In an economic context based on competitiveness and productive efficiency, staff motivation seems an indisputable condition. Surely you think that the more motivated, the better, right?
Do you understand Juan?
- I don't understand at all. It seems impossible that a person who was so important, so productive, so successful in this company could have become what he is.
- It's true, he had everything. He could have gotten what he wanted here: power, honors, money. The big boss only swore by him.
- And now he's angry about nothing, anything you tell him about his job seems to be a personal attack.
- He always reminds you of his old battles and his old victories. Its legitimacy is in the past.
- Yes, it is out of date. He has clung to the Project as if it were his son, when they proposed a new department to him, he refused, arguing that I no longer know what, but in reality, I think he was afraid.
- I think it's burned.
- Burned? But if it does nothing more than work. You didn't meet him before, he used to go out with colleagues to have a drink, to have dinner, to play a double of tennis…
- Juan? It's hard to believe it.
- Well, it wasn't always the way it is. I remember when he was entrusted with the head of his department, giving him preference over an older colleague. I was super motivated. He wanted to eat the world. He began to devote all his energy and all his time to the Project. It was the admiration of many and the envy of many others. Everyone was betting on him to get to the top management.
- What happened?
- Nobody knows. Now he seems to live in a bubble, he does not come out, he gets angry easily, he clings to outdated ideas, he seems bitter, disappointed. I think his career, and even his job, is in jeopardy. It would be a shame to lose him!
- What do you say?
- You are right. He knows a lot, he knows the company like few others, he knows the market, he has experience. They are not pleasant assets to lose.
- What happened to him?
What happened to him, right? How is it possible that such a motivated collaborator has become a problem?
Precisely the problem is in the motivation, or rather, in the excessive motivation.
Of course, most, if not all, managers want motivated collaborators. Highly motivated.
In an economic context based on competitiveness and productive efficiency, staff motivation seems an indisputable condition. Surely you think that the more motivated, the better, right?
Well, not all the forest is oregano.
It is true that up to a certain threshold, professional efficacy and level of motivation are correlated. Motivation increases, dedication increases and professional efficiency increases. But this has a cap beyond which the effects are reversed and supermotivation generates negative benefits. An over-motivated contributor will become a problem. Let's see why.
The affective balance of people rests on three pillars: professional life, private life and relational life.
When a person's emotional balance is noticeably disrupted, they experience tension, anxiety, stress, depression, and other undesirable and unproductive effects.
Our affective capital is limited, it cannot be stretched at will, so a super professional motivation ends up depleting the other affective capital, it is detrimental to them.
In general, relational life declines first because people struggle to maintain family stability as best they can. He no longer hangs out with friends ("I just don't have time"), he gives up sports and hobbies. If professional over-motivation is maintained, or increases, family life will also be affected. The balance is broken.
The affective needs are focused on a single pillar: professional life, and any blow to it shakes the emotional building. The identification between the person and the work is excessive. The affective needs rest on a single support while making it more fragile, as would happen with a healthy leg if the other were in a cast.
A confusion is installed between being and doing. The person projects herself in her work, identifies with it; all criticism of it becomes personal criticism, all the more damaging that it no longer has any other affective source to re-stabilize the whole.
In their environment, their colleagues and collaborators learn not to comment, to avoid confrontations and the super motivated stops receiving feedback, or receives it in biased feedback, and therefore useless.
By not receiving feedback, a pernicious form of isolation is produced that results in the loss, partial or total, of the capacity for evolution.
The affective imbalance creates a dependency, affective also, of the work in which the supermotivated person has invested. It depends on what you do because it is already the only thing you love and can be emotionally gratifying. To leave him, to abandon his project, would be to leave what he likes, what he "is". Consequently, the person loses adaptability.
Supermotivation is associated with specific projects, which provide satisfaction and pleasure. Once the project that provided the gratifying success is finished, the present that always seems dull remains, all the more so as our super motivated will have missed a train while isolating herself in her. Those that remain are not so important. And so he becomes a nostalgic for the past.
And all that happens to the John of our story. He was super motivated. He devoted himself exclusively to his work, renouncing his relational life, perhaps also his personal life, and now he finds himself marginalized, disillusioned and out of date.
Motivation is good, essential, fundamental. But this matter as in so many, excess is a defect and the best can be the enemy of the good.
A good coach tries to motivate his player, but does not allow him to burn.
