Truth 4. It’s not money that motivates

Don’t get the wrong idea. This truth doesn’t let you off the hook for fairly compensating your employees for the work they do. (Anxiety and growing resentment that come from being broke can be very distracting.) You can adequately—even lavishly—pay your employees, but if you overlook one most essential engagement tool, this is what you’ll get: Ho-hum workers driving around in expensive cars wondering how they can fill this odd, empty feeling inside.

People yearn for purpose—for doing something that’s important, something that engages their full potential in a way that’s meaningful beyond their personal bank accounts. And that makes your job as their manager a little harder. You may not have as much control over their compensation and benefits program as you might like to have. But you do have control over how inspired they are and how connected they feel to the mission their jobs serve.

It’s not about the company. It’s about what the company is doing to make the world a better place. This may seem like an overly romantic or grandiose stretch, but, in truth, most people’s standards are realistic and modest. Very few aspire to be the one to save the world from Evil Genius with his finger on the button. Most people want to feel that thanks to their efforts, the world is a little better off by nightfall than it was when the day started.

People yearn for purpose.

And the truth is, it is! You just have to help them figure out how what they do makes it happen that way. The first thing, though, is for you to understand how your company improves the world—and then how your job serves that mission. With precious few exceptions (drug dealers and professional assassins are the only two jobs that come to mind at the moment), every paying job improves the day (or the world) for someone else. This is because money is motivated to change hands for one or more of only three reasons:

• To relieve pain

• To restore hope

• To bring beauty into the world

Once you’ve connected your own job to one or more of these reasons, your next job is to help your employees make this connection for themselves. And that’s going to require some imagination.

It’s easy to show a mason that he’s doing more than just building a wall; he’s making a cathedral. It’s even easy to show a hospital janitor that he’s doing more than just mopping the floor for the fortieth time that day; he’s saving lives. But this same connection can be made to elevate the vision and attitudes of all employees, no matter what they do.

A music teacher looks out at a room full of snot-nosed kids and wonders if she can do it another day, another year. Mozart was once a snot-nosed kid. And look how well he turned out. More recently, a high-producing salesman who traveled the world marketing telecommunications systems for airports quit one day because he felt that he was born for greatness. Airport electronics just wasn’t doing it for him. No one took a moment to help him see that his product helps loved ones fly to one another safely and that when a traveler collapses on a concourse from a coronary, the telecommunications system kicks in and consequently EMTs arrive in seconds, saving a precious life.

Motivation, for this salesman, was not about winning the game of making plan for the quarter. It was about making a positive difference in people’s everyday lives, which was exactly what he was doing. His boss just didn’t help him see it that way.

Motivation is about making a positive difference in people’s everyday lives.

Every job carries with it myriad ways employees can relieve pain, restore hope, and bring beauty into the world. Helping your employees make the connection between their daily deliverable and enduring meaning may not be the easiest, most obvious conversation you can have. But, with a little one-on-one exploration, you’ll find that connection together. It could be with the product itself, the customers themselves, the community, the coworkers, even the employee’s family and the dream future your employee’s job with your company is helping them realize.

And the conversation you have with your best employees exploring those ways is many times more pleasant than the one that begins with “Is there any way we can change your mind about leaving? More money, perhaps?”