Leaders are always challenged to find ways to motivate their workforce. Motivational theorists support the fact that people motivate themselves. Leaders can only help by creating the conditions whereby people can be motivated. Monetary compensation only works for a short time before people start needing additional incentives to increase their commitment and effort. It’s not because people are inherently greedy or ungrateful, it’s just that we need more intangible motivators over the longer term. We may not even be conscious of these needs; we just know when something’s missing. Rewarding a form of positive competition may help.

When we are part of an organization, any organization, one of our basic human needs as social beings is to feel secure and accepted by those around us. If we feel vulnerable and don’t quite fit in, we can get distracted and eventually become demotivated, regardless of our pay package or how intrinsically interesting the work might be.

Each organization has a unique formula for creating these motivational conditions based on its mission, culture and the composition of its individual employees. Motivational leaders continually work to discover and apply that unique formula to engage and support their workforce to be more connected to the organization and its goals.

A good starting point is to maximize transparency. Share as much information with employees as possible about the economic situation, financial imperatives, competitive threats and progress toward achieving strategic goals without sending them into information overload.

Continue by streamlining ways to receive input and feedback from them about decisions that are being made. Regularly solicit ideas for what employees need to improve how they are working and what they are working on.

Lastly, don’t just simply create teams; create collective competition within the organization. Collective competition, like all competition, is goal-oriented which can result in greater focus and increased creativity and innovation. However, it’s different from the more traditional type of competition where success is defined strictly by a bottom line win or lose outcome. Traditional competition creates more losers than winners and often results in organizational dysfunction, despite positive intent by the leader. Success in collective competition is measured by real, tangible cooperation within and across units and divisions. Cooperation, along with level of effort, and demonstrated growth and learning is what gets rewarded in healthy, collective competition.

For organizational success what a “win” and “team” is may need to be redefined and reinforced until it becomes part of the cultural fabric. An organization should be viewed and treated as one team. The individual units should only claim and, most importantly, be rewarded for a win when the larger team also wins. This becomes more challenging for leaders in larger organizations. We are often more familiar with individual competition or smaller team vs. team competition that is focused on narrow sales or revenue targets. Although there may be short term benefits, over the longer term siloed thinking and unhealthy competitive behavior is typically a negative result. This is the main reason why emphasizing internal competition within organizations is often perceived to be counterproductive.

Team members taking part in healthy, positive, collective competition, by definition, are encouraged to be inclusive, to share information, and to help each other learn and develop skills. This type of internal competition can be positive for the overall organization and for the individuals working within it. Rather than pit one member against another, the conditions created by leaders that reward cooperation can increase the chances that individuals will find their own reasons to be motivated.