Dearest Darling Friends,

 

“The team doesn’t need another motivational speech.
They need fewer contradictory instructions.”

 

The HOD Engineering said that to me after the fourth consecutive difficult quarter.
The honesty of this unexpected statement stung me a little.

 

Here is a little backstory.

 

A retail giant was growing well. New stores were being opened at good speed. Yet, four quarters in a row, sales per store had dropped on an average by 23%. The organisation was also bleeding talent.

 

The leadership was at their wits end.

 

They had done…
– number crunching,
– looked at their talent pool,
– analysed the pay packages of the team,
– used the appropriate technology,
– examined the product pricing,
– had a hard look at competitors offerings

 

….. and everything seemed to be ‘spot on’.

 

They were scratching their heads in dismay. What was going wrong?

 

For the past 6 months, the leadership had genuinely been trying to energize and motivate the organization.

 

• Town halls? Done!
• Vision presentations? Done!
• Cultural extravaganza? Done!
• Out bound training programs? Done!

 

Nothing seemed to be working.
Nothing was able to stem the gradual downfall in sales or the exit of top talent.

 

They were genuinely worried.
They concluded, it must be a motivation problem.

 

They got us in to with two purpose in mind.

 

1. Analyse if their hypothesis was right
2. ⁠‘Motivate’ the whole organisation.

 

Our sensing sessions with the team revealed a simple yet damaging issue.

 

An old hand looked at us with disdain and said, “The team doesn’t need another motivational speech.
They need fewer contradictory instructions.”

 

A deeper dive revealed the truth is his insight.

 

– Sales emphasized aggressive growth.
– Operations emphasized process discipline.
– Finance emphasized cost control.
– Product teams emphasized experimentation.

 

Each direction sounded reasonable individually.
Together, they created daily confusion.

 

The real culprit was different leaders signalling different priorities.
Unresolved strategic trade-offs therein created operational nightmares.

 

Sometimes speed seemed to matter more and sometimes quality!
Sometimes they were asked to customize heavily for the client…and sometimes they were asked to protect scalability!
Sometimes experiments with breakthrough possibilities got a lot of emphasis and sometimes predictability at all cost was desired!

 

Boardroom discussions remained abstract.
Teams faced ambiguity practically every day.

 

It was not a ‘motivation issue’. It was a lack of ‘operational clarity’ issue.

 

This realization has changed how I think about organizational motivation.

 

I realised people do not disengage only from lack of inspiration.
They disengage when effort repeatedly collides with contradictory expectations.

 

Read the previous statement again.

 

No amount of motivational can compensate for operational confusion.

 

That organization did not need more energy.
It needed fewer competing directions.

 

Clarity creates energy.
Contradiction quietly drains it.

 

I wonder how many organisations out there mistake exhaustion / disengagement / poor agency / slow responses / poor teamwork / for lack of motivation.

 

Inside your business, what contradictory expectations your teams might be currently carrying every single day?

 

Thoughts?