Canopy How to motivate your team to go above and beyond?

What truly motivates a team to go above and beyond?

This is, I think, a top of mind question for so many of us as leaders, especially in resource constrained times. And when there seems to be a lot of literature and content out there about, oh, it's employee recognition, or, oh, it's career progression, or, oh, it's coaching conversations. And so really, to cut through the noise, I'm excited to share a Know Your Team Manager Tip on at least based off our research, what is the one singular thing that can have the greatest impact on team motivation?

I'm Claire, I'm the CEO of Know Your Team. And I'm really excited to be here and sharing these tips with you. Now, if you haven't been subscribing to our Manager Tips, you can do that in YouTube. Make sure you get every single one of our videos as well as make sure to sign up for our newsletter so you're alerted every single time we share these insights. Additionally, we actually have a training product built specifically for managers to answer all these critical questions, including how to best motivate your team.

But for today, I actually want to highlight what I think is above all, the most keen tactic around motivating your team to go above and beyond. And it has to do with a landmark study that was published in 2010. It was published in "Harvard Business Review" where they looked at 12,000 workers and asked 'em a very simple question, which was, "How is work today?" They charted answers from these 12,000 workers about how their workday was over the course of time and analyzed these answers correlating essentially, okay, what is the thing that they were doing, or what did they say was happening with how they were feeling motivated about their work? And there was one very clear winner, which was that above all, workers felt most motivated when they were making progress on something meaningful. That was it. Progress.

And of course, this may feel a bit obvious to us as leaders because we're trying to make progress all the time. And yet, what this begs the question of, for us as leaders as well, am I showing it? Is there a mechanism in my team that I've created that actually shows how we are making progress on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis? Now, that could be weekly write-ups that you're creating as a leader. That could be all team meetings in which you're showing and talking about that progress. But it's really that progress overall, communicating that progress, showing that progress consistently, that is gonna give your team really the context for them to be able to choose to be motivated. And so if you can start there in thinking about showing progress and how to best show progress, that'll be the first step in really thinking about how to unlock the greatest amount of motivation for your team to go above and beyond.

Now, of course, there's so many other things that can be helpful in terms of motivation. So I invite you to check out our other Manager Tips at knowyourteam.com, and of course, our Manager Training Product that was built specifically to help managers like yourself get the exact answers they need on topics like motivation, whenever you actually need them. So make sure to sign up for the training product today if you haven't already. And look forward to having you join me for future Know Your Team Manager Tips.