You will be able to use autonomy, mastery and purpose to explain what keeps people engaged at work.
Arjun has been quieter lately. His work is still good, and his new client account is going well. But he no longer volunteers ideas in team meetings, and in his last one-on-one he mentioned, almost in passing, that a recruiter had called him. Wei Ling's first thought was money. She asked Daniel whether there was budget for a raise, and Daniel said not until the annual review in six months.
Before she gives up, Wei Ling should check whether money is really the problem. Often it isn't, or isn't the only one, and the other things that keep people engaged are much more within a manager's reach.
Start with pay, because it comes first. If someone feels underpaid compared with the market or with colleagues doing similar work, very little else you do will hold their attention for long. They will see every extra task as more unpaid work, and every recruiter call will sound tempting.
Daniel Pink, in his book Drive, makes this point directly. He argues that baseline rewards such as salary and benefits have to be adequate and fair before anything else works. Once they are, more money becomes a weaker lever for most work that needs judgement and creativity, and other things matter more.
So check the fairness question honestly. You may not control pay, but you can find out whether a person's salary is roughly in line. In Singapore, the Ministry of Manpower's Occupational Wage Tables, the salary information on MyCareersFuture job listings, and the salary guides published by recruitment firms all give a sense of the market. If someone looks clearly underpaid, raise it with your manager and HR, with evidence, even if nothing can change until the next review. People notice whether their manager fought for them.
Arjun's salary, it turned out, was within the normal range for his role. That meant the recruiter's call was tempting him for some other reason.
Pink groups what drives people beyond pay into three needs. They build on decades of research by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan on intrinsic motivation, which is the drive to do something because it's satisfying in itself.
Autonomy is having a say in your own work. It's the need to direct some of what you do rather than only following instructions.
Mastery is getting better at something that matters to you. People want to feel they are improving, and they get restless in work that has stopped teaching them anything.
Purpose is knowing your work contributes to something beyond the task itself. Connecting each person's goals to the team's outcomes, as you did in lesson 4.1, From team purpose to individual goals, is part of this.
New managers often think autonomy is impossible in their team, because the work is set: the clients need reports, the escalations need answering. But autonomy doesn't have to mean choosing what to work on. Even when the what is fixed, people can often have a say in how, when or with whom.
How covers the method. Farid's weekly reports have to go out on Monday, but he could redesign the format, choose the tools, or propose a new way of checking the figures.
When covers timing and schedule. On a hybrid team, letting people choose which days to work from home, or block mornings for focus work, is a real form of autonomy.
With whom covers who they work with. Pairing someone with a colleague they learn from, or letting them choose a partner for a project, gives them some control over their working day.
The delegation levels from lesson 3.2, Match your involvement to their experience, are also a form of autonomy. Moving someone from "recommend" to "decide and tell me" on a task they've mastered is one of the clearest signals of trust you can give.
People differ. One person on your team may crave more autonomy, another may want to master a new skill, a third may care most about seeing the impact of their work on clients. Guessing tends to go wrong, because managers usually assume others want what they themselves want.
So ask, directly, in a one-on-one. Explain the three ideas briefly, then ask which one they would most like more of right now. Some people answer immediately. Others need a week to think, which is fine.
Wei Ling asked Arjun. He didn't hesitate: mastery. He had been handling clients for six years and could do it in his sleep. What he wanted was to learn how the operations side worked, the contracts, the pricing, and the planning. The recruiter had offered him an operations planning role. Nobody at his current company had ever asked what he wanted to learn.
That is a problem Wei Ling can work on without a pay budget. She can involve Arjun in the next contract renewal and ask Daniel whether he could sit in on the quarterly planning meeting. Turning that into a plan is the job of lesson 6.4, Write a growth plan with each person.
Over the next week or two, put the question to each person on your team, and write down what they tell you in their own words.
In your next one-on-ones, ask each person which of autonomy, mastery or purpose they would like more of, and note their answers.
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