The kind of leadership that actually motivates doesn’t chase results

There’s a very effective way to demotivate a technical team. I’ve seen it. And, to be honest, I’ve practiced it myself at times.

It looks like this:
you skip the process, jump straight to the outcome, compare it to what it should be… and you charge for the gap.

At the beginning of my career I believed leadership was exactly that: demanding results, until something uncomfortable became clear: Teams lose motivation when it feels like no one is genuinely interested in how they get there.

Over time, and through reading leaders who built extraordinary cultures, like Bill Walsh in The Score Takes Care of Itself, I internalized a simple but powerful idea:

Leadership, at its best, is not about evaluation.
It’s about teaching.

Walsh didn’t lead by obsessing over the scoreboard. He led by obsessing over the process: the right details, daily decisions, understanding the context and technical details and what he must do to teach and support their team to overcome those problems. The score would take care of itself.

This resonates deeply with technical leadership at any level.

The leaders who motivated me the most are never the ones who are best at “holding people accountable.” They were the ones who got involved. So this reflection is mainly an internal daily reminder exercise.

They asked how the system worked. They wanted to understand the why behind decisions. They want to understand how we got there. They went into the details, not to control, but to learn. Not because they had all the answers. But because they had genuine technical curiosity.

It’s important to clarify something here. I don’t believe motivation is something a leader can or should manufacture for others. Motivation is personal. It’s individual. And it’s not a leader’s job to constantly “pump up” people who are disengaged. What is a leader’s responsibility, though, is not to destroy motivation.

And one of the most effective ways to avoid demotivating a team is simple:
show genuine interest in the work, the process, and the problems they are trying to solve, you will demotivate less if you:

• Understand (or truly wants to understand) the problem.
• Respect the complexity of the work.
• and you are willing to think with the team.

When that happens, something shifts.
- Commitment rises.
- Conversations become honest.
- Ownership emerges.

I’ve also seen and practiced mistakenly the opposite. And here comes the uncomfortable mirror.

When I’ve focused only on outcomes, when I’ve charged without listening, when I’ve skipped the process to get straight to the metric or final results. motivation drops.

Results matter. Of course they do. But in complex systems, results are not imposed, they are designed, they are taught, they are repeated until they become culture.

In the end, leadership isn’t defined by the pressure you apply when things go wrong. It’s defined by the environment you create while things are being built.

You don’t need to motivate your team.
What you do need is to avoid demotivating them.

And one of the fastest ways to demotivate is simple: Show no genuine interest in the details of their work, because if you don’t care to understand what they do, then it’s fair to ask why you’re leading them in the first place?