REALITY MANAGEMENT NEVER SEES

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It may surprise you, if you are a manager, to learn what power you hold.  Your behaviour as a manager dramatically shapes your employees’ inner work lives.  But the key levers in your hands for driving motivation and performance may not be the ones you’d suspect.

 

More Than Meets the Eye

 

Think about your own most recent day at the office.  What would hidden observers have been able to learn had they been watching you go through that day?  They might have read e-mails you composed, looked over the numbers you plugged into spreadsheets, reviewed the reports you prepared.  They would have noted your interactions, in formal meetings or hallway encounters, with colleagues, subordinates, and superiors and listened in on a presentation you delivered.  They would have heard your end of various telephone conversations, perhaps with customers, suppliers, or consultants.

 

As events unfolded, you were also forming and adjusting perceptions about the people you work with, the organisation you are part of, the work you do, and even yourself.  You were experiencing emotions, maybe mild states of satisfaction or irritation, maybe intense feelings of pride or frustration.  And these perceptions and emotions were intertwining to affect your work motivation from moment to moment, with consequences for your performance that day. 

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Inner Work Life

 

When something happens at work, some workday event, people’s minds start ‘sense-making’.  They try to figure out why the event happened and what its implications are.  It is the dynamic interplay between:

 

• Perceptions, ranging from immediate impressions to a more fully developed understanding about what is happening and what it means

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• Emotions, whether sharply defined reactions, such as elation over a particular success or anger over a particular obstacle, or more general feeling states, like good and bad moods

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• Motivation, your grasp of what needs to be done and your drive to do it at any given moment.

 

Inner work life is crucial to a person’s experience of the workday, and affects how people perform their work.  

 

• If people perceive the work, and their role, as having high value, their motivation will be high.  If they perceive a clear path forward, with little ambiguity about what will constitute progress, motivation levels rise.  

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• When people feel highly valued and certain about what needs to be accomplished, this motivates them into high performance.  When people are happy and excited about work, they will leap to the task and put great effort behind it.  

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• If they are sad or angry about their work, for example a manager is being obstructive, they care less about doing it well.  

 

Employees generally display their emotions and describe their perceptions only to each other or keep them entirely private.  Research suggests that most managers are not in tune with the inner work lives of their people; nor do they appreciate how pervasive the effects of inner work life, and their own actions, can be on performance.

 

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New Understanding

 

Every moment that they are performing their jobs, employees are ‘working under the influence’ of their inner work lives.  People perform better when their workday experiences include more positive emotions, stronger intrinsic motivation (passion for the work), and more favourable perceptions of their work, their team, their leaders, and their organisation. 

 

Far and away, the best boosts to inner work life were episodes in which people knew they had done good work and managers appropriately recognised that work.

 

Managers’ day-to-day (and moment-to-moment) behaviours matter not just because they directly facilitate or impede the work of the organisation.  They’re important because they affect people’s inner work lives, creating ripple effects on organisational performance.  When people are blocked from doing good work, for instance, they form negative impressions of the organisation, their co-workers, their managers, their work, and themselves; they feel frustrated and unhappy and they become demotivated in their work.  Performance suffers both in the short and longer run.

 

When managers facilitate progress, every aspect of people’s inner work lives are enhanced, which leads to even greater progress.  This positive spiral benefits the individual workers, and the entire organisation. 

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