The death of employee motivation: Open responsibility without a target
How can you feel usefull, in any job even without a clear target? Spoiler alert- you can’t.
Imagine this: you start your dream job at a new company. Your skills are valued, and you know you can contribute in the team and development of the company. In addition — your department have a clear mandate, well anchored in the company strategy. Seems quite the jackpot, right? It is not.
A mandate for a department working on internal innovation for instance, may include great ambitions such as “make sure that the company is alined, and work towards a common goal” or “have the main responsibility do drive internal innovation” — the list could go on. Even these mandates seems tempting and ambitious, right? I used to belive so.
Then the problem is — how do I know that my contribution fulfill these ambitions?
Lets say you have a clear, motiavtional and ambitious mandate for your team. You create activities, arrange event, leads projects or processes to fulfill that mandate. There is a problem with this: The mandate could be fulfilled in houndreds of ways. Some bystander could then stop by saying that “Well, I see what you are doing, but I would do it this way”. This could pose a major threat. Specially if that person is a person of influence or power within the company.
Knowing this, the original question should be transfomred into: How can I measure the success of my doings?
You can fulfill any mandate in different ways — but when you manage to set a measurable goal — that is when the discussion on the how and the what could be shut up in an instant. That being said, getting a parametre that gives you a sense of completion of a given task, does not necessarily make you as an employee happier — But it can give you a sense of purspose, and a goal to reach, knowing why it should be reached, and an understanding of when it is completed.
