Have your colleagues become kind of blah about work these days? Whether you call it quiet-quitting or just a pandemic-induced dip in morale, many leaders are struggling to motivate their teams to do their best work.

But it doesn’t need to be that way, explains Leigh Thompson, a professor of management and organizations. And not just because managers can work to motivate employees, but because employees generally want to be doing their best work, too.

“Most of us want to be engaged because it’s just more fun to be engaged,” Thompson says.

We’ll hear more from her today about how you can motivate your teams to reengage at work.

Motivating People to Do Their Best Work

Thompson is an expert in negotiations, including negotiating relationships at work. In the most recent episode of The Insightful Leader podcast, she talks about how leaders can motivate their teams to do their best work, not by instituting top-down mandates, but by inspiring employees to want to do their best work.

She focuses on three key actions leaders should take:

Don’t make assumptions about where employees are at: If you have a team member who seems checked out, don’t assume it’s because they’re just not into their job anymore. Respectfully probe to find out if it’s you or them that’s making them disengage, and if it’s them, it may be for reasons unrelated to their actual job. And remember that truly engaged employees show it in different ways. “If I’m an extrovert and I’m extremely animated in the way I talk, maybe I shouldn’t be using those same cues to judge whether another person on my team is really engaged,” Thompson says.

Look inward, too: You need to also regularly ask yourself these same questions. Essentially, secure your own oxygen mask before helping others. Thompson has done research that shows that the more powerful a person is in the organization, the more “contagious” their emotional mindset is. “Team leaders are very contagious. If my affect is low or negative, or glass is half empty, that is going to strongly effect the mental set of my team,” she says.

Create a team charter: This is “a one-page mission statement collectively coauthored by all members of the team. This is not a decree that’s kind of written by a leader and foisted on the team. This is a collectively written document,” she explains. The charter should include statements about what the team’s purpose is and what each person’s roles and responsibilities are within the team. This allows each employee to take ownership of what’s expected of them. And that makes people more likely to feel energized about what they do for the team.

You can learn more about how to write a team charter and hear other ideas for reengaging your team in the full podcast episode here. We’re also working on an article covering the same topic, and I’ll let you know when that’s posted.