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The Real #1 Motivator at Work (It’s Not Pay)

by | Creating an Accountability Culture, Culture, Effective Leadership, Employee Engagement, High Performance, Managing Employees, Profitability and Growth, Sales & Marketing

Most executives assume the biggest motivator at work is compensation.

They’re wrong.

Research—and decades of organizational performance data—show something far more powerful: the feeling of progress every single day.

When employees believe they are winning—moving the needle, improving, mastering something meaningful—their motivation skyrockets. Yet most banks fail to define what “progress” actually means for their teams.

The result? Talented employees feel stuck. Lower performers stay disengaged. Leaders mistakenly assume capability is the problem—when in reality, the system is.

In this video, Roxanne Emmerich reveals why progress is the hidden driver of performance—and how leaders can activate it inside their organizations.

You’ll discover:

  • Why compensation and appreciation alone don’t sustain motivation

  • How undefined progress quietly creates disengagement in your team

  • The simple “one-needle” mastery approach that turns struggling employees into top performers

When leaders create visible progress systems, something remarkable happens: people begin to believe they can win.

And once they believe they can win, performance accelerates.

Watch this week’s episode to discover how to build a culture where progress fuels performance.

Watch now. 

Trick question for you. What is the number one motivator for employees?

Every time I ask executives, they say pay, up to a certain level. Yes, the research shows that—but that’s not it.

Feeling appreciated? Yes, that’s important—but that’s not it.

Are you ready for the answer?

The answer is the feeling of progress every single day.

But what is progress?

That is the question that needs to be solved. For many people, as we established last week when I was talking, we mentioned that they think they’re tied to profit in such a way that they believe they’re performing in the top ten percent. So perhaps they do not truly tie to profit.

What we have to figure out for them is: progress on what?

Here’s what I’m going to suggest.

When I did graduate work in organizational development, I discovered the concept of making sure you never get ahead of your skis. You take people from learned helplessness—the belief that “I could never do that”—and you give them one thing to do.

You guide them to mastery.

You celebrate it. You high-five them. And you make sure the system is in place to keep that needle up.

Then you show them another needle to move.

You put a system in place after they move that one up to make sure it stays there. Then you add another.

Here’s why this matters.

Some of your lower performers are actually high performers who have simply not been properly groomed because they cannot answer the question: progress on what?

But people get energized by the feeling of making progress every single day.

Once they start to feel like they’re winning, suddenly some of your lower performers become some of your higher performers—and you didn’t think that was possible.

But here’s the real miracle.

They didn’t think it was possible either.

Next week, join me as we cover the next piece: How do we create a workspace everyone wants to be in—one that supports high performers and doesn’t allow low performers to suck the energy out of the room?

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