How to motivate your team when raises and promotions are off the table

It’s hard sometimes to motivate teams when times are good. What about right now when we might have fewer incentives to be working with? This is really, really hard and it’s a situation that we’re all facing, whether we’re a small business owner or a corporate manager, or an HR leader or an executive, we are facing this time where we have less to play around with. Bonuses are a little bit lower. Raises are more difficult to commit to.

Promotions might be quoted, and you might not have space to be making a lot of the moves that we used to know that we could always promise to folks. Now, how do we motivate our teams when we don’t have the same incentives when they potentially had access to those same incentives and now they’re gone. This is really, really important to figure out if we want to keep our high performers because, yeah, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but you’re lucky to have a job that’s not doing it for people anymore.

And I get it. It’s hard right now. If you’re an A player or a senior person in your company, it’s scary to go back on the job market. There are a lot of people out there looking for, for good jobs, and it doesn’t mean that’s motivating your teams because then you get into this quiet cracking zone, which we’ve talked about on the show, which is when high performers stay. They start to quiet, quit. They start to do less.

They bring the morale of the team down. This chips away at the productivity, at your team’s culture, your lower performers, they start slacking off even more, and you’ve really crushed the soul of your team and destroyed productivity. Okay, so like you’re lucky to have a job as not the, not the line of choice. So what do we do instead? That’s what we’re gonna talk about in today’s show. I’m Leah Garvin, and this is the New Manager Playbook podcast, where I’m on a mission to make managing your team the easiest part of your job.

And yeah, with these, you know, slimmer incentives with promotion, quotas, with, with bonuses constrained with resources, with not ability to hire backfills, it’s like we’re outta options as managers in many cases. Even if you’re a business owner and you could, you know, grant any raise or promotion or title change, your budget is limited. You have resource constraints. And my middle manager’s listening, you know, a lot of times we don’t have access to be able to promise really a lot.

It’s, it’s decided maybe one or two or three levels of the ladder above us. So we’re here trying to motivate a team and we don’t have a ton of influence over the incentives. That sure is a hard place to be in. And I’ve been there and it sucks because your team’s looking at you thinking you have more power than you have. You don’t wanna say, well, I don’t really make any decisions. ’cause that doesn’t motivate any confidence in them.

But you kind of don’t. So what do we do? And this is something I said, we we’re facing this, whether we are a business owner, like a kind of first time manager and HR leader. Anything between that, we have to motivate with constrained incentives. So that’s, that’s our context here. Now the old, you’re lucky to have a job talking about, well, the work’s, really exciting. Things like that. Like these things don’t really do it for folks.

So I’m just gonna go ahead and just like say, okay, yeah, they’re lucky to have a job. Great. Cool. Thank you. But this isn’t gonna keep folks operating at their best. Firing on all cylinders is not gonna keep, you know, your high performers really motivated and, and stepping up and out, right? A a 10 xer means they’re doing 10 times the amount of work of someone else. So how do you keep a star performer overdelivering when they know they’re not gonna get that pay out at the end?

Or maybe they wonder and you can’t commit to that. So here’s what we gotta do. We have to show our team member that we are invested in their growth in other ways. Now, this doesn’t mean we’re like, Hey, you know, like don’t worry about money. Don’t worry about this. Right? We’re not undermining what is important to them. We’re not belittling it. We’re not gaslighting them, okay? But we are saying, given the constraints, right? Just like we talked about with dealing with setbacks or talking about change, we acknowledge the situation given the constraints.

Here are some ways that I really wanna invest in you or that you can invest in your career, or that you can get exposure. You can give visibil visibility. Now you start to plant the seeds with your team members around what’s in it for them sticking around. And again, it’s not like an ultimatum that they’re threatening you with. It’s not like, it’s not like, okay, you know, do this or leave, or This is the only thing I have.

This changes the conversation with your teams. They see that there’s more than the one thing that they maybe had their eye on. You don’t say that thing’s not important. You don’t say, that’s not even attainable, right? It’s saying, Hey, as we move you closer to this, here’s some stove over here that we’re also gonna be building up. Because I’ve seen it firsthand when, when a manager, I, I’ve been there when a manager invested in me in building skills, whether it was around public speaking or some of my facilitation skills or, you know, learning, you know, taking manager training so that I was ready when it was time to be a manager, when my managers invested in me in that way.

Without giving me any extra money or bonus or even make turning, you know, turning me into a manager at the time or giving me a promotion. I saw a path and I said, okay, so this person believes in me. There’s something to stay for. There’s something to be here for. I have a path I’m working on. This, this person values me. And when we can’t give folks the money that they want or the promotion that they want, the immediate thing that comes to mind is, no one values me.

My work doesn’t matter. I’m invisible. Like, forget it. Why am I even here? Okay. Like, that’s what they’re thinking. I’m just telling you that flat out, that’s that’s what’s happening. So we gotta show ’em why they’re here and what I see so much. All of this talk, especially business owners, but I’m seeing it in the corporate world too, actually, just as much. Both, both are at fault to that. Like leadership in corporate and business owners talk about how tough times are.

They talk about how, you know, a business owner might say, I’m not even paying myself. And a leader might say, Hey, we’re everybody’s pulling back. Uh, everybody’s constrained. We can’t get backfills, we can’t get this. Your team looks at you. Whether you are one rung higher in the ladder or you are c-suite, s, v, p and a Fortune 100 making millions of dollars, they see you and they think this person has a better deal than me right now.

They think that, and they think that even when the resources are constrained, that you, you, the manager again, one rung or 10 million rungs higher is getting something that they’re not. That is human nature. We see someone they have, like, they’re, you know, because by, by virtue of you being senior them, you have something that they don’t have, you’re definitely getting paid more. Right? We have to understand the context. So when we are talking about woe is me, you know, well, you know, I, the business is tight.

We can’t, you know, we’re, we have cuts here, we got shareholders, all this stuff. Think about the shoes of the person you’re telling. This might be an entry level employee. They have really maybe very little understanding of how revenue works or profitability or shareholders or, you know, share price, any of this. They, they just, they don’t have that understanding. And yeah, I think our, our employees should have some better business acumen in many cases. But, but we’re looking in their shoes right now and we’re thinking, what does this person care about?

And that person. Carries about themselves and what they’re getting and they’re thinking about what they’re not getting. Again, because if you are telling a team member last year you got a raise this year, you got a 5% raise this year, you’re getting a 2% raise, but you did just as well, but you did a great job. It’s just that there’s less, you know, the, the company’s giving out less money. The person’s like, Hmm, what I got screwed and how do I know this happened?

To me working in a Fortune 100 star performer, same performance ratings raise was less. Hmm Did I feel more motivated because that Fortune 100 I worked in, they were still doing pretty good. Looked at the stock market, wasn’t struggling. So like why? Right? This is the thing that your team members are thinking. And what I try to do here on the show is show you both sides, right? I understand the constraints you’re under. Believe me, because again, as a middle manager in a corporate job in a Fortune 100, I did not have direct control over what my team members got paid.

Promotions were decided in committees, and if this person did not have enough criteria stacked against other folks that were being evaluated, they did not get that promotion. That was something I had, I literally had no control over. I could advocate for them, but there was a lot of stuff behind the scenes I wasn’t aware of. So I have been there. I’m not, I’m, I’m not belittling the struggle that you have as the leader. I want you to think about what your team member is, is thinking in, in their shoes.

So they’re thinking, I don’t really care that the stock market is down. I don’t really care that you as a business owner aren’t getting paid or that it costs a lot to run a business. A lot of my clients that run a, a business that has a brick and mortar, a physical location that is so freaking expensive to operate something with a physical colocation, the rent, the overhead, the utilities, you know, everything, your team members. They don’t care.

They don’t understand that. They are not concerned with that. When you say, that’s why they’re not getting a raise because the landlord increased the rent and everything’s more expensive and supply chain and all this stuff that they’re like, okay, like cover your ears. La, la, la, la, la. Okay, what about me? What about me? Why is that matter to me? And. We have to understand this, I’m telling you, because this is where we lose our team members.

We make the story about AB things that feel abstract to our team members and they don’t care, and they feel like no one’s investing in them, and they feel like it’s a bunch of bs. So this is the context, and this is why I’ve already said it. We’ve gotta show them how we’re investing in them. We don’t say, oh, rent went up and so I can’t pay you more. No. We don’t say, yeah, we got direction from the top.

Bonuses are flat, or no, there’s no raises. No. We say, Hey, there is a lot that’s going on, much of which is outta my control. I have looked really, really carefully at what I have control over and how I can help support you. Let’s say someone wants to become a manager and you just can’t hire another person right now, like you can’t make them into a manager. That’s not, that’s not in the cards. You might say, Hey, I wanna get you there so that when that headcount opens up, you are the first person on the list.

Here’s the training program that I’m gonna be doing with you or putting you in, or a couple books that I’m recommending or podcast so that you are completely lined up. And hey, we don’t have budget right now to bring someone in. So we’re gonna kind of create this structure of a curriculum so that when you’re ready, we can do it. So read these articles, these books, like you can get real creative. And that’s all free, right?

You can do this for no cost. You can also say, Hey, someone they wanna be promoted, so they’re gonna need to have eyes of leadership, right in your team. Okay. I don’t know when we’re gonna have promotions. I don’t know if there’s quotas or not. I don’t know that. But what I know is when you have visibility with senior leadership, then you don’t, they don’t get into their committee and go like, who’s Jim? I never heard of that guy.

Right? You wanna avoid that. So I’m gonna have you do this presentation. And then we’re gonna share it with this team, and then you can do a lunch and learn and you would teach someone. So I wanna really invest in your visibility right now so that when it’s time folks know who you are and they feel like, gosh, Jim has really been adding value. He’s been in every single presentation. He did this teachbacks, he’s doing these lunch and learns like Jim, whoa.

He is like legit. Right? That is what you do for your teams. You invest in other ways. If you’re a business owner, right? You say, Hey, you know, we don’t have a, you know, a ton of runway right now with, with growth, but I’d love you to kind of shadow me in some of this work or another team member, or kind of create this apprenticeship program so you’re learning the skill so that when I can really make the moves you are ready to go.

The ca the, the caveat, obviously the natural thing that has to happen is when there’s more budget, when there’s some flex, when you can hire you, you honor in those commitments, right? You’ve gotta follow through. But the cases right now, that might be a year or two in the future, and that’s a conversation for a different day, right? It’s assumed you’re gonna honor the commitment. Like, let’s just go with that. What we’re doing right now is getting that buy-in with genuine, you know, clear action steps.

Meeting someone can be in that gives them visibility, opportunities to learn a skill, opportunities to, you know, develop in an area that maybe they’re not as strong. Right. With this over-reliance on utilizing Gen ai, a lot of people got really weak at writing, at critical thinking, at figuring out like, how do I solve a problem without getting an answer? Okay. That’s a skill to be developing folks in. Okay. How about prompt engineering? Right? Get someone, Hey, you are gonna be our resident AI expert.

We know we’re gonna need that and like spend a couple hours a week really getting deep. How can we integrate this technology on our team? That’s a huge, huge thing that that person, that is a life skill that will be incr like invaluable for that person as they progress. To get to do that at work, during work times, that person should be paying you. Just kidding. But yeah. Right. You get where I’m going with that. We have so many ways we can demonstrate we are investing in our teams.

If we stop at saying, well, raises are flat, we don’t have it, and it’s don’t have this, and don’t have that, and the economy and the uncertainty and the, and the overhead and the prices and the, and the tariffs, whatever. If we say all these things at the macro to an individual that now they can’t pay their own rent. They can’t take that vacation that they were waiting for five years to do because finally they were gonna get that raise.

Or they can’t, like, you know, they’re, whatever they’re doing, that’s what they’re thinking about. We’ve gotta appeal to them and the what’s in it for me and we show them, hey, there is something very, very big in it for you. If you stay, if you’re here, if you invest this energy, we are investing in you, your team members invest right back. Now, this is something that it can be hard. I know as a leader to map out for your team.

It can be hard to look across, you know it. It can be like, yeah, I wanna do that, but like, I don’t know how that applies. Send me an email. [email protected]. We will map this out. We will sit down and look at your teams and say, Hey, what are the goals of your team members? Where could they be situated? What’s an opportunity? We will do that and get, and you’ll come away with a solid, solid action plan for how to bring to life what I’m talking about.

Because again, if it’s gonna be another year, two years, where money’s tight in your company, or maybe you don’t know how long that’s gonna be, right? Because you’re not a senior decision maker, you’ve gotta do this like yesterday to reengage your teams. I’ve said it before, 21% engagement in the workplace, one in five. We can get this number up. We’ve gotta do things like what I’m talking about in the show today. Reach out. [email protected]. I am here to help you.

I’m here to help reengage your teams and take that pressure off you as a leader. See you next time.