Inside-Outside: Leadership and Motivation

Building on the last post entitled “My Take on Motivation and Why It Can’t Be Created” (you can read it here to catch up) I want to share my take on how we show up to work. I ended with a promise of pulling together a piece on “individuals, looking inward and at their leaders, because perspective matters.”

The way we show up at work, (and in personal relationships too) is only a miniscule part of the whole of who we are; importantly though - that tiny slice of ‘who we are’ becomes the whole of what people see. Even when we look in the mirror at ourselves, we can’t see clearly how we look from the outside, because our vision is clouded by all that we know, or suspect, about ourselves. Engaging with others constantly provides us with hints, and we get more hints by taking online temperament, or personality, or tests that give us ‘our’ letters/colours/career, or ‘how we are as a partner in life’; but no matter how many perspectives on ourselves we collect, we can cobble together only an approximation of how we show up in the world. The self is therefore highly subjective, and exists simultaneously as both known and unknown.

Even if we are working with, or living with that ‘unicorn-of-a-person’ who sees us clearly, or realistically— in a way that we enjoy (i.e. ‘she’s the one to go see if you need _____’ or ‘you’re the best at _______’, or ‘I love how you ____’), we each know ourselves from the inside out. Though we might think each of us knows the ‘real’ version of ourselves, do we? I say we don’t have a lock on how we ‘really are’ because we are multi-faceted beings, in multiple roles, on different days, raised by and with people who have their own ideas about us, interacting with people who only see what they are capable of seeing, etc… So how then, is there anything solid about how a person is or how they operate? Literature calls that “character traits”, but we might also call it tendencies, and to complicate it further before breaking in down more simply, we are growing, learning, changeable humans, so even our tendencies and character traits are subject to change.

This knowledge of self, others’ ideas about who we are, and how we look at others is relevant in our working lives; how we lead and allow ourselves to be lead will be more muddy and then more clear, once we sort out in(evitable) biases, and to what we attribute our own and others’ behaviors. Multitudes of studies in social psychology show - regardless of the outcome - we tend to view our own intentions as positive, yet assess the intentions of others as more negative than ours. For example, individuals tend to attribute poor outcomes to circumstances or other people, instead of resulting from personal characteristics or poor choices. (Click here for more discussion and examples of this.) Once we know that we do this, the immediate next step is realizing others are doing it too. Oh the implications of these biases at work! Keeping this in mind and considering how these biases influence our choices can really impact how we interact with both others and ourselves at work.

And about now, it might seem tempting to think this is something ‘other people do’… The research says everyone does this, and the studies say that even with awareness, individuals tend to think they’re better than ‘others’ at this. They aren’t, but they think they are, according to Pronin’s 2002 study entitled “The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others”. This gem of a paper means there is significant room for growth in how we hold ourselves and others accountable as it directly studies how we think about our own thinking. Connecting these ideas back to the last piece on motivation; we tend to think that our own motivations are better than those of others too. Judging the motivations of others is a game best left alone- as said before, recognizing and acknowledging that lasting and renewing motivations are intrinsic will take us further at work and at home. An all-time favourite quotation from the movie The Incredibles comes from the boy desperate to be allowed to do his best: “If everyone is special no one is.” We’re all differently unique, special, individuals, which means no one is immune to these biases. Wrestling with these notions can however, make having this awareness part of what makes you a better leader, partner, or team member.

The (dis)advantage of our abilities to grow, change, and alter how we interact with ourselves and others means that simultaneously, we are varying degrees of both constant and malleable. This paradox of steadiness/variation matters because what we offer to the world depends on the complex interaction of how we see and value ourselves, along with how we perceive others seeing us, or not seeing us, and valuing, or not valuing us. Where and for what we are responsible, holds varying levels of challenge, because it roots in our view of ourselves. Even the healthiest, most robust, confident person can be rattled, or, suffer in life because of what others do to them, and around them. Likewise, an almost opposite can be true, the most dispirited people can grow and ‘bloom where they’re planted’ based on how they are treated. It’s that mix that makes looking at leadership so fascinating.

Though leadership is a huge topic, put simply, it is all about how leaders get people working together. It answers questions and sets standards about how we treat people, how we communicate, what makes up the corporate ethos, and what we’re trying to accomplish. Leadership impacts motivation greatly and can easily sap the productive energy of intrinsically motivated folks, if work isn’t that fertile ground for people to bloom. In other words, minimally successful leadership can be thought of as allowing people to survive, whereas highly successful leadership will allow people to thrive. I’m deliberately leaving out leadership failures, because those are obvious and readily visible in high turn-over, poor performance, myopic goal setting, or just plainly poor goal setting, punitive environments, negative ‘vibes’ in the workplace, etc… and I think we just know it when we see it.

Centering on the idea of the interplay between looking from within, seeing others and being seen ourselves, allows us to examine both responsibilities of leaders, and responsibilities of self. While it might be tempting to align external motivation with leadership, and intrinsic motivation with self – let’s not! Extrinsic motivation takes up inordinate amounts of resource, including focus, for very short-lived and often counter productive effect.

What I’m working on next: the ‘why’ and ‘how’ people become great teammates, colleagues, and co-workers.

Sources 

Pronin, E., Lin, D. Y., & Ross, L. (2002). The Bias Blind Spot: Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(3), 369–381. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167202286008

Why do we blame external factors for our own mistakes? at https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/self-serving-bias/#:~:text=What%20is%20Self%2Dserving%20Bias,fascinated%20researchers%20globally%20for%20decades.