you want to improve engagement, you’ll need to tap into and ignite intrinsic motivation.

Use the Right Motivational Tools

Perhaps you’ve heard the saying, “Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.” It’s important to use the correct tools (but please don’t shoot or stab anyone). You wouldn’t use knitting needles to sew a quilt or serve soup on a plate. And it wouldn’t make sense to pump up your bicycle tires with a cotton ball.

While these examples seem obvious, we commonly mess this up when it comes to motivational tools. Here’s a true story that illustrates this: I asked a senior leader what her organization’s goals were for the coming year. She told me that one goal was to increase ownership of the strategic plan at all levels of the organization. She wanted every employee to internalize and demonstrate ownership for their part in making the strategies come to fruition. I then asked her what their action plan was for making this goal happen. She listed several items like these:

• Conduct mandatory monthly meetings to review strategic plan elements with staff.

• Cascade the overall goal to employees’ goals.

• Require every staff meeting to include a review of departmental goals and performance to those goals.

I said to the leader, “You’re bringing a knife to a gun fight.” Well no, I didn’t say that, but could’ve. I told her that her action plan wouldn’t work as she intended. This leader was extremely bright and well-regarded in the organization, but the look on her face told me she did not understand. To her credit, the actions she and her team had agreed upon were reasonable, good-to-do things, they just had little chance of creating ownership. They weren’t designed to produce those types of behavior.

Ownership is intrinsically driven. You can’t force someone to own—in their heart or mind—anything. You can hold people accountable because accountability is extrinsically driven. In my example, the leader’s actions were extrinsically driven. Do you see that? Something is happening external to the person with the intent on improving motivation for owning the strategic plan. Figure 5-1 presents a diagram that might help illustrate this important point.

Going back to my example, the leader’s goal was to increase employee ownership of the strategic plan. Ownership is an intrinsically driven behavior. The action plan they created contained accountability system tools (mandatory meetings, employee goals, and meeting requirements). Knife at a gun fight.

Think through a few examples of your own to test the diagram. Imagine that your manager told you that she’d like you to be more engaged and then shared with you a goal regarding engagement that she was adding to your performance metrics. How would you feel? First, handing out engagement goals is a dumb thing to do—that’s like bringing a marshmallow to a gun fight. It doesn’t work; not by a long shot. If I want you to be a more engaged employee, as your manager I need to use engagement tools. These will feel like pull. And that’s why this step is called “Use Pull Versus Push Motivation.” For example, in Exercise 5-1, Emma is pulled into her work, for the sake of that work, because she’s motived from within. This is the place where discretionary effort comes from, and it’s how we help catalyze the best performance.

We’re using some different sounding words in this chapter. Managers create environments, catalyze performance, and inspire extraordinary effort. You don’t and can’t control engagement, but you can influence it by using pull motivation tools. Pull . . . pull . . . pull….

Create More Pull in the Workplace

Our work has pull when we willingly engage it. Pull might look like deep listening, inquiry, interest, excitement, proactivity, choosing to change, trying something new with gusto, eagerness to learn, taking the initiative to contribute to others, bravery, stepping into chaos, ownership, coachability, and other behaviors that come from within.

You cannot force engagement to happen, but you can build a workplace where it is more likely to flourish. Here are some of the characteristics of a workplace that supports high employee engagement:

• Employees feel challenged. They have interesting problems to solve.

• Employees use their strengths in the service of meaningful goals.

• Employees feel connected to their work, team, and the company (high embeddedness, as in step 4).

• Employees feel cared for (step 2), valued, and special.

• Employees have the opportunity to collaborate and partner with peers to solve important problems or implement worthy projects.

• Employees grow professionally and personally.

• Employees have some control over their work; they can make choices that affect their work.

• Employees believe their work has meaning and is important.

• Employees have fun at work.

Want to know how you can create more pull in the workplace? After all, pull is not something you can push. The good news is that creating pull does not require you to implement a long or complicated process. You can do it in many small ways. And you don’t even need to buy cupcakes. That would be an extrinsic motivator, right?

To create more pull in the workplace, add new workplace elements that provoke or evoke your employees’ inner motivation to the things you are doing now. There’s a list of these elements in Exercise 5-2. For example, you can use your morning or beginning of shift rounding (or huddles) to ask your employees for ways you can help remove challenges or barriers they are facing. If you show interest and take initiative to make things better, your employees will smile, high-five you, and feel less workrelated stress. This would be an example of adding the “make things better” element to your regular communication practices. Take a minute to brainstorm more ways and situations in which you can create more pull (Exercise 5-2).

Did you notice that I inserted the word worthy a couple times in Exercise 5-2? That’s an important distinction. Employees love a challenge and will pull into one as long as it represents something that is worthy of their efforts. If you double their production goals, thinking it is a good challenge, well then you won’t see much in the way of pull. Similarly, pet projects that seem like a waste of time to most people won’t get much pull. Compliance, perhaps, but not pull.

You can create more pull by making small but impactful changes to the things you already do. Let’s use the example of your next team meeting to illustrate. Example 5-1 fills in the chart from Exercise 5-2 with ideas for applying the elements that improve pull at your next staff meeting.

Did reviewing Example 5-1 give you any ideas? Try going through the exercise with other situations, such as huddles, goal setting, rounding, or training. However, I’ve got a few caveats: First, although the focus of this step is on creating pull by igniting intrinsic motivation, I am not suggesting that accountability systems (extrinsically driven) are bad. We’ll discuss accountability in step 6. It’s another tool that produces different, but also important, outcomes. As managers, you have many tools.

Second, creating pull is not a science—if you do X, you will not always get Y. When it comes to engagement, you are not in control. Engagement is an intrinsically driven behavior that occurs when we pull ourselves into the work. But the situation that elicits pull for me might be different than what motivates you. And it might change. There are some common triggers and conditions that tend to evoke intrinsic motivation more often, and managers who use these will see more employee engagement. And there are common elements that make the difference for many of us.

Before you plan your staff meeting, huddles, one-on-ones, rounding, or work plans, review the management practices that create pull and determine ways you can make the workplace a bit more motivating. Small actions, practiced consistently, will yield better results than twice yearly grand gestures.

Model Engagement

I could end every chapter with the suggestion that you need to model the behaviors that you seek, but it’s particularly worth noting for this step. At the root of engagement is energy—an energy that comes from within and that expands or contracts based on intrinsic motivation. That energy can be contagious.

When we see a heartwarming story about people helping the homeless, it usually evokes within us the desire to do more for people. When we see someone having fun breaking down empty boxes, we’ll likely join in. When we watch a co-worker get absorbed in solving a persistent problem, we’re often inspired to dig in with them. Engagement itself is a workplace element that generates pull.

So remember, show your passion for your work. Share the fascinating aspects of your job. Have some fun! Find the inner fire that motivates your discretionary effort and be that fully engaged manager your employees want to be around. Your most powerful tool for improving employee engagement may be inside you. Let it out.

Building ACCEL Skills

The management techniques we’ve explored in step 5, “Use Pull Versus Push Motivation,” will help you build the following ACCEL skills:

• Collaboration: The skills you are practicing to create more pull will also help you build collaboration. The best collaboration happens when team members are actively engaged in the work, so the fundamentals of intrinsic motivation also apply here.

• Engagement: This step is squarely focused on helping you build the skills to improve employee engagement through increasing pull and modeling engagement.

• Listening and assessing: As you create a work environment with more pull, you’ll be listening deeply to determine what best motivates your team members. And you’ll assess and adjust your managerial practices to continually hone your efforts to improve engagement.

Your Turn

Here are a few suggestions for ways you can practice what you’ve learned in this chapter:

• Learn how to better distinguish intrinsic and extrinsic motivation by observing what team members do and assessing what’s driving their actions.

• Take some time to consider the goals you have for your department and assess whether your actions are aligned with the types of behavioral changes you seek (use extrinsic tools to produce extrinsically driven outcomes and vice versa).

• Review Exercise 5-2 at the beginning of each week. Choose one element to focus on for the week, and then try a different element the following week.

• Practice tapping into your intrinsic motivation. Notice what works for you and consider whether similar approaches might help your employees.

Here are my answers to Exercise 5-1:

1.   Intrinsic

2.   Intrinsic

3.   Extrinsic

4.   Mostly intrinsic, but also some extrinsic

5.   Extrinsic

6.   Extrinsic

The Next Step

In this chapter we focused on improving engagement, which is intrinsically driven and characterized by pull. Step 6 will help you increase accountability, an extrinsically driven behavior.