Why People won't always do what they're told

You've probably felt this too. The tools you've tried are well designed. The incentives make sense. The strategy is clear. And still, something doesn't click.

There is a reason for that. And it is not a strategy problem.

"You are dealing with over 200,000 years of evolution dressed as professionals"

In the 1980s, Robert Sapolsky was studying olive baboons in Kenya when tuberculosis tore through the troop and killed about half the males. It killed the most aggressive ones, because they had been eating contaminated food at the tourist camp where the lower-ranking baboons were not allowed to feed.

With the bullies gone, the troop's social fabric shifted. The younger baboons grew up in a less hostile environment, and their stress physiology changed. Lower cortisol. Stronger immune systems. Longer lives.

The part that matters most for leaders is what happened next. A decade later, long after any baboon who remembered the old culture had died or moved on, the peaceful culture persisted. The animals had stopped shaping the culture. The culture was shaping them.

THE IDEA

Here is the thing most leaders miss. You are not just managing a team. You are designing the conditions in which 200,000 years of evolution shows up for work.

Every person walking into your meeting is running on wiring older than language. The drive to belong, to grow, to contribute, to feel some control over their own lives, these are not preferences you need to activate. They are drives as old as the species, already running, already looking for somewhere to land. Layer on top of that an entire personal history of authority figures who did or didn't trust them, see them, protect them, and you have someone who is not really responding to you. They are responding to everything you remind them of.

This is what Ryan and Deci spent decades exploring. The three needs they identified (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) are not nice-to-haves. Mess up one of them and performance drops. Baumeister and Leary said the same thing about belonging. When it goes missing, cognition measurably drops.

The implication for you is both freeing and frightening. You won’t need to motivate what is already motivated. The human in front of you does not usually need your inspiration. They need you to design conditions where the drives they already carry are able to be expressed.

Sapolsky's baboons are the case study. Remove the bullies, and biology changes. Design the conditions, and a culture outlasts the people who built it. The question is not how to make your team perform, it is, how does the environment you are creating inhibiting their motivation.

The single thing to try this week

This week, try this. Pick one thing you have been trying to motivate your team to do. Instead, ask yourself a different question: How does the environment our organisation creates help the team to realise that they have autonomy, they are valued both personally and for their ongoing contribution?

Not what will inspire them. Not what will hold them accountable. What conditions, built quietly and consistently, will grow your team’s sense of competence, connectedness and autonomy?

You cannot override 200,000 years of evolution. But you can design with it in mind. The people walking through your door are already motivated. Your job is to build the conditions that let them show it.