To motivate your team, understand their inner needs. Intrinsic motivations are the most powerful drivers of effort.

The number one question I get from clients is: How do you motivate your team? The leaders I work with most commonly want to know how to motivate a team to:

The solution for all these problems is motivation. I’m going to break down different kinds of motivations and how they work. By the end, you will have a practical framework to choose what will actually motivate your team. (Hint: All the blogs on my site explore the tools for activating motivation, namely, trust, confidence, empathy, alignment, decision making, and emotional intelligence.)

Key Takeaways

  • The most powerful motivation comes from within—when work meets intrinsic human needs.
  • Motivation starts with safety and belonging, and grows with empathy, respect, and purpose.
  • Fear, control, or pressure undermine performance. Empathy and clarity build it.
  • Use Maslow’s hierarchy as a framework to diagnose what your team really needs.

The Two Types of Motivation: Intrinsic and Extrinsic

Motivation can be extrinsic, from the outside, or intrinsic, from within.

Extrinsic motivators don’t go far to get your team engaged. Fear decreases both motivation and performance. A command-and-control leadership style also lowers motivation and performance. And don’t rely on money to motivate your team.

On the other hand, intrinsic motivation comes from within. It is much more powerful and long lasting than extrinsic motivation. We all seek basic needs like safety, love, and belonging. Further, we all have higher desires like respect, recognition, spirituality, and purpose. When work satisfies someone’s intrinsic needs, they are up to three times more engaged than when they have extrinsic motivation.

Use Human Needs as a Framework to Motivate Your Team

Certain universal human needs drive human behavior. Abraham Maslow defined these universal human needs over 80 years ago and decades of research has confirmed them. These needs are:

maslow's hierarchy to motivate your team
  • Physiological: breathing, food, water, shelter, sleep.
  • Safety and security: health, work, family, social stability.
  • Love and belonging: friendship, family, intimacy.
  • Self-esteem: confidence, respect, recognition.
  • Self-actualization: purpose, creativity, meaning, the search for one’s highest potential.

All people have these same internal needs. This is what helps people survive and thrive.

How Maslow’s Hierarchy Explains Team Motivation

People can pursue multiple needs at once, and sometimes they’ll even trade short-term comfort for long-term meaning.

As an example, take the story of Chris Gardner, subject of the movie “The Pursuit of Happyness.” As Gardner worked his way up through an internship to become a successful stockbroker on Wall Street, in his private life he was homeless with his child for over a year. In spite of risks to their health and safety, he showed up and performed, driven by a belief in his future success.

As a manager, building a team culture that satisfies people’s intrinsic needs is how to motivate a team. Below is a deeper look at the categories of needs and how they motivate us at work.

Start with Physiological and Safety Needs

If someone is not breathing, there is no way they can think about work. The same is true for other urgent physical needs, such as health, housing, food, or safety. A lack of any of these needs for your team member or a loved one is an emergency. They must resolve these problems before they can fully focus on work.

As a manager, if anyone on your team is unsafe, the only real human response is empathy and compassion. If it’s appropriate, offer some support. Often just listening is a relief to them. Sometimes, a day off is what they need.

Fortunately, these issues are usually temporary. If you show empathy, later, after the threat passes, their gratitude will motivate them to work even harder. So empathy is not just a decent, human response. It’s a long-term strategy to motivate your team.

Build Psychological Safety at Work

While personal safety may be outside of your control, your team’s psychological safety at work is largely within your control. Employees must trust that no one will retaliate if they make a mistake. That’s how people grow in a workplace.

People stop learning when someone retaliates for a mistake. Their boss might make a demeaning comment. Or the boss might reduce their responsibilities or avoid them. In the worst cases, the boss yells at them. Even subtle slights or yelling down the hall is enough to make most people stop taking risks. That’s when they stop learning. People will always protect their self-esteem over team results.

So, to motivate your team, start by reviewing team culture. Ask yourself: Do you and other leaders protect your team’s self-esteem? If not, work to establish psychological safety and a learning culture to start re-engaging them.

How Belonging Motivates a Team

A culture of friendship and belonging at work is important to motivating your team. You don’t have to be their best friend, but you do have to care. Good managers build strong relationships in the office.

It’s not enough to care about their work. Good managers care about them as a person. This means supporting their hopes and dreams, understanding their frustrations, and caring about what they care about.

Most of the time, listening is enough to show you care. Take time in one-on-ones to know what’s important to them. Have fun with the team and try to have a good laugh every day.

How Respect Fuels Motivation and Effort

Once people feel safe and trusted, good leaders prioritize self-esteem. People need to feel respected to be motivated. Think about it. If no one respected you, how motivated would you be?

Respecting people necessarily involves empathy. You need to understand how they see their work to respond in a way that’s motivating. In particluar, how you handle mistakes will either raise or lower motivation on your team. Instead of getting mad or frustrated at mistakes, take time to listen to what happened. Ask what they learned. Problem solve together to fix what went wrong.

Connect Purpose to Performance

If your team is safe, cares about each other, and feels respected at work, congratulations! You have done a lot to motivate your team.

Now connect the work to meaning: the customer served, the problem solved, the mission advanced, or the team’s shared pride.

Self-actualization fuels our innate desire to be our best and make a difference. When the vision is clear and everyone is building a common dream, team effort fires up.

People work harder when the why is visible. You don’t need to be saving lives; serving clients well is a worthy purpose. Measure what matters, and celebrate team success. More success will follow.

4 Proven Actions to Motivate Your Team

Take a look at your team in light of their human needs. You probably see what they need from you to start engaging them. Here are three pro tips for motivating your team.

1. If you have someone dealing with a real life crisis: empathize.

Treat them how you’d want to be treated. An empathetic manager reduces stress. In return, when the emergency passes, their motivation will naturally go up. No one wants to disappoint a manager who had your back when you needed them.

2. Establish psychological safety and a learning culture.

Make sure you establish psychological safety at work and protect your team from retaliation. Help them learn from mistakes and try until they get it right. Ask what they learned and what they can do to try again. A learning culture is the best way to help your team engage and grow.

3. Raise self-esteem to raise effort.

First, listen without judging them. Listening is the most important sign of respect. Once you have listened, empathize. People need to feel validated before they can learn. If they are defensive, it’s a sign that you are not listening and validating their experience. You don’t have to agree with them, but if you want them motivated, you do have to understand them and care how they feel. That’s when they will trust you enough to learn and grow.

4. Activate purpose by measuring success.

Measuring results is the best way to motivate people at the highest level. Measuring work outcomes is like keeping score at work. Just as in sports, team goals are a target to shoot for. Help your team choose the right goals and challenge them to learn how to reach them. Celebrate every win and watch your team grow!

Use this framework to diagnose needs and choose actions that actually motivate your team.

Keep Learning

Here a few more articles on the art of motivating your team:

Related articles

If you want more ways to build motivation, join my free leadership workshop One-on-Ones that Motivate for 12 tips to make your 1:1s more motivating.

FAQs to Motivate Your Team

What’s the fastest way to motivate a team?

Protect psychological safety first. When people feel safe to speak up and try, effort rises immediately.

Does money motivate teams long term?

Fair pay is essential for retention, but it doesn’t sustain daily effort. Intrinsic drivers—safety, belonging, respect, and purpose—do.

How do I motivate a disengaged employee?

Start with a 1:1: listen, validate, and identify one meaningful, achievable goal. Remove a blocker. Then recognize progress quickly.

How can I motivate my team without micromanaging?

Set clear outcomes, agree on measurable goals, and let people choose how to get there. Coach; don’t commandeer.

What if my exec culture is fear-based?

You can still create a high-safety, high-standards micro-culture on your own team. One good manager can make a real difference.

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