Lead Better - What Leaders Do That Demotivates Talented Team Members

0:00All right, time for lead better and I'm very happy to be here with Emily Blackburn today. Emily, how are you? I'm good. Scott, how are you? Thanks for having me. Good. Yeah. Mikey, it might join us. He was here a minute or two ago and then there were some technical difficulties or I don't know. He suddenly disappeared. I didn't want to accuse Emily of being part of some plot. Yeah. You know, it hasn't been ruled out. I suggested you to stand to mimeing or some lead better. Yes. But nobody bit of my idea. Yeah. Emily and I could hear each other but Mikey could not hear us and so he's trying to solve that problem. Now, in the meantime, our field note for today is about motivation or more specifically it's about demotivation. What leaders do that demotivates talented team members and you would say, well, talented team members, they're self-driven, they know where they're going, like they can deal

1:02with all of the riffraff and everything else and they just keep going. But you know, we see this all the time with professional sports, you can get some really world class performer and then the coach just pisses them off and then they just kind of start slacking off. Yeah. Now, I'm sure you've never, this has never happened to you though, right, Emily? Yeah. You've always been fully motivated. Can't relate, Scott. Yeah. So there's some cool stuff to chew through in this field note about what actually does demotivate, but what jumped out at you? How did this one land for you? You know, I think for me, Scott, it was just the insight that motivators are so bespoke to the individual. But when you step back and look at that list of demotivators, if you will, they're kind of universal, they only hit it people, right, right in the heart and it would be hard press to find someone that wasn't impacted in some way or in other, by some of those.

2:04There are certainly some that stood out to me more personally as being largely impactful demotivators. But I think on the whole, they're watchouts for everybody. I think if you're a factor, you should cast a wide net in terms of what you're trying to avoid to get around demotivating your team and make sure that you're motivating them. Yeah. And I think that's part of this, which is before you even think, how can I help everybody get to the next level? Just make sure you're not wiping out their motivation out of the gate. Now, I'll go through the quick list of a few of the things. And a lot of these people will be like, yeah, I kind of know that. But there are some sort of things that you go, like, maybe I haven't really pondered that enough. But I want to set up something because you hit something where you said motivation is very like what motivates this person might be very different than what motivates this person. And it's kind of personal. But yet demotivation seems to apply across the board. Now, my caveat here is in admired leadership, we generally try to emphasize the universals

3:04right that even if motivation is personal, even when we're coaching leaders, how to motivate and inspire people, we're looking for the universals that apply. And so there are things that apply, but it really is true here on the demotivators. You're not going to really go around and be like, I'm going to demotivate you this way. I'm going to crush your spirit this way. So the ones that we think about in terms of, you know, okay, I've got to give you some low impact tasks, suddenly you're just bombarded with busy work. We have put you on a new project, but I can't even articulate what the purpose is. So you're thinking, like, maybe there is no purpose. And so if there's also just regular, you know, I'm not developing your skills. I'm not giving you challenges. All of these fit to this thing that pop performers hate when things slow them down. And yet it seems like so many leaders want to kind of ride the brakes in a way. Is that a good metaphor?

4:05Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that goes to the point about lack of autonomy, Scott, when you have a strong leader, there is this natural tendency to want to get in the weeds, right? Because that's what you get once upon a time. But I think it's very important as a leader to take a step back and ask yourself, okay, I selfishly want to get in the weeds here, but what is that doing to my team and doing that? I'm telling them that I don't trust them. I'm telling them that I think I could do it better myself. And what are the same? Yeah, right. Very much so. Now, I didn't mean to stop you. I was just being like, yes, yeah. No, yeah. I mean, that was my thought. I think that's the second order of consequences that your team and in your selfishness. Yeah. Lovely. Yeah. Now, middle way on this field note comes to this sort of fulcrum that the thing that really gals people, like where they really get exasperated, is when the leadership can't decide, right?

5:06That there's either this, well, we're going to just have more meetings about this. We got to talk this through a little more. We're going to reverse a decision so that this is the fast track to motivation when they just see a lack of clarity and decision making. And that would seem to be something that the leader can kind of take to heart and own, right? Yeah. Oh, absolutely. But I also think there's a little bit of onus on the folks that are being led to make sure that you're showing up as an advisor and you're providing a point of view about where we think they should go when they should go there and limiting those barriers to having your leader make those decisions, right? It's a little bit of a give and take. So for those that are listening on the leader side of things, definitely take a step back and ask yourself, where am I hindering the team's workflow? But if you're on the, if you're on the receiving end of some of this demotivation, ask yourself, what can I be doing to add value and make my leader see that I'm thinking about this strategically? Well, in reality, I'm just trying to keep the trains moving on time.

6:10Yeah. You know, one, one thing that Mike and I talked about the other day that kind of paralleled some of the themes in this field note is, and it was about leaders kind of being decisive. Like let's just get things going here. But we also talked about the fact that in admired leadership in general, what we understand is that some of the very best leaders live with ambiguity for a long time, that they will either make very fast decisions or they'll make really late decisions later than people would be comfortable with. And I think, and you tell me if this sounds right, which is, you could read this field and say, okay, as a leader, I just need to be making, being very, make decisions and be clear all the time. Great. Clear is the part here because sometimes you're not going to make the decision. Your high performers will be a little antsy, but that's because you didn't explain it. You didn't say, hmm, here's where we are, right? And when, because, and our rule is that if you understand the idea that when you look back at bad decisions, they tend to be from things you didn't know yet, right?

7:16Like we decided to build a restaurant on this corner, but we didn't realize they were going to change the off ramps to the highway. And after we bought the place and built the building, then the council, you know, put in the new thing like, oh, we should have been paying attention to what zoning permits and whatever else was going on. And so you say, you can make some really drastic decisions, particularly you're spending big money building real things. And so you need to say this to your team. And I think then, do you think that will ease the concerns if you're not ready to make the decision? Yes, and no, Scott, I think there's a watch out there. It's, it's a little bit of a balancing act that I see taking place between the importance of leaders being decisive, but also avoiding making knee-jerk decisions for the sake of making decisions, right? One of our other admired leader behaviors, which I'm going to watch the title, but it has to do with deferring to the expertise of others in the room, right? So if you're not ready to make a call, even if your team is waiting for it, look around and say who's expertise can I lean into here to make sure that the decision that we make is a right one and a well informed one.

8:18And I'm not just checking the boxes and potentially waiting the team down the wrong track. Well, you, and you actually kind of tee up the next sort of phase of where the field note goes, which is also very rich around, well, who's the expert, right? Who's the person that really knows and does the leader trust that person? And before we get to that specific part, there's this issue that gets there, which is this. If you have top talent and the leader is reaching out to them and, and they're getting input, they're being, they're pretending to include them, but they're not actually listening. Then your top performers will check out. And that to me, I like, I've seen that over and over again in, in my career, where just that different places, the leader will be like, well, yeah, and what do you think about that? And you just know you're, you're not going to do anything with this. And that you like, you might as well tell me to just go look for another job. Absolutely. And it doesn't mean Scott that you always have to take people's advice when you ask it,

9:19but you at least need to acknowledge it in a meaningful way and consider it. And if that's not the decision that you make, close the loop with them and let them know why it didn't work, right? Let them know that you pondered the input that they provided. And it influenced your decision one way or another. It may just not have been where you ended up. I think that's the critical step that a lot of leaders miss out on. They ask for the input and they consider that the admired leader behavior. But I think there's a secondary step that often gets missed and that's what's doing a lot of the demotivating without realizing it. Yeah. Well, and the in the themes that develop out of that in the field know, we come to these issues of autonomy. People like to have autonomy. They don't want the leader kind of getting in there and controlling. But really one of the things that becomes so potent is when you're on a team and you've got some people that are really high performers and you have some people that are, you know, maybe not so high. And when the team is having to compensate for the low performers, that coddling of the

10:24low performers not only will drive them crazy, but I like the way the field notes says it. They seldom recover from this unfair practice. Absolutely. Now, you've worked in a lot of organizations. You've seen a lot of things. Does that ring true? Have you heard that complaint, you know, inside organizations? Absolutely. And I think we've all experienced it firsthand in class projects, circa four, three, three, four, three, not, right? Yes, exactly, right. A lot of us on the, on the CRA side of things would like to think that we were the overachiever in the group, right? That, that wanted to meet all the deadlines and create the beautiful poster board or whatever it is, right? But inevitably there's going to be someone else on the team that that falls behind. And I think when you're in a team setting, it's, it's often second nature to want to pick up the mantle on your own accord, right? To make sure that the job gets done. I think what is really damning is when the leader is the one that's asking you to do that. That says, hey, that's right. Yes, right. Right.

11:24We're doing their way. I need you to pull it for them. Yeah. That's saying that my hard work is valued in the same way that another team member's lack of hard work is. And that's what you can't recover from. That's saying I'm not absolutely here. Absolutely. And I need to go elsewhere. Yeah. And your example is actually, I think the, the good one that we can all understand because I have an 11 year old who occasionally will say, and by the way, they're all team projects. Now it seems like it's different from what, and they're like, yeah, I'm on a team of four. We're supposed to do a presentation. I was supposed to do the research. So I was supposed to do the slide deck. So I was supposed to build the example. And they didn't do the slide deck and I had to do it, you know, and then the teacher gave us all, you know, a B plus and they didn't realize that I had, you know, you hear that but it's worse. If you went to the teacher and you said, well, these two people are not doing anything and the teacher says, I need you to do that for them. And then you all get an A, right? You would just, you, that would just drive you and batty the next time that comes around to be like, I'm just going to sit here. Right.

12:25And when you put it, when you put it that way, Scott, it seems like such a no brainer. What teacher would ask their student to pull the weight of someone else on a cloud project where they're all being graded? So that, I would say, okay, aren't, aren't all individual contributors being graded with their performance reviews, with their annual objectives, right? Why aren't we holding people in the workplace to the same standard that, that has been ingrained in us from K 12 and now? Oh, yeah. Well, now look at the stakes here because as, and all of our field notes are great, this one seems to be kind of like straight down the middle in terms of clarity about things that we all kind of would see. But as we always say, about lead better, more wisdom per minute than any other 15 minute podcast on business you can listen to. But in this leadership lesson, every line of this field note hits another thing that you go, yeah, that's, that is very true because what happens if you do all the things we just talked about that would demotivate your top performers. And I don't think leaders always think about this, but when you demotivate a top performer,

13:29they not only just become less effective, they actually become a drag on the perfect performance and culture of the entire team. And it points out that it's not always so easy to spot that it, it's like it would take a while to be like, what's going on here? Like, why, so why do you think leaders would even miss it at that point? They would be like, they wouldn't, they wouldn't see the signs for a good while. It's, it's tricky because I think a lot of those type performers are intrinsically motivated to pull away and to support the team, right? In this age of quiet quitting and, and all of these other kind of buzzwords in the workplace, I think it's easy for top performers to take a step back and say, okay, I'm not being valued at my best. I'm probably not going to be valued if I'm working at an average rate or, or, or providing value at an average level. So why should I do anything at all, right? And I think it's easy for that to fall below the radar. I think another really important part of a leader's role in motivating is being tapped in

14:30to where their team sits in terms of how loud and they are, how motivated they feel. Are they engaged in team meetings? And just constantly checking yourself on a one-on-one basis with the folks on your team. So, so you don't let a problem escalate out of control. And then it does become too late and you can't recover. Yeah. Well, you know, you talked about quiet quitting and, you know, maybe if, if somebody who's regularly on a podcast, a live stream like this, and like right beforehand, if maybe they hadn't felt like they'd been appreciated enough or endorsed enough or praised enough, and then they literally quiet quit. They're like, I can't hear you. I'm just going to not be on this one. You know, I'm not saying that happened, you know, today when Mikey just disappeared right before we decided to go down this path, but it's something to think about, you know. You said it. Well, all right, I'm going to wrap with the last two lines and you can see if you have any thoughts here because the last two lines of the field note are really potent.

15:32Remember, leaders don't crush the spirit of team members overnight. They do it, one discouraging behavior at a time, and that's on the leader. It's on the leader, 100%. Thank you, Emily. I better myself. Thanks, Scott. See you.