boredom, risk, and mission
You may be following the common advice to “start with the why” or “return to the why” for your people. You might find that this is not inspiring them. It’s having little effect, especially on tasks that are not fun to do. If your mission statement and your values and your breathless history of your organization are well-written, they may not offer an intuitive link to many of the week-to-week tasks that your people take on.
A thing that’s worth coming back to, that’s within your “why,” that’s within your mission is “what is at risk in this situation or in this task?” Risk can be frightening and anxiety-inducing. The friendlier side of those negative emotions is suspense, intrigue. Risky work is interesting. It has a plot. Things could turn out for better or for worse.
If you find that, in fact, there is nothing at risk in the task or the work these folks are doing, consider deleting that task. Or, assign them the job of automating or eliminating it. Then, what is at risk — the thing that they can win for the organization — is a happier, less boring, more interesting future for themselves and the rest of the team. Now, instead of just doing a boring compliance-oriented thing, they are heroes of the story who are freeing up time, attention, and dollars for themselves and the rest of the team to truly chase that inspiring mission - that why - that might not have motivated them if you had just repeated it in their faces.
-eric
PS: This kicked me right in the shins as a high school history teacher. There were inevitably lessons in the curriculum each year that even I – the teacher, the resident nerd-for-this-stuff – found boring in prospect and in delivery. In some cases, I was able to make those lessons my favorite, and the kids’ favorite, of the year. The path to that was digging into the characters and the story hidden behind the flashcard vocabulary kids would need to retain for a state test. Briefly put, I had to find what was at risk in this lesson. I had to find the drama. “Late 19th century monetary policy” is a phrase that might put you to sleep before you even get to the end of it, but when you realize that is the dull mask on a life-or-death nationwide battle between farmers and bankers with a three-time presidential candidate criss-crossing the country on a train, screaming himself hoarse about Jesus, it starts to get more interesting.