Use Surrogate Goals To Maintain Your Team’s Motivation
When we embark upon a long, audacious journey, such as building an entrepreneurial venture, our over-arching goal might be several years into the future.
We, along with our team, might start out with unbridled enthusiasm, but a year in motivation is waning because it might feel like we’re investing countless hours and getting absolutely no closer to our endgame.
It can be a little like going to the gym. If your goal is to lose 10 kilos, and you’ve been working out and eating lean for a month, but you’ve seen little evidence of this on the scales, then you might begin to question your approach, and your motivation will start to slip.
In the 1960s, psychologist Edwin Locke posited that goal setting is linked to task performance. In particular, Locke put forward the idea that specific, explicit and challenging goals, along with feedback, contribute to motivation and higher performance.
Goals give us direction about what needs to be done and how much effort is required.
Locke and his team conducted numerous studies to build a case for their theory. In a 1974–75 study, they found that unionized truck drivers increased the number of logs loaded onto their trucks from 60 percent to 90 percent of the allowable legal weight as a result of setting goals. This saved the company $250,000 in nine months.
A short feedback loop is essential to keeping motivation high, and it has four discreet stages:
A feedback loop can be positive, in which case you know you’re on the right track, or it can be negative, in which case you need to make some changes.
But a very long feedback loop, essentially renders our missing information, not seeing the paths ahead and unable to confidently take action. This deprives us of a sense of control. It leaves us feeling unmotivated because we’re not seeing any forward progress — we’re just toiling away ad infinitum.
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The WorkFlow podcast is hosted by Steve Glaveski with a mission to help you unlock your potential to do more great work in far less time, whether you're working as part of a team or flying solo, and to set you up for a richer life.
To help you avoid stepping into these all too common pitfalls, we’ve reflected on our five years as an organization working on corporate innovation programs across the globe, and have prepared 100 DOs and DON’Ts.
