- 12 May 2025 Author: Doug Wyton
The reason is that people eventually turn a deaf ear to all that motivational talk. Especially vulnerable are people who answer to a manager for their performance or lack thereof- they grow numb to all the managers’ efforts to ‘motivate them.’ Why is that?
Motivation Is Innate
It happens because your people are already motivated. Treating them like they are not motivated to be successful breeds resentment. Long ago, a scientist named Maslow showed us that all humans are born with three basic lifelong motivations:
- The drive to survive physically (Meaning to earn enough money to prosper)
- The drive to belong to a group (To feel valuable as part of a group at work)
- The inner drive to excel at meaningful work so they can feel ‘self-actualised.’ (To be a high achiever)
Here’s where things backfire. What happens when you give employees what they already possess? It demotivates them. They see all the incentives as insulting. That’s because offering rewards for production or threatening punishments for lack thereof gives your people the message that they are lazy.
They interpret incentives to a degree; they see them as derogatory and manipulative. And if you project to your people the message that they are lazy, that is precisely how they will act.
Then Why Do Managers Rely on Incentives?
After World War II, the prevalent management theory was that workers were lazy. Therefore, managers thought the only way to motivate people to work was to offer rewards for performance and threaten them with punishments for underachieving. That’s what managers believed, and that’s the message they sent to their people.
It’s no wonder that workers reacted to all those motivational perks by:
- Becoming withdrawn
- Growing distant from managers
- Acting unteachable and untrainable
Is that what you are experiencing in your dealership? To some degree, it happens everywhere people are paid on commission.
How to Increase Car Sales By Improving Team Cooperation
Would You Want Competition Among Siblings?
Look at it like this. Imagine a family with several children. To motivate the children to excel, the parents pitted them against each other. Only the ones who had achieved something very recently got praised. The others were treated as less valuable, in the hopes of goading them on to do better and to win recognition, at the other sibling’s expense.
What do you think would happen over time? The children would withdraw from their parents, grow distant from them and each other, and lose interest in helping each other. That sounds like the typical problems we experience at work.
Cooperation, Support, and Synergy
When employees are continually compared and ranked from best to worst, their willingness to support one another diminishes. This leads to overall underperformance, as the majority feel like underachievers despite the efforts of a few high performers.
Consequently, they act accordingly, resulting in underachievement. The synergy that could have been achieved through mutual support is lost, and teamwork fades away.
If Not Incentives, Then What Is the Solution?
Leadership. People crave it. They naturally want to be led, trained, and better than they were before. That’s what Maslow’s work tells us. The more great leadership you can implement, the less you can rely on incentives to motivate people.
Look at The Japanese Example in Business
Before World War II, the Japanese culture was highly competitive. Almost everybody was paid on piece work and by incentives.
After the war, a management scientist convinced them to institute a spirit of cooperation and reduce competition among workers. His ideas took hold over time, and we all know how successful that nation became in the global markets.
If you want to learn the details and read ‘how to’ advice on what that scientist taught them about leadership, look for books written by W. Edwards Deming. You might become the great leader you know you are.
