Whatever we do we will be looking for a way that we can make the most of our own abilities in order to best provide for the next generation, and our families. Without any outside stimulus, without any input from management, our collective unconscious has hard wired into our heads the desire to be the best we can be, to be motivated and engage with what we are doing.

Being born is what really motivates and engages us.

We are born into the collective human unconscious which drives our desire to be good at what we do. By doing things well we know that we are creating the best possible environment in which to raise the next generation and therefore satisfy our prime motivator, which is to perpetuate our species. After we are born our personal consciousness develops and we respond by trying to do what we do well to satisfy our collective unconscious need. The strength of this desire and our ability to do well varies from one individual to another. Our own desire to do well is modified by the environment in which we find ourselves.

We all want to win the race but if we find ourselves pitted against an Olympic athlete we know that we are unlikely to win, so we look for other ways to do well, to create the environment in which we can be acknowledged for our own contribution. We may end up coaching the athlete and therefore take some of the credit for their performance, or finding that we are not physically suited for athletic competition we may pursue a career as an academic, or an artist, or raise a family, or compete in an entirely different field of endeavour to satisfy our need to be valued.

Whatever we do we will be looking for a way that we can make the most of our own abilities in order to best provide for the next generation, and our families. Without any outside stimulus, without any input from management, our collective unconscious has hard wired into our heads the desire to be the best we can be, to be motivated and engage with what we are doing.

In a hospital ward I heard the ward sister say that she knew she was supposed to motivate people but just did not have the time. In common with most managers she believed that without her input nothing would happen, she was responsible for everything. Except that while she was perfectly happy to accept responsibility for the things that did happen, she was never prepared to admit that she was also responsible for the things that did not. She talked of motivation as if it was her job to hand it out in measured doses to each and every one of her needy staff, but since she was such a busy and important person running the ward, it was not a reasonable thing to expect her to take care of the needs of every single one of her staff, so she was quite comfortable that she was not doing it but still thought that it was part of her job.

This is a very common attitude where managers become comfortable knowing that they do nothing to motivate their staff because they feel that they cannot spend all of their time holding the hands of their employees. What these managers do not realise, though, is that their employees are already motivated, that when they drew their first breath they wanted another and then another and that their whole lives were actually about getting better at what they did.

When employees first turn up at the interview they bring with them this natural desire to do their best and are prepared to share that desire to help the organisation that employs them to also get better, to earn more money, to increase that organisation’s share of the market and therefore satisfy their own desire for stable long-term employment. It does not usually take very long for the new employee to realise that the organisation is not capable of listening to its employees ideas. The employee soon learns that his input is not welcome, so he proceeds to pack away all of his education and experience that he had been prepared to share so freely and reverts to the mindless automaton to respond to direct orders, and does nothing more.

Management, when this happens, blames its workforce for being unmotivated and moans about the fact that it then has to motivate its employees. Because it has not got the time, the management pay for someone else to do it the motivating by sending the workforce away on motivational courses without realising that whatever happens at that motivational workshop, however pumped up the workforce gets, it will be coming back to work in the exact same environment that demotivated it in the first place. An environment that was probably created by the same manager who is blaming them for being demotivated.

Don’t waste time trying to motivate your workforce. They are already motivated. Find out what you are doing that is demotivating your workforce, then stop doing it.