What Actually Motivates Your Team (and Why Most Managers Get It Wrong)
A few years ago I was coaching a senior analyst at a financial services company. She was talented, well-paid, and miserable. Her manager had just given her a promotion and a pay rise to keep her from leaving. Six weeks later she handed in her notice anyway.
When we talked about it, the reason was obvious. She didn't want more money or a bigger title. She wanted autonomy. Her previous role had given her the freedom to shape her own work. Her new role, despite the higher salary, had her locked into prescribed processes with no room to think. The promotion had addressed the wrong motivator entirely.
Her manager wasn't stupid. He was just doing what most managers do: assuming that what motivates him motivates everyone else, and reaching for the obvious levers (money, status, promotion) because they're the easiest to pull.
This is the motivation mistake I see over and over again. And in 2026, with AI reshaping roles, team structures shifting, and the nature of knowledge work changing fast, getting motivation right has never mattered more.
The Problem With Carrots and Sticks
Most organisations still operate on a reward-and-punishment model of motivation. Hit your targets, get a bonus. Miss them, get a difficult conversation. Perform well, get promoted. Perform badly, get managed out.
This isn't entirely wrong. People need to be paid fairly and recognised for good work. But decades of research, from Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory to Daniel Pink's work on autonomy, mastery, and purpose, tells us the same thing: extrinsic motivators like money and status work for routine, mechanical tasks. For creative, complex, knowledge work, they are insufficient and sometimes counterproductive.[^1]
The work most of your team does in 2026 is creative, complex, and knowledge-based. If it weren't, you'd have automated it by now.
The motivators that drive sustained performance in this kind of work are intrinsic: curiosity, autonomy, mastery, purpose, connection. These aren't soft nice-to-haves. They're the difference between a team that does the minimum and a team that solves problems you didn't know you had.
What I've Actually Seen
After years of coaching individuals and teams, here's what I've observed:
People don't leave bad companies. They leave environments that suppress their core motivators. The analyst who left wasn't escaping a bad employer. She was escaping a role that had removed her autonomy. The company was fine. The fit was wrong.
Managers project their own motivators onto their teams. A manager who values status assumes everyone wants a title. A manager who values order assumes everyone wants clear processes. A manager who values mastery assumes everyone wants training. They're not being selfish. They're being human. But it leads to motivation strategies that work for one person and miss the other nine.
The same person's motivators change over time. A junior developer might value mastery above everything (learning, growing, getting better). Five years later, the same person might value freedom (choosing what to work on) or goal (working on something that matters). If you assessed their motivators once and never revisited, you're working with outdated data.
AI is shifting motivators right now. Teams I coach are telling me that AI tools are removing the parts of their job they found satisfying (the crafting, the problem-solving, the creative work) and leaving them with the parts they didn't (reviewing AI output, managing prompts, quality-checking generated content). When someone's core motivator is mastery and their job suddenly becomes "check the AI's homework," you have a motivation problem that no bonus will fix.
A Tool That Actually Works: Moving Motivators
There are many ways to explore what drives people. One of the most practical I've used is Moving Motivators, a technique developed by Jurgen Appelo as part of the Management 3.0 toolkit.[^2]
It uses ten motivator cards, each representing a different driver. The first letters spell CHAMPFROGS:
- Curiosity - the desire to learn and explore
- Honour - the need for integrity and respect
- Acceptance - the need to be acknowledged for who you are
- Mastery - the desire to improve and get better
- Power - the need to influence your environment
- Freedom - the desire for autonomy and choice
- Relatedness - the need to connect with others
- Order - the need for structure and predictability
- Goal - the desire to achieve something meaningful
- Status - the need for social recognition
The exercise is simple. In a 1-to-1 coaching session, give the person the ten cards and ask them to rank them from most to least important. Then ask them to explain their ranking.
That's it. The power is in the conversation, not the cards.
What the Conversation Reveals
The ranking itself is useful, but it's the discussion that matters. Three things consistently emerge:
Hidden Conflicts Become Visible
One client ranked Freedom as their top motivator but was working in an environment with rigid sign-off processes on every decision. They didn't describe themselves as unhappy. They described themselves as "frustrated but I can't explain why." The cards gave them language for something they'd been feeling but couldn't articulate.
Another ranked Curiosity and Mastery highest, but their organisation had just moved them from a business change team to operational support. The role paid the same. The title was the same. But two of their top three motivators were now suppressed daily. No wonder their engagement had dropped.
"What Motivates Me" and "What My Manager Thinks Motivates Me" Are Rarely the Same
I've run sessions where the manager guesses the person's top three motivators before the person does the ranking. They match about a third of the time. The other two-thirds is where the real coaching happens.
Motivators Shift, and Tracking the Shift Is Valuable
Revisiting the exercise every six to twelve months reveals changes. One client initially ranked Status highest. After several coaching sessions exploring what actually gave them satisfaction, they realised they valued Freedom far more. They made a career change that better aligned with this insight. The shift wasn't instant. It emerged over time through repeated reflection.
Motivation in 2026: What's Changed
Three things are different now compared to when I first started using these techniques:
AI is changing what "mastery" means. If your skill was writing clean code and an AI can now generate it in seconds, your sense of mastery takes a hit. The teams navigating this well are the ones redefining mastery: it's no longer about the craft of writing code, it's about the judgment of knowing what to build and whether the output is good enough. That's a higher-order skill, but it doesn't feel like mastery to someone who took pride in the craft.
Autonomy is under pressure. AI tools often come with standardised workflows. The promise is efficiency, but the cost can be freedom. If your team previously chose how to approach their work and now follows an AI-assisted pipeline, you may have gained speed and lost engagement.
Purpose matters more when routine work disappears. As AI automates the predictable parts of knowledge work, what remains is the complex, judgment-heavy, creative work. People doing that kind of work need purpose more than people doing routine tasks. If they can't connect what they do to something meaningful, the work feels hollow no matter how impressive the AI tools are.
Understanding your team's motivators isn't a nice-to-have in this environment. It's how you retain your best people while everything around them changes.
How to Start
You don't need to be a certified coach or buy a toolkit. You need a conversation.
In your next 1-to-1, ask the person: "Of these ten things, which three matter most to you right now?" Read them the list. Let them think. Ask them why. Listen to the answer without trying to solve anything.
Then ask: "How well does your current role serve those three?" This is where the real insight lives. If there's a gap between what motivates someone and what their role provides, you've found the source of disengagement, and probably the retention risk.
Revisit it regularly. People change. Roles change. What motivated someone a year ago may not motivate them today, especially in a period where AI is reshaping what their job actually involves.
Don't assume your motivators are theirs. This is the hardest one. The thing that drives you to do your best work may actively demotivate someone else. The only way to know is to ask.
Related reading:
- Overcome Imposter Syndrome - 4 Ways Coaching Can Help - when self-doubt undermines motivation
- The PDCA Cycle: Why the Best Teams Learn Faster Than They Plan - the learning loop that supports continuous improvement
- Agile Is Not What You Think It Is - why trusting teams is fundamental to agile
References
[^1]: Daniel Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Canongate Books, 2009. Pink's work builds on Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory (1985), which identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as the three core human psychological needs.
[^2]: Jurgen Appelo, Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders, Addison-Wesley, 2011. The Moving Motivators technique and CHAMPFROGS model are described in detail. Free card downloads are available at management30.com.
Alun Davies-Baker is an agile coach, trainer, and the founder of Altogether Agile. He is an ICF Associate Certified Coach who helps individuals and teams navigate complexity, build confidence, and work more effectively.