A leader may give people a compelling reason to act, then spend the next month making action difficult. What happens after the speech tells employees far more about the organisation than the speech itself.
Andy Demir | Qalbur Perspective | People & Culture | 14 minute read
Executive Summary
Motivation is often discussed as something a gifted leader inspires in others. In practice, employees learn what is possible and worthwhile from priorities, decisions, feedback, rewards and the authority they are allowed to exercise. Steve Chandler and Scott Richardson's 100 Ways to Motivate Others is a useful framework for examining daily conditions, although the book's emphasis on the individual manager cannot account for every obstacle to good work. Senior leaders need to test what their organisation rewards under pressure, where capable people are waiting for permission and which constraints lie beyond a manager's control.
In This Article
- What leaders signal when the quarter gets difficult
- Goals require a usable interpretation
- Optimism without denial
- Potential requires judgement and opportunity
- The conversations that carry the strategy
- The manager's own conduct
- Time tells people what matters
- What motivation cannot repair
- What senior leaders should examine
- Questions for the Boardroom
- The work after the speech
- References
There is a familiar scene in large organisations. A leader explains a difficult new priority at an all-hands meeting, acknowledges the challenges and gives people a reason to believe the team can deliver. The room responds well. Then the normal week resumes: a decision sits in an approval queue, a manager is rewarded for speed after quietly compromising quality, and an employee learns that raising a delivery concern has made them the owner of a problem they cannot solve. The meeting may have been sincere. The working conditions have offered a different account of what the organisation wants.
The usual response is to ask how leaders can become more inspiring. Some can certainly become clearer and more persuasive. But the promise made at a meeting has to survive budget decisions, forecast reviews, customer escalations and the small choices that fill a manager's calendar. If it does not, a better speech will only make the distance between the message and the experience more apparent.
Steve Chandler and Scott Richardson approach motivation by focusing on the actions managers take repeatedly in 100 Ways to Motivate Others. The book has the confidence and occasional excess of its genre, and its hundred short chapters are more useful as provocations than as a single theory of organisations. Yet its concern with attention, feedback, self-discipline and the example a manager sets points towards an important executive issue: people adjust their effort and judgement to the system in which they work. A leader helps to create that system, often without realising how plainly others can read it.
What leaders signal when the quarter gets difficult
Leadership begins with behaviour, not instruction. When a leader tells a team to prioritise quality and then consistently rewards speed, the team notices the reward. The contradiction may remain hidden in formal reporting for a while. It becomes visible when someone has to decide whether to delay a shipment, revise a forecast or tell a customer that a proposed solution is not ready.
Employees do not read every inconsistency as dishonesty. Senior managers also face genuine trade-offs. A delayed delivery can damage a customer's operations; a missed quarter can reduce the resources available for the next one. What employees need is a credible account of the decision. If an exception is necessary, the leader can state what is being accepted, who bears the risk, and why the usual standard still matters. Silence invites the team to infer a permanent change from a single pressured decision.
This is where an executive's influence extends beyond personal example. Promotion criteria, management reviews and budget allocations give a repeated signal about what receives protection. A leader may personally value careful work yet oversee a system that celebrates only closed deals or reported milestones. People soon understand which contribution is visible to those who decide their future. It is reasonable for them to devote more attention to it.
Chandler and Richardson are right to insist that managers examine their own conduct. Their argument becomes stronger when extended up the organisation. A manager who protects a quality concern while a senior committee penalises every delay cannot repair the contradiction alone. The people who set the measures and approve the exceptions are part of the motivational environment too.
Goals require a usable interpretation
Most organisations have no shortage of goals. The harder work is translating a goal into decisions that a capable person can make on an ordinary Tuesday. A regional sales manager can be told to increase revenue while facing an uncertain margin threshold, limited technical support and two senior executives with different views on which accounts deserve attention. The target is clear enough to enter into a dashboard. It is much less clear as a guide to action.
Leaders need to explain what success looks like before the final number arrives. Which opportunities should move first? What evidence would justify changing the plan? Where can the team decide without further approval, and when must it escalate? These are questions about judgement as much as communication. If two experienced colleagues would make opposite decisions because each has received a different account of the priority, repeating the target is unlikely to help.
Clarity also has to survive change. A leader may learn that an expected customer programme has slipped or that delivery capacity will be lower than forecast. People can work with a revised priority if they know what changed and which earlier work remains useful. When the target moves without explanation, hard work begins to feel like a series of wrong turns. The cost is measured partly in wasted time and partly in the confidence people lose in their own decisions.
The book warns against becoming absorbed by past failure. There is a worthwhile distinction here. A team should carefully examine a failed bid or a missed milestone, especially when someone else's money or trust is at stake. It should also leave that review with an altered decision, a clearer owner or a better test for the next attempt. Repeatedly revisiting an error without changing the conditions that produced it teaches people that reflection is another meeting to endure.
Optimism without denial
Chandler and Richardson place considerable weight on optimism. I would handle that advice with care. A team dealing with a lost customer, a strained budget or a programme that is slipping does not need an enthusiastic account that contradicts the evidence in front of it. Experienced people are usually more willing to face a difficult position than to act inside an account they know is false.
There is, however, a difference between naming a serious problem and allowing every meeting to be governed by helplessness. A leader can describe the problem accurately, identify what remains under the team's control and make the next decision intelligible. If a customer has changed its requirements, the team may need to revise its proposal, renegotiate the timing, or decide that the opportunity is no longer attractive. None of those choices requires the leader to promise a happy ending. Each gives people a way to apply their judgement.
The executive cost of unstructured anxiety is often missed. People begin preparing for the leader's reactions rather than the customer's needs. They delay decisions that might attract criticism or send work up for reassurance, even when they are capable of handling it. This is an interpretation of a common organisational pattern, not a universal psychological law. The point for a senior leader is practical: uncertainty will exist; the way authority responds to it determines how much useful thinking the team can still do.
Potential requires judgement and opportunity
The draft behind this essay makes an important distinction: potential is more than a compliment. An employee who repeatedly hears that they have leadership potential but receives no greater responsibility has learned something about the limits of that praise. Development becomes credible when an organisation gives the person a real problem to own, provides support appropriate to the risk, and offers feedback on the decisions made.
There are reasons leaders hesitate. A capable specialist may be essential to current delivery. Moving that person into a broader role creates a gap that the department cannot immediately fill. A manager may also worry that an experiment with greater authority will produce an expensive mistake. Those concerns should be acknowledged in the staffing and succession discussion, where they belong. Leaving the person in place indefinitely while describing them as the future is also a choice, with consequences for retention and the organisation's next generation of capability.
Challenge needs proportion. Holding someone accountable to a capability they once demonstrated can be fair when they have the authority, time and support to use it. It becomes unfair when leaders treat an isolated strong performance as evidence that someone can absorb any amount of additional work. The useful managerial question is what conditions allowed the person to perform well, and whether those conditions can be created again as the responsibility grows.
That question brings the discussion closer to the evidence on motivation. Research syntheses associate support for autonomy, competence and relatedness with more favourable motivation and work outcomes. The findings do not tell a manager which individual should be promoted next month, and much of the evidence is correlational. They do reinforce the value of making capability and decision space part of the environment rather than relying on praise alone.
The conversations that carry the strategy
A plan may be coherent at executive level and still arrive in a team as a collection of partial instructions. Each hand-off asks someone to interpret a decision for colleagues who were not in the original room. The quality of those conversations affects whether the strategy reaches the work in a recognisable form.
Feedback avoidance is one way the chain breaks. A manager sees a recurring problem, decides to wait for the next formal review and allows the person to continue without information they could have used. By the time the issue is raised, it may have affected a customer or a colleague and become harder to address without embarrassment. Candour delivered early can be less damaging than a long period of apparent approval followed by a severe judgement.
Listening can fail just as quietly. Leaders invite concerns and then respond to each with an explanation of why the existing plan must continue. Sometimes that response is correct; an organisation cannot change course whenever someone objects. But it can explain what was heard, why a suggestion will or will not alter the decision, and what evidence would prompt a review. Without that response, an invitation to speak becomes an exercise people eventually stop taking seriously.
The more difficult conversation runs upward. Managers may understand that two targets conflict and still feel unable to say so to the executive team. A senior leader who wants candid information should examine what happened the last time somebody brought unwelcome evidence to a review. If the answer is that the messenger inherited the problem and lost support, a training session on open communication will have little effect.
The manager's own conduct
Chandler and Richardson return to the manager's self-management for good reason. The leader who cannot distinguish urgency from importance passes that confusion on through interruptions, shifting priorities, and decisions made to relieve immediate discomfort. People then expend effort trying to anticipate the next shift. The organisation may call this agility, although much of the movement produces no improvement for the customer.
Self-management should not be mistaken for the requirement to appear permanently calm. A leader can say that a decision is difficult, that the available evidence is incomplete or that they were wrong about an earlier assumption. Such admissions can improve the quality of the team's information. What matters is whether the leader can remain responsible for the decision while allowing others to describe reality as they see it.
There is also a governance limit to personal development. An individual manager can become more reflective while still operating under conflicting incentives, inadequate staffing, or a senior team that changes direction without owning the cost. Coaching may help that manager recognise the pattern and raise it effectively. It cannot, by itself, change the budget or the authority structure. Treating every motivation problem as a matter of managerial temperament lets the organisation avoid examining its own design.
Time tells people what matters
Calendars offer a less flattering account of leadership priorities than most strategy documents. A leader may say that developing successors matters, then repeatedly cancel the conversations in which a successor could discuss judgement, mistakes and the next responsibility. Internal reporting remains protected because its deadlines are visible. Development slips because the cost of postponing it arrives later and is harder to attribute.
Attention inside a conversation matters as well. A manager who invites someone to discuss a difficult customer situation while processing messages has given that person a narrow opening to speak. The employee may offer the safest summary rather than the important detail that requires thought. This is one reason Chandler and Richardson's advice on focused attention has practical value: the information a leader receives depends partly on whether people believe the leader is available to receive it.
Protecting time has a commercial purpose beyond making people feel valued. A timely discussion can prevent a foreseeable delivery problem, help a capable colleague make the next decision independently or reveal that a customer's stated objection is masking a more serious concern. Senior leaders should ask whether their reporting routines create enough useful information to justify the conversations they displace. The answer will differ between organisations, but the question belongs on an executive agenda.
What motivation cannot repair
There is a strong objection to the leadership-system argument: it can place too much responsibility on managers for conditions they do not control. Unfair pay, a workload that cannot be completed responsibly, insecure employment or a senior promise that the organisation keeps breaking can overwhelm excellent local management. A person may understand the mission, respect their manager and still decide that further effort has become unreasonable.
That objection sharpens the argument. Leaders can improve how work is explained, delegated and discussed; they must also distinguish a manager's conduct from the structure around the manager. A board that asks for better engagement while approving incompatible cost, growth and service assumptions is itself shaping the conditions under review. An employee survey may register results at the team level, although its causes lie much higher up.
A 2018 meta-analysis found a strong positive association between perceived leader support for autonomy and autonomous work motivation across the studies it reviewed. A broader 2024 synthesis found support for autonomy, competence and relatedness associated with need satisfaction, wellbeing and performance, while also reporting variation across contexts. These results warrant attention, but they do not prove that any single leadership practice will overcome structural constraints. The research is most useful here as a challenge to simplistic accounts of inspiration and equally simplistic accounts of managerial control.
The trade-off is therefore more demanding than a choice between strict management and freedom. Some work requires close oversight, particularly when safety, compliance or an unfamiliar task is involved. Capable people also need sufficient authority to make consequential decisions without depending on the manager's comfort. The boundary should reflect the risk and the person's preparation, and it should change as they learn. An organisation that gets this wrong may enjoy short-term control while slowly weakening the judgement it will need later.
What senior leaders should examine
An executive review of motivation should begin with decisions, not with a request for another campaign. Take a recent case where quality, cost and speed conflicted. Which outcome did the organisation reward, and what did it ask the people involved to explain? Trace an important delay through the approvals it required. If several competent people waited for a decision that no one clearly owned, the problem has an organisational location.
The same method applies to talent and feedback. Examine a person described as having high potential and identify the last responsibility that actually expanded their judgement. Find out how long a known performance issue remained undiscussed and whether the employee had the means to correct it. Review management calendars against stated development priorities. These are imperfect indicators, but they lead to decisions the executive team can make: change an approval limit, resolve a conflict between measures, protect a development commitment or remove a reporting demand that no longer earns its cost.
None of this means leaders should stop explaining the purpose of the work. People need a reason to care, especially when the effort is difficult and the outcome uncertain. The explanation becomes more credible when it describes conditions that employees recognise. A speech may invite commitment; the ordinary operating system determines whether that commitment has somewhere sensible to go.
Questions for the Boardroom
- When quality, delivery speed and quarterly performance last conflicted, which decision did we reward, and what precedent did it set?
- Which decisions are our capable managers still escalating because our authority boundaries are unclear or unsafe to use?
- Where have we promised development to high-potential people while withholding the work, cover or authority that would let them grow?
- What do our reporting and meeting demands prevent managers from noticing or discussing with their teams?
- Which motivation problem recorded at team level can only be corrected through a senior decision about staffing, pay, priorities or governance?
The work after the speech
The most revealing moment comes after the all-hands meeting, when a manager has to choose which commitment to keep, and an employee has to decide whether speaking frankly will help. These moments rarely look dramatic from the executive floor. Over time they form the evidence people use to decide how much judgement and energy it is sensible to bring to work.
Chandler and Richardson give managers many ways to act more deliberately. The lasting value of their book, for a senior leader, may be the invitation to inspect ordinary conduct with the same seriousness normally reserved for the annual strategy. That inspection should extend from the manager's behaviour to the measures, authority and resources set above them. Motivation is influenced at every level where a promise about work meets a decision about how the work will actually be done.
References
- Chandler, Steve, and Scott Richardson. 100 Ways to Motivate Others: How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy. Third edition, Career Press, 2012.
- Slemp, Gavin R., et al. “Leader Autonomy Support in the Workplace: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Motivation and Emotion, 2018.
- Slemp, Gavin R., et al. “Interpersonal Supports for Basic Psychological Needs and Their Relations with Motivation, Well-Being, and Performance: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2024.
About the Author
Andy Demir is an international commercial and business leader with more than two decades of experience across complex B2B and industrial markets. Andy writes about executive leadership, strategy, organisational transformation, commercial performance, international business and the changing world of work, combining research with lessons drawn from operating across industries, markets and cultures.
