If you were to search for them right now, you'd likely find hundreds of articles about how to stay motivated, how to keep your team motivated, and how to instill motivation in the people around you. There are plenty of tips and tricks purported to keep us motivated - setting goals or timers, giving ourselves rewards, and staying positive. While those suggestions might seem helpful on the face of it, the reality of the notion of motivation has remained more of a mystery and messier than it's made out to be. So how can we tackle the mystery and messiness of motivation in a meaningful and impactful way?

Motivation is a Mystery

You rarely hear people talking about how to motivate their teams or keep themselves motivated when it's alive and well in a workplace. We seem to only ask about motivation when it's low or missing, altogether. And looking for something when it's absent is challenging, if not impossible - motivation, then, becomes a bit of a mystery.

Motivation is Messy

It's not uncommon that we find ourselves thinking about or even discussing our unmotivated team members or staff when they're not in the room. What is keeping this employee from performing at their best? Why is it such a challenge to keep them on task and on target? We might guess at reasons for why they seem to be underperforming - interpersonal dynamics or personality differences, for example. Once we determine what we think the culprit is, we then often try to effect change with incentives or punishments (also known as carrots and sticks), and then wonder why those efforts largely fail.

Bring Others into the Conversation

One of the biggest problems here - we attempt do this problem solving without turning to the expert on the matter: the employee them self. Rather than guessing at the reasons for their lack of performance, or deteriorating performance, we need to invite that person into the conversation to learn and understand their perspective and what things matter most to them. It's in having those conversations with our team members that we not only better understand what is and isn't working but also show them that we value their point of view and genuinely appreciate their contributions to the workplace. Valued team members feel better, do better, and perform better, after all.

Reflect on it When it's Present

The solution to the mystery of motivation isn't to brainstorm when it's absent, but to instead reflect on it when it's alive and well. When your team members are performing optimally, ask them what is contributing to or supporting their performance. Meet regularly to better understand how your team maintains motivation and how you can then continue to support that motivation.

Motivation can be a mystery sometimes, but it doesn't have to be messy. Take the time to reflect and review your team's performance and output when things are moving like a well-oiled machine. Use your own strengths - elevated productivity, performance, and potential - as feedback to ensure that you're not left in the dark when things begin to backslide. The sooner you can identify what keeps your workplace in tune, the fewer chances you leave for performance to plummet.

You can learn even more about how to unravel the mystery and messy of motivation from Stephen de Groot, an authority on human behaviour, performance, leadership, and organizational development, in his upcoming book, Getting to Better: A New Model for Elevating Human Potential At Work and in Life. In it, he examines the ways in which we can better engage and motivate our people to reach the goals we have for ourselves, our teams and workplaces.