What Science Reveals As The Key To Promoting Long-Term Employee Motivation

Have you ever thought about how how you’re communicating progress in your organization? In this latest edition of my Leadership Espresso Shot series for my leadership podcast, I share findings from a fascinating study that show this can have a powerful impact on sustaining motivation over the long term.

With the start of a new year, there’s naturally a lot of focus on setting goals, developing plans, and executing strategies that will help your organization to succeed over the next 12 months.

Now most of us are familiar with that reality of how when we take on learning something new, or making a change to our lifestyle like eating better or exercising more, at the start we tend to do very well at keeping up with this new effort.

Unfortunately, there comes a moment where that early motivation we had to commit to this change or to learning this new skill starts to wane and we find ourselves reverting back to the old and familiar.

Of course, this behavioural pendulum is not limited to changes we make in our personal lives as the same thing happens when the senior leadership proposes changes that we might at first be excited about and want to dedicate our best efforts to, but then over time, our interest deflates and progress slowly comes to a standstill. And if you encounter this pattern enough times in your workplace, it’s not surprising to find a lot of resistance to any change initiative surface as people have learned not to buy into it as it’ll inevitably end up in that pile of good intentions that amounted to little change.

So how do we stop or even avoid this cycle? Well, there’s a fascinating study that looks at what the relationship between progress and motivation and to find out what it says and what we can learn from it in terms of how we lead, just hit the play button below and listen to this latest episode of my podcast, “Leadership Biz Cafe”, and I’ll share all the details.