chapter 5
Find your motivation
Supercharged teams are driven to succeed by a strong motivation for achieving their goal. Even when you have a clear vision for your team, teamwork can be challenging without the motivation to do the work. With a strong purpose, a team will be far more motivated to achieve more together. For some teams, their organisation’s greater purpose will provide all the motivation they need, even if the work they are doing is difficult. For some people, they are driven by a kind of reactor core that keeps them going long after the rest of us will have given up and acts as a filter for all decisions. Internal drive and motivation are crucial – we cannot supercharge without them.
Use these tools to ramp up the meaning and purpose of your work for yourself and your team.
What you will learn in this chapter:
- • How to motivate your team by having a purpose.
- • How to reveal and articulate your team’s purpose.
- • How to deepen your understanding of why the team’s work matters.
- • How individual team members can find their motivation.
Purpose motivates teams
Organizations are focusing not only on being a great place to be, but also to be from.
Global Talent Trends 2019.1
Of the many interviews I did for this book, almost every person mentioned the importance of purpose at work. Grainne Wafer from Diageo said that the best way to be a successful team is to have clarity of purpose – a true understanding of what you are doing and why you are doing it, so the team is clear what they are in service of. Gael De Talhouet from Essity said the best teams don’t succeed because they work harder or longer, but succeed because of the passion they share and their motivation to exceed expectations.
More and more companies understand that if people’s work actually stands for something, the more motivated and effective their teams will be. In the last ten years we have seen a remarkable shift in what customers expect. It is not enough simply to be profitable – organisations have to stand for something and to contribute something to society.2 This is partly because it is harder for companies to hide unethical behaviour, so they have to behave better. It is also because customers have more choice than before, and one way that companies can stand out is by doing good. Today, people want to buy and work for brands that reflect their own values.
This is the same for employers – people want to work somewhere that does good work. In 2014, KPMG’s ‘Higher Purpose’ initiative recognised and celebrated the impact and meaning of the work the company did. It found that when its leaders communicated the higher purpose and impact of their work, their teams were significantly more motivated to strive for continuous improvement and high performance.3
When companies can form a human connection with their employees and build trust and pride in what they do, they improve the performance of their people. In other words, when work is meaningful, teams perform better.
Diageo
How gender is communicated in advertising
I’ve worked on many projects over the last two decades, and only a few stand out. The ones that do are those with a strong social purpose. One of the best projects I’ve ever been a part of was with Diageo, one of the world’s biggest producers of spirits and beers.
Diageo is a leading company for inclusion and diversity. In 2020 it was featured in the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index for the third year running,4 and in 2019 named the second most inclusive and diverse company in the world by Refinitiv,5 and ranked first globally for gender equality by Equileap as a result of this work.6
Diageo is responsible for advertising hundreds of recognisable brands, and in 2018, Syl Saller, the Chief Marketing Officer, kicked off a purpose-based initiative to normalise gender equality. Syl believes passionately that advertising shapes culture – what people see on screen has an influence on how we behave in society. Historically, women have been misrepresented in advertising. For example, in mixed gender adverts generally, men speak about seven times more than women,7 and in Diageo’s own advertising male voiceovers had historically been more common than female-only voiceovers.
Amber D’Albert in my team led the work with Diageo to improve gender portrayal in advertising, working with the business to produce a framework for progressive gender portrayal that Diageo’s 1,200 marketeers, global and local agencies were trained in. Diageo has shared this framework widely with the industry, including the Unstereotype Alliance.
When we worked on this project, we deliberately selected an all-female team, including our designer, so that the ‘female gaze’ led every element. Because of the purpose, we were motivated to do our best ever award-winning work. Imagine the societal impact that one of the world’s biggest advertisers will have on gender equality.
Employees don’t need to work at your company, they should want to work there and as a result everything should be designed around that principle.
Jacob Morgan8
Tool 10
Define team purpose
We don’t all belong to an organisation with ambitions to change the world. However, if you want to supercharge your team, no matter what you aim to achieve, you can create a team purpose that powerfully drives the team to keep you going when the work is tough.
In the previous chapter your team will have created a vision, the ambitious direction for your team. The team’s purpose is why you are doing what you do. To find your team’s purpose, you need to define why you are doing this work, and that reason will give your team the passion and energy, the reactor core, that makes them exceed expectations.
Once you have your goal, consider these six questions in turn, as a team, to define your team’s purpose:
- 1Starting with the team vision you created in the previous chapter, what is your one-sentence expression of this team vision?
- 2What unique talent and expertise does this particular team have to achieve this vision?
- 3What are the assumptions and beliefs we bring to this project?
- 4Based on the previous three answers, why do we exist and therefore what is our team’s purpose?
- 5With our team’s purpose in mind, how will we overcome challenges that come our way?
- 6With our team’s purpose in mind, how will we make progress?
Answer these six questions to arrive at six short sentences or statements that define your team’s purpose and how it will help you to achieve your team vision.
Example:
Define Team Purpose
| Purpose questions | Example answers from the digital transformation team (from the previous chapter) |
| One-sentence vision | To perform a deep digital makeover for every individual in the company so they can experience the benefits of a successful digital transformation at first hand. |
| Talents and expertise | We are ten of the top digital experts in the business, with experience from inside and outside of the company. If we can’t do it, literally nobody can. |
| Assumptions and beliefs | We are convinced that digital transformation will make work easier, more efficient and more enjoyable for every single person in the company, and will have a positive impact on their work–life balance. This project will make people’s lives better. |
| Our team’s purpose | We exist to make people’s work easier and better with digital tools that save time, enable great work and help people to have a better work–life balance. |
| Overcoming our challenges | We know that people resist change, and we need to remember to prove to people that this will actually be better for their overall work–life balance, not just their work. We will have to convince them gently, one person at a time. |
| Making progress | We will identify individuals who will find digital transformation easiest, work with them first, and ask them to talk about the benefits to both their work and home life to others in the company, and ask them to help other people overcome their issues. We will work to understand those individuals with the most barriers, difficulties or challenges to working digitally, and understand what benefits will make a difference to them (for example, allowing people to work flexibly and from home) and focus on delivering them these benefits first. |
How to use this tool:
- • Ask each person in the team to write their answers to these questions on Post-it notes first, individually and without discussion, and using the most descriptive language possible.
- • When everyone has finished answering the first question, only then share the notes with each other, and agree one main answer taking the best bits from all of them.
- • Then move to answering the next question in the same way.
- • Don’t stop at defining your team’s purpose, but move beyond to what that means for dealing with challenges, and how you will make progress.
- • Make your answers emotional, descriptive and colourful – the more memorable and meaningful they are, the more motivating they will be.
Your team’s purpose should be relevant in the short and medium term, but when you create a purpose at the beginning of the project, you may find it needs to change once the project is underway. So, after the early stages of your team’s work are done, sense-check the team’s purpose, and reword it if necessary.
Purposeful leadership works
Put simply, the way people feel at work profoundly influences how they perform.
Schwartz et al9
Whether or not your organisation has a strong purpose, it is important to motivate your team to want to do great work. Purposeful leadership is growing in importance in today’s workplace. Extensive research has found that when managers display ’purposeful’ behaviours, employees are less likely to quit, they are more satisfied and willing to go the extra mile, they are better performers and less cynical, proving ‘the modern workplace is as much a battle for hearts and minds as it is one of rules and duties’.10
A strong purpose can motivate our bosses too. John Monks is a leadership coach who works to help creative leaders achieve their full potential. When we talked, he told me that he is seeing the evolution of purpose in brands for individual leaders who need to find how their own values and interests can be aligned with their work. Doing this helps them navigate the complexity and pace of today’s world, alongside a desire to take control of the creative process.
Kantar
Purposeful collaboration
One of the first people I interviewed for this book was Beth Ann Kaminkow, at that time CEO of Kantar Consulting. Kantar is a data, insights and consulting company with over 30,000 employees working in a hundred different countries. In a business like this, because they are working on lots of different projects, teams can sometimes compete with each other instead of working together for their clients. Beth Ann and her leadership team developed an initiative called ‘purposeful collaboration’ to encourage teams to work together better across departments.
Kantar looked at high potential collaborators who were already doing great work, and developed a set of principles and a new way to kick off projects. Every project started by identifying the purpose of the project (the client question), the outcome (what they aimed to achieve together), the team (who would collaborate on this) and only after that defined the scope, timing and budget. This was so that people weren’t being pulled into anything and everything under the guise of ‘collaboration’.
This gave new meaning to everyone’s work, with inspiration and expertise from a wider pool of collaborators, and more successful projects because clients were getting the richness and depth of knowledge Kantar is known for. As a cross-company effort it made people feel like they were having a greater impact, something that would not have been possible in the siloed departments of the past. Beth Ann told me that it led to positive business and people results, driving ‘higher client value, engagement and satisfaction, and creating a virtuous cycle of employee engagement and motivation’. Purposeful collaboration is now a core value at Kantar, which is a huge achievement given the size and scale of the company.
Tool 11
Why our work matters
People get a sense of purpose from feeling connected to something bigger than themselves, knowing their work matters and understanding how their work affects other people.11 This tool helps your team to be more aware of the work and its positive impact, linking the team’s work with the greater good it can do beyond the team.
If you work only for yourself, if you hit rock bottom, you give up, but if you work for other people you can never give up because it becomes a bigger cause.
Kelly Choi12
As a team, with your team purpose in mind, consider the positive impact that the team could make. Answer these questions together to inspire and motivate each other about the work you are doing as a team. You can visualise these as if building a pyramid, starting with the base and building upwards.
- 1How will the company benefit from the work this team is doing?
- 2What positive impact will this team have on the people in different departments or other parts of the organisation?
- 3How will our work benefit people outside of the company?
- 4How will this work have a positive impact on our family and friends?
- 5What will our work give to our community or local area?
Example:
Why Our Work Matters
Our team’s purpose is that we exist to make people’s work easier and better with digital tools that save time, enable great work and help people to have a better work–life balance.
Our work matters because:
- 1The work this team does will make the business more efficient, and will give us the tools and time we need to be better than our competitors.
- 2This work will have a positive impact on everyone in the organisation, in every department, because we will make their lives easier, make their work–life balance better, and make them enjoy working here more than before.
- 3The work this team does will be an example of brilliant digital transformation, and we will inspire other traditional companies to make this change for the good of their business and employees.
- 4Our work will be good for our friends and family because they will notice we are spending more time with them, and we will do such a great job that we will be promoted and earn more money to share with them.
- 5As a result of this work, we will have more time to work in and volunteer in our community as a result of the free time we’ve made, and more money to spend in the local economy.
By considering how our work affects others, it reminds us who we are helping and how, in big and small ways, and in direct and indirect ways. This tool helps you to identify and remember what matters about your team’s work, and why the work is important.
Motivation is crucial to mental health
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
Victor Frankl (1905–97)
Psychologists have found that a sense of purpose enhances our self-esteem and self-confidence as long as we feel we are moving successfully towards our goals. Having purpose can also make us less focused on our own anxieties and worries because we feel a part of something bigger.13 People with a purpose in life also live longer.14
However, for many of us being in a team is not a choice – you have to be there, told to be there, even if you don’t want to be. You might be working with people you don’t like, on a project you don’t believe in, in a company you are not proud of. When you find yourself in this situation, it can be quite serious, as a lack of meaning and purpose in your work makes you less motivated and less happy.
If possible, try to find some meaning and purpose in where you are and the team you are in, even if you are not currently enjoying it. This is your chance to find something in that team that keeps you going.
Finding your personal motivation
When I was 25, I moved to London from Zimbabwe. Immigrants often have to start from scratch in a new country, so even though I had marketing experience, I started off working as a hotel receptionist for a few months, before getting an admin job at Kraft Foods. I knew Kraft was a good company to work for, and I thought that if I did a great job there might be more opportunities for me. On my first day I was shown into a large boardroom with hundreds of boxes in it, piled almost to ceiling height. Inside was the company paperwork from the last 20 years, and my job was to archive the important records and shred everything else. I worked my way through all the boxes eight hours a day for three months – that’s almost 500 hours of filing.
As I worked, I kept the door open and greeted the other people in the office as they walked past, and found out as much as I could about what the company did, and who people were. When the archiving project was over and the boardroom was clear of boxes, I threw away my plastic finger protectors and asked if they had any other work for me. That’s how I met my first boss and mentor Monica Juanas, and gained the consumer insight which became the foundation of my career.
No matter what work you are doing, it is important to feel your work is worth it. Whether the company does great work that you can be a part of, or if you have to find your own meaning and motivation to keep going, when you have a good reason for doing your work, the work will feel better.
Working hard for something we don’t care about is called stress: Working hard for something we love is called passion.
Simon Sinek15
Tool 12
Personal motivators
This tool recognises that you may not be in the team of your dreams, but being in a team is hardly ever a life sentence. We can check our own mindset and find the benefits to keep us motivated by asking how we can benefit from this work or team, despite its difficulties.
Please note, if you are being bullied, or the work your team is doing is unethical or illegal, you must reach out for support rather than using this tool.
Assuming you can accept the team you are in and want to make the best use of the experience that you can, here are some personal motivation questions you can ask yourself to find a few ways of finding motivation even in a difficult working situation:
- • Does this team open you up to new opportunities in the future? Is this work a stepping stone to other teams or projects? What do you need to get out of this experience to make your next move possible?
- • Is there a specific area of expertise, topic or skill you can learn while part of the team? Is there a new responsibility and opportunity to learn, for example, taking meeting minutes or setting up a project management system?
- • Is there a person on the team you admire or aspire to be like? Could you watch them and learn from them? What do they do in tricky situations that you could apply to your own ways of working? What example do they set and how can you learn from them?
- • Can you learn about team dynamics, management or relationships while you participate in this team? Are there any books you can read to understand why the different team players act like they do? Is there someone in the team who can help explain it to you, so you understand more deeply why we work in this way?
Then reflect on what you have learnt:
- • Reflect on your own career, what you aspire to achieve, and how you will get there, including what you commit to doing and to never doing, based on the behaviours you see around you.
- • Make an effort to empathise with people in the team, understanding more deeply why they are behaving in a certain way, being sympathetic to their pressures and mistakes and offering acceptance and support.
- • Consider your escape plan or alternatives – where would you like to be, and how do you plan to get there?
- • Understand why – learn from the people around you, even if how not to do things.
Write about it:
- • Can you record, measure or code what is happening in the team, observing what is happening and analysing it to identify specific patterns? For example, recording how many minutes late each meeting starts, and total these up for all meetings in the year to show how your team can improve. Or recording how long one person talks versus the others in the team, and creating a comparison of airtime over time.
- • Can you record the story of this team as an interesting case study to teach other people about in a future role?
- • Can you write a private blog or journal about your experiences that you can turn into an article, book or comedy in future?
Have fun with it:
- • Create harmless experiments, competitions and games to enjoy the time you spend in the team, for example, writing yourself a bingo sheet of commonly used phrases to tick off, or making it your mission to make sure people have to sit in a new chair each time by moving in each meeting. My husband once spent a year’s worth of meetings with a large cost-cutting consultancy group taking their paper clips from them when they weren’t looking, building up a collection that he was very proud of.
Reach out to others:
- • Reach out for support, whether to a coach, leader, boss, your HR person or a peer, and ask for them to help you find personal motivation and benefits in this team, even if the work feels difficult or unmotivating at first glance.
- • Can you use the benefit of your experience to reach out to more junior colleagues and help to grow the next generation of leaders? Helping others can be hugely motivating in itself.
Motivation is essential
Whatever we do, and whichever team we are in, we can supercharge it by finding a deeper motivation to do our work. Even the best teams face challenges and difficulties, and it’s the internal drive that keeps us going together. Our motivation is the reason why we get out of bed in the morning and come to work. It’s far beyond and more important than selling more products, hitting deadlines or making money.
When a team has a purpose, they have defined why their work is meaningful, and why they are so motivated to do that work. A motivated team feels better to be in and works better too. Finding your motivation is crucial to doing excellent teamwork.
Key take outs
- • Purpose is a strong motivator, and motivated teams perform better.
- • Defining a team’s purpose will help find the passion and energy to exceed expectations.
- • Understanding why the team’s work matters connects them to something bigger than themselves.
- • Finding personal motivations within your work can help you make the best of challenging situations.