In uninspiring times, tap into the power of purpose

We had suffered a massive outage. It was so big that it made headlines across our industry, caused tangible customer churn, and sent ripples of distrust through the businesses we served. While nobody would wish for this to happen, it is something that will happen to practically any technology business eventually, and what is important is how you respond.

I thought that my company responded perfectly. They openly apologized, took responsibility, and enacted changes through the product engineering organization to shore up the stability and reliability of our systems. It was the right thing to do.

Everyone knew that it was the right thing to do, and everyone wanted to pitch in to make our systems as resilient as they could be, but after many months of this work, it started to feel like a death march. As the memory of that outage blurred and faded, the urgency of the remedial tasks faded with it. How do you motivate people to continue boring, tedious work?

We know that there are three primary motivators we can tap into: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Let’s focus today on purpose.

When people on your teams aren’t motivated directly by the challenge or novelty of the work they’re doing, one way that you can help is to connect their work to its purpose.

By connecting work to purpose, you help your team members understand exactly how their day-to-day toils benefit the team, the company, and the customer. The more clearly you can articulate those connections, the more effective this tool will be to motivate your team.

Start by thinking about why your team member is doing the work they’re doing. In the case of my above example, the work helped to reduce the likelihood of a future service disruption. You could start by describing what the impacts of a service disruption might be for your customers, which helps to humanize the goal, and then describe the connection between their current project or milestone and the purpose: increasing stability.

I know that this all may sound obvious, but even if what you are saying is understood to everyone, just hearing it from you in clear and specific terms can do a lot to ignite the fire of motivation for your team members; remember that as a manager, your words automatically carry an outsized weight.

How will you help one of your team members to understand the purpose of their work today?

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