Understanding if someone is motivated at work is easy – enthusiasm, energy and engagement are visible. Understanding why they are motivated is much more difficult.
But understanding motivation at work is important for all of us: motivated employees stay longer, work smarter and get more done than their demotivated colleagues. They are also happier. Getting more people to that place more often would be a win/win all round.

When you ask people about their peak experiences at work, they do not generally respond by telling success stories, they tell adventure stories. They focus on something that had real meaning and challenge for them.
In corporate terms, the success story goes something like – ‘we had a great product and we made lots of money.’ It is nice but it does not ignite anything in the pride, identity or meaning department The adventure story is much more about battling internal and external obstacles, fighting your way to success in a resistant environment full of traps and enemies, armed only with limited resources.
In general, people’s adventure stories relate to the early days of projects and the start-ups of companies. It is more difficult to keep the adventure going in lengthy projects and mature companies. But this is exactly what leaders need to be able to do – most of us do not work in start-up’s, we work in mature companies.

The most obvious thing about leadership at work is that it is a group thing rather than an individual thing – it is about groups getting results and building their sense of identity. Leadership comes from followers: it is power through people, rather than power over people. Good leaders get things done by galvanising the identity of the group and in the process change and strengthen that identity so that the group can get more things done in the future.
Really accepting this idea means forgetting much of what we normally think about leadership. It means that we will not get to understand leadership by analysing a list of individual ‘leader’ qualities because leadership is not about an individual – it is about a relationship. It is something that is happening inside a group, not something that one person is doing. It is a verb, not a noun. This is important, because when people talk about leadership, they tend to produce a list of ‘leadership traits’ – qualities that equip someone to lead others. We tend to focus on the person, not the process, because that is where we expect to find the key. We have spent a lot of time looking in the wrong place for what leadership is.