Meet Paulina. Paulina hates her job.
Paulina’s working from home one day and clocks into her Teams account at 8:15. She was supposed to start at 8, and her manager sends her a snarky message asking why she’s late. Paulina responds in kind with an equally snarky rebuttal, and then puts the chat on silent.
She looks at the tasks in the cue that her team is responsible for and picks the three easiest ones she’ll tackle for the day.
She works diligently for an hour and then starts to get distracted. She finds herself checking Instagram all the time, even though she hates it. She feels guilty about this, but she’s addicted to the brief moment of escape it provides.
She slugs through the rest of the day, doing the bare minimum so her boss won’t be breathing down her neck. If she completes her three tasks, there is nothing anyone can say about her effort.
This is a typical day for Paulina. She hates her job and doesn’t put in any extra effort. Her only focus is getting through the day.
Now, meet Sarah. Sarah loves her job.
Sarah has a flex situation at her company and decided to come in to the office that day. She likes the structure and camaraderie it brings.
She strolls in at 9:30 and is greeted with a smile from her boss. They have some small chit-chat, and then Sarah sits down at her desk and combs over her to-do list. She debates doing some admin tasks that have been building up, but instead decides to work on a side project she’s excited about. She sees this project as an opportunity to springboard her career and provide massive value to her company.
Sarah is highly motivated, and she treats her company’s success like it’s her own. She acts like a founder, taking risks and trying new things.
She’s highly autonomous and self-motivated. She doesn’t need a manager breathing down her neck.
She feels inspired to grow the business and does precisely that. Her risks pay off and create massive value for her career and the company because their goals are in-line.
The question we’re constantly working on at Centric is, how can leaders cultivate more Sarahs and fewer Paulinas?
Here’s how we think about the problem today.
The image below is designed to illustrate the difference between the motivational drivers of Sarah and Paulina. It was originally proposed by Daniel Pink, and we loved it so much that we made a version of our own. Don’t worry about understanding it fully right now; we’ll explain it as we go.
It’s all about the strength and character of motivation. People operating in the blue of the diamond are self-motivated, happy with their work, have high-self esteem, and they perform exceptionally well for the organization. People in the red are doing the bare minimum to get by. They are motivated primarily by their paycheck, which makes them feel unfulfilled, unhappy, and unconfident.
Sarah is operating at the top of the diamond. She has the freedom, trust, and safety to act according to the higher values of the motivation spectrum: initiative, creativity, and daring. She can take initiative to start new projects (knowing her team has her back if they fail), think creatively about solving problems (because she feels safe enough to try new things), and can act daringly to take risks that drive massive value to the business (because her goals and the organization’s goals are congruent). As a result, she is self-motivated and confident, and her work is rewarding to her.
In contrast, Paulina is operating at the bottom of the diamond. She clocks in and does the bare minimum. She does what she is told and nothing more because stepping out of those bounds rarely pays off. Mistakes are punished, so there’s no room to take risks. She’s low performing and unfulfilled, and her self-esteem is shot. She doesn’t feel trusted by her leadership team. Her goals and the organization’s goals are so misaligned they might as well be in opposition with each other.
The million dollar question: how can strong leadership transform Paulina into a Sarah?
To illustrate this, let’s jump back into Paulina’s story
Paulina’s job has 5 of the 7 signs of toxic culture:
- Teams faking a false harmony
- People can’t report bad news to their boss
- Rampant passive aggressiveness
- Everyone in it for themselves
- When times get tough, people stick their heads in the sand
And as a result of this environment, she’s struggling.
One day she’s chatting with her friend at her cubicle about a problem with a client. Her boss walks by and utters her final passive-aggressive comment toward Paulina.
“Chit-chat’s getting a little long, eh?”
This sends Paulina into a full-blown rage. Blood rushes to her head, and she clenches her fist. She’s quickly scanning her mind of all the damning remarks she will say back when her friend breaks the silence, “Hey, whoa, Paulina… what are you going to do?”
Paulina snaps out of it and says, “Nothing… from now on, I will do nothing.”
This was the impetus for her departure. She spends the next few months scanning job boards and applying for better positions.
Her friend Sarah calls her up and offers her a new position that just opened up at her company. Her face lights up and silent fist pumps ensue.
She says yes.
A new form of leadership
Flash forward three months, and Paulina is fresh into a new job at Sarah’s company. On day two, she has a meeting with Frank, her new boss, where he asks her, “What do you want from your career? What are your biggest dreams?”
Perplexed by the question, Paulina furrows her brow and asks him, “What do you mean? Why don’t you just tell me what to do?”
He laughs and reframes the question, “Well, what would you want to do?”
Paulina doesn’t know how to respond. She’s used to just following orders.
Frank helps her along, giving examples of goals other people in her position have held. Some of these are big dreams, dreams Paulina wouldn’t have ever considered for herself.
As the conversation progresses, Paulina is starting to open up to the possibility that Frank might be serious—that these are the kinds of dreams that might actually be possible for her.
She’s never experienced leadership like this. It feels like, for once, she’s in the driver’s seat, not her boss.
The new possibilities ignite her imagination, but there’s still a genuine part of her that is skeptical.
Paulina’s first big project
She gets assigned as lead on her first project. Frank and the rest of the leadership team inform her of their desired outcomes and then asks her what her desired outcomes are. She thinks, “Who cares what my desired outcomes are?”
But she takes a moment and remembers—this organization is different. She’s finally starting to internalize this new way of working.
So, together, they co-create a desired outcome. And perhaps even more incredible, the leadership team gives her full autonomy on how the outcome should be achieved. Instead of giving her the template of how things should be run, they let her choose and tell her they will support her in any way she needs. In a way, it almost feels as if they’re beneath her in the organizational hierarchy.
Paulina takes ownership. She asks questions about how they think it should best be carried out, but she knows she’s in command.
A disappointing start
The project commences, but it ends up being more difficult than she thought. It doesn’t end up producing the desired outcome. In fact, in her eyes, it didn’t even get close.
She’s mortified. She failed.
The thought of telling Frank is terrifying, but she feels safe enough to be forthright.
As Frank reads the project report, Paulina anxiously sits across from him at the table, knee bouncing up and down like a kid in the principal’s office.
Frank looks up at her and smiles, “This is good work. I know you didn’t hit your mark, but there’s much to build on and learn from here.”
He calls in the other leadership team, and they go over what worked and what could be improved. They see a lot of potential in Paulina.
Paulina can barely keep in her tears. She feels so supported and valued. She feels trusted. She feels safe.
A new way of working
Paulina now knows her leadership team has her back, win or lose. She won’t be micromanaged, and she won’t be reprimanded for mistakes.
She’s empowered.
With this kind of safety, she can now take risks. She can dream big. She can use her creativity to start projects with the potential to bring immense value to her career and to the organization. Her goals and her organization’s goals are in-line.
Paulina has worked her way out of the red and into the blue.
Less than a year ago she was wasting away in a soul-sucking job. She was doing the bare minimum, was addicted to social media, and her self-esteem was abysmal. She ended her work days miserably and her husband often took the brunt of it. She was too tired to work out and often snapped at her kids. The effects of her awful work situation trickled into every aspect of her life. The job was slowly killing her.
However! After joining Sarah’s company, Paulina became invigorated. She’s now operating with initiative, creativity, and daring. She feels confident, and she’s the happiest she’s ever been in her career. She’s begun taking care of herself better, and her relationships with her family are significantly better. Her job is giving her vitality.
Strong leadership can transform a soul-sucking job into one that breathes life into each of its members
And the best part is, these skills are trainable.
To bring people out of the red and into the blue, leaders can adopt some of the following principles and attitudes:
- A willingness and openness to hear and seek out other’s opinions and ideas
- Less division between hierarchical levels
- A humility to admit ignorance or wrong-doing
- Seeing people as people, not just workers. Learning about their lives more deeply
- Giving people autonomy to choose not just how they work, but what they work on
- Learning about what would be success to their team members, and supporting them to achieve it
- Asking for feedback from the people they are managing
Operating with these principles can transform the direction of employees, teams, departments, and the entire culture of an organization.
So I leave you with two questions:
How’s the leadership in your organization? Are they producing self-motivated high performers? Low performers? Somewhere in the middle?
How are you showing up in your organization? Are you operating with initiative, creativity, and daring? Or are you following orders, just getting through your day?
At Centric, we train leaders to produce high-performers. Ones that operate with initiative, creativity, and daring
We offer a low investment leadership audit for any organization looking to better understand how its leaders are operating.
We give a thorough report with practical changes you can make immediately after reading it.
The first step is easy: send me, Kursten, a message today and let’s have a discussion!