Communicating Motivation

Article by Valentina Gentileschi – “Communicating Motivation” – JULY 2017_ LEADERSHIP & MANAGEMENT

“If you want to build a ship, don’t gather your men together to give them orders, to explain every detail, to show them where to find everything. If you want to build a ship, make your men’s hearts yearn for the sea”.

There is a lot of wisdom and also strategic thinking in these words of Saint-Exupéry, an excellent starting point to begin thinking about what motivation means to us and how we can communicate it effectively.

What do they represent?

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We usually think of motivations as the ‘petrol’ of our actions, what gives us the drive, but they represent so much more. Our motivations represent our desires, our values, our parameters of judgement, the lenses through which we view the world. The choices we make in life. Why leave a prestigious and perhaps well-paid job for a place that does not have these characteristics? Why might what makes sense and is important to us seem superfluous or of little value to someone else? Why do we experience some situations as conflicting when other people value those same situations quite differently? The answer is that things that may seem absurd in the eyes of others find precise meaning when viewed through the lens of our motivations.

Our motivations are formed as we grow up, influenced by the upbringing we received, the environment we grew up in, the school we attended and the friendships we made. Strong experiences, capable of leaving a mark destined to be consolidated: ‘motivational levers’ that will accompany us for the rest of our lives, a sort of ‘trademark’ characteristic of each person. Qualities that we will try to pass on to our children, in the knowledge that they will be able to imprint their lives in the right direction. Values that we will look for in the people with whom we will form strong relationships. But they will also be the source of conflicts when faced with people who will be unwilling to recognise these values or who will even trample them underfoot. Reflections that help us broaden our view of motivations, entities not easily negotiable, a condensation of our deepest desires, our expectations, sometimes our fears.

The Spranger Model

According to Eduard Spranger, there are six motivational levers: theoretical, utilitarian, individualistic, aesthetic, social, traditional. Theoretical motivation expresses the desire to increase one’s knowledge and the fear of passing oneself off as incompetent. Utilitarian motivation, the desire to gain concrete benefits and the fear of wasting resources. Individualistic motivation seeks leadership, visibility, prestige and fears anonymity, being one of many. Aesthetic motivation embodies the need for harmony in relationships and in life situations, shuns conflict and tense situations. Social motivation embodies the desire to be of help to others and the fear of coming across as selfish and indifferent. And finally, traditional motivation, which expresses the desire for consistency and the fear of not being in the right line of values.

How we can use this awareness

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Philip K. Dick, the famous science fiction novelist who inspired the cult film Blade Runner, argued that: “reality is only a point of view, and the most powerful tool to manipulate it is the control of words”. Many studies on strategic communication have investigated this aspect and Spranger’s model, applied to communication, can also help us here. Touching the right motivational lever is one of the simplest and, at the same time, most powerful ways to get in tune with our interlocutor’s ‘world view’. If you want to convince your interlocutor of the goodness of a project, a proposal or your own thinking, or vice versa of the risk or disadvantages of a certain situation, you have to appeal to his motivational levers.

In order for critical feedback to trigger a process of change and growth in one of our employees, it must go to his or her motivational levers, otherwise it will be perceived as a ‘complaint’ from the boss and therefore of little importance.

Each of us is primarily driven by some specific motivational levers. When communicating to an audience of people in order to be effective and get the message across to all interlocutors we must try to use a fairly broad spectrum of motivational levers, in this way we increase the chances that at least one of the levers important to my interlocutors will be touched.

The biggest mistake

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Our motivational levers, as we have seen, are intimately linked to our strongest values, we are so used to taking it for granted that what motivates us must also motivate others, and this not only does not work but risks leading us to make glaring mistakes.

To motivate your employee to whom you are entrusting a new project, what do you decide to communicate: that this project will give him visibility; that it will create innovation and harmony; that it will bring tangible gain; that it will help the rest of the team; that it is the right completion for the growth path the company has designed for him; that it will make him learn new things and increase his skills? It may be that one of these motivations will seem particularly effective, the right one, the one capable of arousing a positive emotion, but are you sure that it will be the same for your employee?

Similarly, what elements do you highlight when presenting your company to a customer? Do you claim to be a market leader? If he has the individualistic motivation this might appeal to him, but if this characteristic in our interlocutor is very low our message might even be annoying. It would be more effective in this case to say that our company has been on the market for a long time, that it has a wide range of products, that it is socially committed, that it values partnership with its customer, etc.

The ability to be able to tap the right motivational lever is crucial to be able to open doors that might inevitably remain closed. In private life, we associate with people with whom we share motivations and values. Within an organisation we are often called upon to collaborate with people we would never have chosen, so we will not be able to like a colleague with whom we do not have motivational levers in common. The only thing we can do is to recognise and respect the motivational levers of our interlocutors even if they differ from our own.

How do we recognise the motivations of others?

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A famous phrase by Ludwig Wittgenstein helps us to understand how we can act effectively in this direction: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world”. We build our vocabulary around our values, the words we use and that often return, like a leitmotif, in our speeches, represent a precious clue to understanding the “world view” of the person in front of us, the values, desires and levers that move their motivation. The key competence to be developed is therefore listening. The starting mindset is decisive in this respect: in order to develop this important competence, we must be able to trace the frame of reference of our interlocutor and not take it for granted that it coincides with our own. Listening in order to fully understand the real needs, the implicit and unstated premises.

When someone tells us that professional growth is important to him, what does he mean? Is he talking about economic growth? Of role? Of competence? Of responsibility?

For each of us the word ‘growth’ has an obvious meaning, it indicates a precise direction, it is therefore essential to be able to understand what the idea of growth represents in our interlocutor’s world view.

The most useful tool for discovering our interlocutor’s levers are obviously questions, and in particular open-ended questions directed at the future: what do you expect? How do you see yourself in a year’s time? What needs to happen to be able to say I made the right choice? Questions, however, are only a tool, they cannot be the starting point.

The starting point is an exploratory attitude, a curious mind interested in understanding the world through the lens of one’s interlocutor. Something like this must have been on Marcel Proust’s mind when he wrote: “The true voyage of discovery does not consist in seeking new lands, but in having new eyes.