If you want a high-performing team, they need more than a paycheck.

Let’s be clear, very few, if any, of your employees will keep showing up if the paychecks stop, but creating an engaged, creative, and productive team goes far beyond tapping your checkbook every couple of weeks.

In 2009, Dan Pink dipped into the social sciences in his excellent book Drive to teach us what employees need from a job –

• Autonomy – the ability to control what they do, how they do it, when they do it, and who they do it with.
• Mastery – doing work that is not too hard, but not too easy.  Growing their skills with the knowledge that their abilities are not finite, but infinitely improvable. Realizing that mastering a task takes determination, effort, and on-going practice. And, knowing that no matter how hard they try, they will never fully master their craft – making it perpetually challenging.
• Purpose – the ability to attach meaning to their work that supersedes the enrichment of themselves or investors.

Great, actionable information in 2009 and great, actionable information 16 years later. In those 16 years, Covid and work from home have impacted Autonomy, AI and microlearning have impacted Mastery. Everybody and their dog have now hung a mission statement on the wall in their lobby, allegedly impacting Purpose. But something else has changed – me. I’ve had the privilege of sharing these ideas with dozens of clients and helping them implement employee development plans that were, at least, partially informed by these ideas. In my experience, here are three places where your team still might need more –

A Reason to Come to Work – The Old Testament book of Daniel tells the story of young, brilliant Jewish men who were taken captive by an enemy empire – the Babylonians. These young men were given jobs in the Babylonian government. This book contains stories that are most likely known even to people who aren’t religious – Daniel in the lion’s den, the three Hebrews in the fiery furnace, and the handwriting on the wall. So, what does this have to do with a post on bosses and employees? The book of Daniel can be read in 30 minutes, but the events chronicled in the book take place over the span of 70 years. In the midst of those epic Bible stories, there were lots of daily days – get up, go to work at your government job, go home, and do it again the next day. That’s the experience of your employees. Most days are “daily days”. There are no life-altering, memorable experiences that have been recorded and read by hundreds of millions over the course of thousands of years. The charge for you as the boss is to attach meaning to the daily days. Clearly articulate the vision – how will your organization make the world better. Clearly define the mission – what primary activity will you do to fulfill the vision. And most importantly, how do you attach the job of each individual employee to that mission in a way that they can embrace on those daily days.  

Direction – This Chinese proverb hung on my wall for a long time, “If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.” Every organization has multiple disciplines that could use some shoring up. The thing is, if you choose 5 things to improve at the same time, you won’t. Your focus will be divided. Organizations that successfully transform pick one to two things to focus on at a time. Employees, in the course of their daily work, need to be able to say, “While I’m doing my accounting job, or IT job, or sales job, I know that our focus for this quarter is to shore up quality on the manufacturing floor. So while I’m doing my accounting, IT, or sales job, I’m going to do, in my world, whatever I can until we get the defect rate to .2 percent on the manufacturing floor.”

Development – Employees are starving for feedback that goes beyond an analysis of their productivity. Certainly every commissioned salesperson wants to know how to sell more widgets, every person on the factory floor wants to know how to improve quality and throughput, and every developer wants to know how to write bug-fee code, but the employee development that fuels rapid company growth looks different. How can you align the organization’s five-year talent needs with the career aspirations of the employee? What skills will employees need to future-proof their jobs? Is their job low-hanging fruit for the next round of automation? If so, how can they re-skill to continue to bring value? Using their job skills and industry knowledge, do they have the ability to “see around corners” in ways that others in the organization do not? Have you tapped that knowledge? If they are a gifted at their craft (software development, accounting, statistics) but have no interest in managing, have you identified a career path that allows them to stay in the trenches but recognizes their deep expertise? Have you leveraged their unique expertise as part of a multi-discipline team to solve hard problems? In short, create a development framework with a future focus.

If you want a bit more direction about what your team needs from you, practice some MBWA (management by walking around) and ask good questions –

• I’ve been thinking a lot about what our industry will look like in 3 years. What do you think it will look like?
• If that’s what the industry will look like, what will our company look like?
• If that’s the case, what will my job look like?
• What should I be doing to prepare for those changes?
• What will your job look like?
• What skills will you need to do that job?
• What tools will you need to do that job?
• Does that look like a job that will continue to be interesting to you or can you see yourself doing something else?
• If that’s the case, what would the preparation for that job look like?

It’s doubtful you’ll get through that list in a single setting, but you get the idea.

There aren’t very many activities that you can engage in that are more beneficial to the long-term health of your organization than building your team. Introducing these three ideas into that discipline will supercharge your efforts.