Motivation is not a dial you can turn

You cannot install motivation in someone else. You can only build the conditions that make it likely.

Picture a manager describing a low performer. "He just doesn't have the drive." The language treats motivation like a character trait, baked into the person, low or high, fixed. Fix the person and you fix the output.

That diagnosis is almost always wrong, and it is expensive, because it points you toward an intervention that cannot work: reaching into someone's head and turning their motivation up. You cannot do that. Nobody can. What you can do is change the conditions around a person so that motivating themselves becomes more likely. That is a different skill, and one of the highest leverage things a technical leader controls.

If you believe motivation is a trait, you write performance improvement plans or give a rousing speech. If you believe it is a property of the environment, you look for the specific missing condition and fix that one thing. The second approach is testable. The first one only feels satisfying.

Three legs, not one dial

The best research on this did not come from management consultants selling a framework. It came from decades of psychology, funded in large part by organisations that want more output from the same number of people. The dominant model is self-determination theory, built by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan starting in the early 1970s. Daniel Pink popularised a version of it in Drive, under the labels purpose, autonomy, and mastery. The original academic terms are autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Same three factors, different packaging.

Treat them as legs of a stool. Two legs and you can balance, awkwardly. One leg and you are falling over. Almost every job is missing a leg somewhere, and the job of a leader is to notice which one and reinforce it, not to demand all three at full strength everywhere.

A team doing unglamorous maintenance work will often feel the purpose leg wobble. Compared to teams shipping the flagship feature, "keeping the lights on" doesn't feel like the most meaningful use of anyone's career. You will not talk that team into feeling otherwise with a slogan. What you can do is reinforce a different leg: give them more say over how the work gets done, and route interesting adjacent problems their way, a migration, a new platform, something that builds real depth for their career later. Two strong legs beat one wobble and two mediocre legs, every time.

Different people are sensitive to different legs. Learn this about your own team deliberately rather than assuming everyone is wired the same way. Some barely notice a loss of autonomy but visibly deflate the moment the work feels pointless. Others do not care much about purpose but will fight you the second they feel controlled. Watch what people respond well to, but also watch what they complain about. Both are signals of where their sensitivity lies.

The test that decides if something counts

There is a simple test, borrowed from research on play, that tells you whether an activity is likely to motivate anyone at all: can the person leave.

The historian Johan Huizinga made this the centre of his classic study of play, Homo Ludens. An activity stops being play the moment it becomes compulsory. The same physical motions performed voluntarily are play. Performed under compulsion, they are labour, or worse, an ordeal. This is not just a metaphor. Researchers who study rough and tumble play in animals note the same line: free to disengage, and the behaviour looks like play. Unable to leave, and the identical movements become fighting for survival.

This is a useful lens for goal setting, which is supposed to be one of the few places a company hands an individual contributor genuine discretion over their own time. In practice, most goal setting programs fail the voluntariness test in a specific, avoidable way. Goals get set once a year, cascaded down from a strategy deck, and formally approved through several layers of management. Then they sit there, binding on paper, quietly malleable in practice. You can change a goal in the weeks before your performance review and nobody stops you, because the process was never really about the goal, it was about generating the appearance of alignment. Meanwhile, missing a goal set under duress can cost someone a rating, even if their actual contribution that year was excellent. That is the worst of both worlds: all the friction of compulsion, none of the substance of real commitment.

The fix is not a better goal setting template. It is giving people something closer to real discretion, and the best evidence for the payoff is one of the most famous stories in corporate innovation. 3M gave researchers a policy of unstructured discretionary time. One of them spent years trying to get a weak, seemingly useless adhesive turned into a product. The company said no, repeatedly, for years. He kept using his discretionary time on it anyway and started sticking notes around the office with it. That adhesive became the Post-it note, built entirely on time nobody officially sanctioned as a project. The formal process rejected the idea for years. The informal culture of protected discretionary time is the only reason it survived long enough to prove itself.

You do not need a company wide policy to apply this. If you lead a team, you can protect a slice of discretionary time informally, goal setting cycle or not. Frame it as an investment, not slack: "we clearly need better dashboards for this system, is it fine if two engineers spend real time on it over the next month." That sentence alone often earns more genuine buy in than a mandated big rock goal, because it was framed as an invitation, and because the person doing the work can see themselves choosing it.

A wider toolkit for the other days

Autonomy, competence, and relatedness explain a lot, but they are not the only levers, and knowing three notes on a piano gets repetitive fast. David Rock's SCARF model adds status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. It overlaps with self-determination theory on autonomy and relatedness, and adds two factors that show up constantly in engineering teams specifically.

Status matters more than most technical leaders want to admit. Whether praise comes from a peer or from someone visibly senior changes how much it lands, and title conversations carry more emotional weight than the org chart suggests they should. Certainty matters enormously to some people and barely at all to others: put someone who needs a clear spec into an ambiguous, exploratory initiative and watch them struggle, not from lack of skill, but because the ambiguity itself is the stressor. Fairness complaints are often the clearest signal that someone feels a resource, interesting work, credit, opportunity, is being distributed unevenly.

The use of a five factor model like this is not to optimise all five at once. It is to notice which notes you never play. No feedback outside a formal review cycle means status stays silent. Work that arrives with zero context on why it matters means certainty stays silent. You do not need to play every note every day. You do need to notice the ones you have ignored for months.

One move helps across almost all of them at once: replace commands with constraints wherever you can. "You must do this ticket first" invites resistance, because a command can simply be ignored or resented. "This piece has a hard external deadline mid sprint" invites planning, because a constraint is a problem the person solves themselves, and the choice of how to respond stays theirs. The outcome can be identical. The felt experience of autonomy is not the same, and that felt experience is most of what you are actually managing.

What this has to do with your goals right now

If you are setting your own goals this cycle, there is a cheap trick worth knowing: you do not need a crystal ball to set a good goal, because you can set it retroactively. Keep a running log of the things you chose to work on that were not strictly required of you. At review time, that log already contains your goals. You are getting credit for judgment you already exercised, which is a more honest use of goal setting than predicting, twelve months out, exactly which discretionary contribution will turn out to matter.

None of this requires a perfect company or an enlightened HR policy. Pay only moves the needle up to the point it feels fair, then the return drops off fast, and repeated raises chase a moving target that never stays satisfied. The lever you already control, regardless of what the company decides about goal setting or discretionary time, is how much genuine choice you build into the daily experience of the people around you. That lever is available in every stand up, every ticket assignment, and every code review comment. Most leaders never touch it on purpose.

If you want a mirror, look at Mentorship and Influence Without Authority in our Big Tech benchmarks for technical leadership roles. Neither score is about how motivated you are. Both are about how much choice you have been building into the environment around other people.

Resources

• Edward Deci and Richard Flaste, Why We Do What We Do (1995): the accessible version of self-determination theory, from one of its two originators
• Daniel Pink, Drive (2009): the popular repackaging of autonomy, competence, and relatedness as purpose, autonomy, and mastery
• David Rock, SCARF: A Brain Based Model for Collaborating With and Influencing Others, NeuroLeadership Journal (2008)
• Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1938): the classic argument that play requires the freedom to stop

This series

This is issue 4 of a 12-part fortnightly series exploring technical leadership. Up next: why status and feedback calibration decide whether people actually hear what you are telling them.

Want the next issues in your inbox? Join the series. Email only, no account required.