The Art of Killing Motivation
The Art of Killing Motivation While Pretending to Foster It
So, you want to kill motivation and creativity in your organization, under the pretense that you need motivation and creativity? Look no further, here’s a not so recommendable guide on how to achieve that goal.
1. Force culture on your employees, always make them aware that this work environment is great and healthy (If you have a nice work culture you don’t need to tell anyone that it is nice, they will already know that and that’s not our goal here)
Bonus if you tell them that they can only speak nicely about the company (again we didn’t need this rule if it was genuinely nice, people would on their own accord speak nicely of the company and work environment, also who cares about free speech).
2. Broken communication is important, it ensures that everyone is confused, and no one knows which direction things are going, it is sure to lead to burn-out and frustration.
3. Emergency culture, everything is an emergency and must be completed EOD. There’s nothing like creating daily stress around oneself; by giving tasks late and making them an emergency for others, it will make people’s motivation drop dramatically and if everyone is stressed, we’ll just call it a fast-paced working environment.
Bonus if you later tell the employee that the work they did wasn’t needed anyway.
4. Take praise for other people’s work, this one is sure to drop motivation to an all-time low, while you get all the praise and perhaps a raise, the people who did the work will feel unappreciated and thus will lower their standards and creative approaches.
5. Change your directions on tasks, preferably weekly or even daily, if possible, this will make people feel inadequate and like they are constantly making mistakes, thus further lowering motivation.
6. Arrange creativity meetings these meetings are for forcing creative ideas, as we all know, innovation and creative ideas are born in the meeting room.
7. Unclear organizational structure and chains of command, with this structure people will never get answers to their questions and therefore they will be unable to execute their daily tasks, because nothing is anyone's responsibility. Which inevitably will drive outthe last bit of motivation, should there be any.
Bonus: Call your company a dynamic and self-directed team with low hierarchies.
This guide is fictional, but it is sadly all too real for many people in the corporate world, the striving for organized creativity and community kills it. Both are values that you cannot plan or strategically enforce, they are built by leading, by example, supporting and trusting your team. If it is a rule, it isn’t fun and if you have to tell people how wonderful things are, we tend to discover they aren’t.
Creativity, motivation and a positive community-based work environment grow from more abstract and free environments where the value is not in how fast you can do it but how well you can do it and where efforts are praised appropriately to the entirety of the team who made it possible.
The good news is that motivation and creativity don’t vanish forever, even if an organization tries its hardest to squash them. They grow back in places where trust, clarity, and respect are nurtured. If you’re leading people, start small: give clear direction and space to explore; celebrate wins loudly and share credit generously and make experiments safe, not scary. A culture worth having isn’t declared on posters, it’s practiced in everyday gestures.
And if you find yourself working in one of those “fictional-but-actually-real” environments, remember that your imagination is still yours. Protect it by setting healthy limits around chaos, looking for allies who share your values, and carving out time for work that excites you. Whether you help shift the culture from within or decide it’s time to grow somewhere new, you’re allowed to choose spaces that fuel rather than drain you, because creativity is a renewable resource, and so is motivation when it’s met with trust and purpose.
About the Author
Mona Elo is a researcher and project communicator, working in international Maritime projects.