Tapping into Intrinsic Motivation: A Guide to Building High-Performing Teams.
Employee engagement in the U.S. peaked at just 34% in 2018—the highest in nearly two decades. This isn’t just a statistic; it’s a wake-up call. Despite everything we know about what drives human performance, most workplaces still miss the mark.
💡 This article explores how intrinsic motivation—our internal drive for purpose, mastery, and autonomy—can unlock high performance and transform your team culture from the inside out.
Working on a Major Holiday
On the eve of a major holiday, Thanksgiving, I left my office early to spend time with my family. Our plans for the next day were simple: do nothing. But that night, as I stood before my whiteboard trying to illustrate multi-touch attribution for my company, I was struck by a realization. This was “intrinsic motivation” at play, the trait that I had struggled to define in my recruitment efforts. It felt and looked like I was solving a puzzle for fun and enjoyment. Later, I came to find out this is a behavior echoed by the monkeys in Daniel Pink’s book, “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”, which delves into the essence of intrinsic motivation as a core pillar of our drive.
We all know people who are absolutely crushing it in their fields. Many of those I’ve encountered are undeniably driven by intrinsic motivation. They focus intensively in honing their craft and excel at projects because they are hungry for mastery.
It’s the same motivation that underfunded semi-professional athletes draw on to reach peak performance and participate in competition. It’s the motivation to seek mastery that Stoic philosophy links to happiness.
In a professional employment and team setting, intrinsic motivation drives high performers to consistently achieve outsized results, but the underlying concept remains the same: they find significant motivation not only in financial compensation but also in the pursuit of personal growth within their areas of interest.
The Case for Prioritizing Intrinsic Motivation
Adding intrinsically motivated people to your team will have cascading effects on business goals. It will give you more of the people who stand on the productive side of the 80/20 Pareto principle. By combining the recruitment of such individuals with fostering intrinsic motivation throughout your entire team, you can create a rising tide that lifts all boats and cultivates a formidable competitive advantage.
We had been grappling with this notion for some time. During discussions on recruitment, we often referred to high performers as “self-motivated.” We came close to an answer when we began seeking candidates with a track record of entrepreneurship and initiative, but we hadn’t quite hit the mark.
That night, as I scribbled on the whiteboard, I realized that intrinsic motivation needed to be named and explicitly integrated into our recruitment and hiring processes immediately. Not only that, but it unquestionably deserved a place among the top three characteristics we humbly strive to assess in candidates.
The Crisis of Employee Engagement
Organizations have not acted on the motivational knowledge surfaced by psychologists many times over the last decades. This oversight is on the recruiting and team engagement sides.
According to a Gallup poll, employee engagement in the U.S. was at an alarming 34% in 2018. That was the highest score in the 18 years the study covered. As a leader, there should be few, if any, higher priorities than maximizing employee engagement. Hiring for and cultivating intrinsic motivation is a low-hanging fruit of significant opportunity that can change this engagement reality. Tapping into this source of motivation in the workplace is urgent, particularly as we face several organizational and global challenges.
Interviewing for Intrinsic Motivation
If you’re nodding, let’s talk about how to interview for it.
First, how do you even interview for a list of characteristics?
In the organizations I lead, we always evaluate each characteristic we are looking for, scoring them from 1 to 10 and multiplying the score by a weight. The weights can be chosen based on our best guess of how much each trait would predict success in the role. The weighted average is the final score.
Here’s an example: before adding intrinsic motivation as a trait, the top 5 we looked for in sales roles, and their assigned weights were:
Coachability – 9
Curiosity – 8
Work Ethic – 8
Intelligence – 8
Prior Success – 7
We stay objective by scoring each characteristic individually and avoiding a halo effect. We have clear definitions of what a score of 1-3, 4-7, and 8-10 mean in each trait, and we plan how we will assess these characteristics. Some can be evaluated during interviews, while others are assessed from sources like resumes or reference calls.
Stay Objective and Do Better at Predicting Success in a Role
You may recognize this strategy if you’ve read Mark Roberge’s “The Sales Acceleration Formula.” If you want further detailed instructions, I recommend reading it. While speaking with Roberge at Harvard Business School, where he is a professor, he explained an additional benefit where you can refine your hiring process. This is done by looking at the score sheets of your actual best performers. You’ll see which traits the data says predict your business’s success. Staying objective and building real data to predict future success are great, but there is more. In “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” Daniel Kahneman describes a very similar method he developed while serving in the Israel Defense Forces to evaluate recruits for potential success in army careers. His method continued to be used for decades. In the book, Kahneman describes several examples that seemingly prove that simple models are better than humans at predicting the future.
With this framework, it’s straightforward to consider intrinsic motivation. Just decide how much weight you want to give it and figure out how you’ll look for intrinsic motivation signals related to the candidate’s professional areas of interest. My suggestion is that it gets the highest possible weight.
Identify Intrinsic Motivation
The signals for spotting intrinsic motivation are not challenging to uncover; they are everywhere because many professionals are, in fact, intrinsically motivated.
Consider the following examples of signals:
- A developer who contributes to open source projects and enthusiastically talks about them.
- A salesperson who keeps a blog where she reinforces her craft by publishing lessons and thoughts.
- A candidate who does a case for the role and the deliverables makes you want to shortcut the process and make an offer immediately.
You may also ask the candidate to describe recent events in which they took leadership without being asked to. Have they sold a project to management or resolved an issue without anyone knowing she was even working on it? Find out why and how they did it, what kind of effort was put in, how the project turned out, and why it turned out that way. One question I like starting with is “So, how do you learn?” and digging in from there.
Downloadable Template
Here’s a template for the weighted-average scoresheet (download it to your Drive or as an Excel file): Interview Scoresheet for Sales Roles. Note the second tab with score range definitions.
Attracting Intrinsically Motivated People
Awesome! Now we know we should hire for intrinsic motivation and how to screen for it. But don’t just sit back and wait for intrinsically motivated people to come knocking on your door with resumes in hand. This is serious! Make it an active objective to attract the right people to your hiring pipeline.
On LinkedIn Recruiter/Lite
If you are working with a recruiter, share this article and make it an ongoing discussion with that recruiter. You can use a Boolean search if you are on LinkedIn Recruiter/Lite. Use keywords that would surface these mastery seekers, like “founder,” “marketing mastermind,” “enterprise sales forum,” “Mozilla Developer Network,” etc. The more keywords you identify, the larger your list will be.
In the Real World
You can also get out to industry events in your hiring field. The intrinsically motivated salesperson will hardly miss their local Enterprise Sales Forum, or equivalent group, meetings. She might even be one of the people running it and posting recaps on social media! The intrinsically motivated marketer might be on meetup.com right now, running a local group that gathers to discuss account-based marketing strategies. Look into your niche, too; whatever it is, there’s a relevant network actively meeting and seeking mastery in that niche.
Finally, build and showcase a culture that promotes and embraces intrinsically motivated people. They have specific needs to thrive and continue to be self-motivated. These needs include opportunities to challenge themselves, to approach mastery, and to have a sense of purpose. According to Pink, autonomy is disproportionately the most powerful lever you can pull to attract and boost self-motivation. Autonomy on how, when, and with whom people work can be the epicenter that sends intrinsic motivation shockwaves flowing through the entire organization.
We’ve used it to hire some outstanding team members, and I hope this guide can help you do the same!
About My Articles
These LinkedIn articles are a collection of actionable thoughts and lessons from the intersection of founding a company, acquiring knowledge, and seeking wisdom. I’m writing for my fellow entrepreneurs, the entrepreneurial ecosystem, my own team, and those interested in my company. Click the +Follow button to hear about future articles. A like, comment, and share are truly appreciated and help to amplify my reach.