Why Your Team Is Losing Motivation — and How to Stop It.

We're not breaking any ground when we say having a motivated engaged team is going to produce better outcomes. Surprise, that's how this works. And there's lots of literature in the business world and pretty much any professional world about how to do this. Some of the themes that come up frequently are things like: 

• Do you get along with your boss? 
• Do you feel like you are valued? 
• Are you compensated properly? 
• Do you feel like there's room for growth? 

These are things that come up in any organization, but in the social impact space, there are a couple others that need tracking. But there's an extra layer that doesn't necessarily exist in other sectors.

What Makes Social Impact Organizations Different

Reflecting on all the different organizations we've worked with over the years and thinking about motivation for teams over the years, we’ve learned that there's no one way to do it right. Sometimes there's deep thought about this because the question arises: why is this particular team so jelled, so aligned, so energized and this other team that seems like they should be, they're just not there? You can feel the lack of enthusiasm, even though there's also this feeling of deep passion and care and purpose and mission.

There are a lot of different reasons why a team can be motivated or not. Sometimes it might not even have anything to do with the mission or the impact of the organization. It could be more interpersonal, it could be even just straight up personal in certain cases for certain individuals.

The Ikigai Framework: Four Ingredients for Fulfillment

This brings us back to a concept called Ikigai — a concept that originated in Japan during the Heian period (794–1185 CE). Ikigai is essentially a four ingredient recipe to personal fulfillment in a career. There are four points that this theory poses. And we think there's a fifth one that's missing.

The diagram is spelled I-K-I-G-A-I. Ikigai. It's a Venn diagram — not rocket science — but there are four overlapping circles in this diagram:

• Is the work something that the world needs?
• Is the work something that you're passionate about?
• Is the work something you're good at?
• Is the work something that you can earn a living doing?

Those four key elements are really close to what it takes for most people to be motivated and engaged in their work.

Two of those should be really easy in the social impact space. 

One of them is something organizations have control over.

The fourth one — can you make a living? — is probably the most difficult one to achieve in the social impact space.

There are two that are easy:

1. If you're working for a truly authentic social impact or mission-driven organization, the work is something that the world needs. 

2. By default, it should be something that you're passionate about. 

A lot of people in our work get into this kind of work because of those two factors. And in fact, there are people who get into the work for those two factors and sacrifice things like:

3.  Their own compensation 

4.  The things they're good at 

They sacrifice those things because they're passionate about it and because they believe the world needs it.

The Missing Fifth Element

There's a fifth circle missing from this Venn diagram for deep personal fulfillment and work.

Can this work be done and have it be in balance with other important things in life outside of work? Whether it's health or fitness or family or play or a hobby or whatever it might be, everybody — in order to be fully healthy and motivated in their work — needs space in their life to do those things.

And if that's not the case, none of the other things matter.

This is one of the major challenges in social impact work and the kinds of people who typically sign up for this kind of work. It's really tough to work in the sector and balance that with those other four factors.

Implementing the Ikigai Framework

If you're running a team in the social impact space, here are some ideas about how to make the work meaningful and make sure that there's passion at the individual level and at the team level.

1. Meaningful Work: Does the World Need This?

When it comes to something that the world needs, there's a really good way to approach it. Thinking about teams: How do you motivate a team to convince them that the world needs this thing? How do you make sure the team is receiving the same level of motivation that we are sharing with our audiences? Basically, the same thing needs to be done for teams that's being done when communicating with audiences (supporters, funders, etc.).

This is one of the most important ingredients to really nail in storytelling — to make a case for support for an organization. It's something that people often assume is self-evident, but often is not, especially if you're a founder or an executive director or someone in the executive leadership team. There's such a clarity of purpose and a clear understanding of why this work matters or you wouldn't be doing it in 99 out of a hundred cases.

The mistake that can often be made is assuming everyone else also sees it the same way because it is so self-evident that the cause matters. From a communications perspective, we spend a lot of time with our clients helping them figure out how to translate that passion and that understanding in a way that resonates with people who don't have the same amount of experience, background, or understanding of the importance of the cause and the mission.

This storytelling is just as important to your internal team as it is for your external audiences.

A Practical Approach: Collecting and Sharing Impact Stories

A really easy place to start is to simply start sharing the things that are being shared externally — internally. You can assign a team member coming to all the all-hands meetings to report on those things and share those stories. In doing so, teams light up — just this constant reminder of why we're doing what we're doing. By putting an owner on it and by repeating it frequently within the team, there's a feeling of making progress in terms of

• Is this work meaningful? 
• Are we having an impact? 

That is important within the team.

Oftentimes when working with clients, there's preaching about the importance of these impact stories and asking them to gather them, and it becomes clear that this is not a muscle that they've built. It's a really important muscle to build within an organization.

It also brings another question to mind: What are some of the things that motivate teams and even leadership the most? 

One of the simple silly things is having a WINS channel in internal messaging apps where people can just share small or large wins. Often the smallest wins are the ones that are the most motivating. Something as simple as: just got out of a meeting with a client and this is a direct quote from them — and it's praise for one team member or one part of a project.

It's those little things that just are proof that the work is having an impact even in a small way, but an inarguable way. That can make a horrible day become an awesome day.

Reflecting on Individual Impact

The other piece of this is wanting every individual's own work to also feel meaningful. So there needs to be reflection of the impact of the organization — which is what we're talking about with these impact stories — but there also needs to be reflection of the importance of individual roles within the organization.

Another thing that's good to do is posting articles from other thought leaders in the space that reinforce the importance of certain jobs. Share those thoughts to say to your staff — your work matters. You matter, and you are creating impact by being a phenomenal human.

It only goes so far for a CEO or an executive director to just go and high five an employee. But when you can show it with a third party, that also carries a lot of weight.

2. Building Capability: Am I Good At It?

Am I actually capable of doing this work? How do you bring that feeling within an organization as a motivational tool? It's a matter of how feedback is being delivered to the team about where they stand at any given time. Are they excelling or are they struggling? And if so, how?

As we previously mentioned, we’re fans of ditching annual reviews and getting into a more regular feedback system. That's important for motivation. Everyone on the team should know: 

• Am I doing a good job — almost down to the daily level? 
• Did I do a good job today? 

They should have a really clear sense of if the answer's yes or no, and not be afraid if the answer's no. And feel free to talk about that with leadership or with their supervisor.

This is an important one. A term that comes to mind that's almost become a little lost its meaning a bit or been overused, but is still worth bringing up, is this idea of imposter syndrome.  A lot of executives and leaders think about this, but it can apply at any level within an organization. Validation is more important for some people than others. Some people don't need it as much as others. Some people really need that validation and they don't have a lot of ability to have self-confidence around the work that they're doing. There's no judgment for either approach or either propensity.

The way to think about this with teams is developing a growth mindset and an ability and the support needed to help team members develop their craft to get better at whatever their role is through simple things like riffing with someone else on the team who's got a similar position.

Our designers, for example, will share inspiration with one another. They'll workshop things, they have a monthly design meta meeting to just keep the creative juices flowing outside of project work. But there should really be an effort — and there could certainly be improvement about this — to acknowledge, to take the time to stop and acknowledge when someone has really stepped up and made a difference or grown in some way and to do that publicly.

There's probably some mixed opinions about that, but we have a strong belief in it. Doing that one-on-one can also be effective, but really putting those wins in and showcasing when people have stepped up or have reached some kind of growth milestone and doing that for the entire team fosters a culture of celebrating each other's wins and supporting one another and mitigates the risk of unhealthy internal competition.

It's recommended to have a conversation with the person you want to praise first and make sure that they're comfortable with being praised publicly. Some people actually don't really want that spotlight. They feel kind of uncomfortable with it, and it can create some awkwardness. So it's good to ask someone: Hey, you crushed it. Want to tell the team about it? Are you good with that? Can we do that? And more often than not, the answer is yes, but there are some people who are like, you know what? I prefer to just keep doing my job.

It also depends on how the celebration is happening. Are you putting them in front of 30 people in real life or are you dropping a little note in a messaging app?

3. Fair Compensation: Can I Make a Living?

We’re not going to spend a ton of time on this one. Episode 29 of our Designing Tomorrow podcast digs deep into this. Pay structures just need to be looked at and there needs to be assurance that people are being paid adequately and competitively. That's an important piece of this whole puzzle.

4. Nurturing Passion: Let’s Make a Plan

In the social impact space, there's a good chance that your employees are passionate about the work overall — or they should be. But here's a crazy idea that hasn't been tried before.

We often talk about performance improvement plans or growth plans or professional development plans. Is there a version of this called a passion plan?

Can we develop little journeys, little pathways for people on teams to explore and energize their passion for this work? And what does that look like? Everybody's source of passion comes from different places. There are some people on teams who really love the theory of science communication. There are some people who really love the policy side. There's some people who really love the youth education side. Having conversations like: want to help you deepen your passion and your love for this. How can we do that together?

The other thing to reflect on is there's the assumption that by default, if you're going to work in a social impact organization, that (of course) it's going to be something you're passionate about. That's probably true, but it's probably worth examining that a little bit more closely.

Even reflecting on journeys running Cosmic — there's real passion about design, real passion about social impact and the intersection of design and social impact.  But there isn't always passion for the work. That's because passion requires energy, right? It's not just a static thing that you either have or you don't need to be able to nurture and sustain that passion and to feed it.

If day-to-day work isn't sustainable or isn't supporting that passion, then the passion can die out over time. This is a common thing that actually happens with creative professionals where you get in and maybe even this Venn diagram can potentially lead people astray — where there's love, there's a passion for a cause or a passion for creativity in one way. And the thought is: I want to make a living doing this. Care so much about it, and if this could be done for a living, life would be perfect.

And that's just not necessarily true. It's not true by default, at least. It is possible, but it requires more than just being able to make a living doing something you're passionate about. 

Think about being a professional musician. There are people with deep music backgrounds who had paths to becoming professional musicians at a young age, and for a variety of reasons chose not to do that. They don't do anything professional with music today. But because of that, it gets to just be a passion project. And as soon as you have to make a living doing it, the question becomes: Can it still be something you're as passionate about? Because by necessity, you need to also treat it like a business.

There are days where a leader may think: God, I believe in this and this is important and I want to make this excellent, but I cannot submit another expense report for the life of me — or whatever the task is.

That's heavy and that's hard, and all the more reason to have that conversation with people on the team about their passion. Where their energy comes from.

It just ties more deeply into motivation. It’s a privilege to work with some of the most amazing people in the world. And there are still times of burnout, and it's not really because the passion doesn't exist, but it's because there isn't the support structure or the right ingredients in daily, weekly life to be able to support and feed that passion personally. And that's personal work.

But it's an important thing that passion can't be assumed as being fixed, even in the social impact space where there's such a clear case to be made about being passionate about this work.

5. Can I Nurture Other Parts of Myself?

But this brings us to actually what we brought up earlier — the fifth piece to add to that Ikigai Venn diagram, which is: can other parts of life be nurtured while doing this work? 

We don’t want to preach here. Because this is different for different people. But we are physical beings and our modern culture does not support healthy habits around movement and exercise, especially if working remotely, especially if not getting natural movement day-to-day. There's more than one way to do this. This does not mean you must go to the gym or do CrossFit or bike or whatever. But we can share that if there isn't consistent exercise in life, passion meters plummet very quickly.

We have lots of friends who can go weeks, months, even without exercising and be totally happy and normal and motivated. But whatever that balance is — whether it's exercise or music or community or friendship — having that outlet, that connection, that balancing act against whatever is stressful in life is honestly the biggest superpower to maintain passion.

And as leaders, the example needs to be set for what that looks like. We have to be living that. Teams can't be expected to just grind, grind, grind, and be expected to nurture these other parts of their lives. There's an example that has to be set.

And again, this isn't just about exercise. The lesson or the reflection being shared is that there's been mindfulness about creating that space and not hiding it. Being very open about it. It's on the calendar publicly. That’s an assurance that the rest of the team has enough flexibility that they can do that too.

To bring this back to impact and organizational success. In our experience, a balanced, motivated team that's coming to work, charged up and ready to go and not burnt out is going to produce better outcomes for impact.

In conclusion: 

1. Does the world need this work?
2. Am I passionate about it?
3. Am I good at it? 
4. Can I make a living doing it? 
5. Can I nurture other parts of myself while doing all this work? 

Those are the five things, and as a leader, you need to be talking about those things with people on your team.

One More Critical Thing: Individual Motivation

There’s something we’ve thought about a lot in past years. Early on when it didn't feel like teams were as motivated as desired in certain cases, a lot of time was spent thinking very deeply about why they aren't motivated in the same way as leadership.

The big “Aha” is that there is no formula for motivation that is the same for everyone. This framework is a really good starting point, but what we learned is that there needs to be curiosity as a leader and inquisitiveness as a leader around what motivates each individual on the team, because it's very different for different people.

Over the years we discovered: this team member really gets motivated by public recognition of growth. This team member really gets motivated by having heads downtime to do their work and feeling accomplished in that way. And it's really different for everyone. But if you pay attention long enough, patterns start to emerge and real understanding develops of what motivates people individually.

Leading by Example

It is so important that leaders stay motivated and passionate. As a leader, the precedent and culture is set for the organization — and not in a top down hierarchical way, but people consciously or subconsciously look to leadership to figure out how to act and react in any given situation. What's okay, what's not okay in this organization?

Don't just assume teams should be motivated or will be motivated just because the work matters. Because that's just not what we’ve seen. It's just not how it works.

Our hope is that social impact leaders are taking the questions we posed seriously. These principles matter in this work.