What We Get Wrong About Motivation

Disengagement isn’t laziness. It’s a signal.

If I could share one insight with my younger self — and therefore with you, my dears — it would be this:

There is no such thing as a motivation problem.

Not with students. Not with employees. Not with volunteers, neighbors, campaign teams, committees, or that one person in your world who never follows through.

For a long time, everyone told me motivation was the problem.

The people selling the books. The teachers on the listservs. The conference sessions where we huddled together trading solutions for “poorly motivated” groups like it was hot gossip. (Who had the best incentive system. Who had cracked the code. Who finally got that group to care.)

So I believed them. And I read the books. I took the notes. I tried the motivational strategies my friends and colleagues recommended.

And none of it worked — not because the advice was bad, but because we were all looking at the wrong damn thing.

Here’s what I eventually saw: Disengagement is never a failure of motivation. It’s a failure of integration.

What we were calling laziness or apathy wasn’t a lack of drive. It was a signal. A system quietly telling us someone wasn’t connected — to the work, to the purpose, or to the people doing it alongside them.

People check out when they can’t see where they fit or how their contribution matters — when they’re adjacent to the work, but never invited inside it.

And once I understood that, I stopped trying to fix people — their energy, their attitude, their effort — and started looking at the structures around them.

We weren’t dealing with unmotivated humans. We were dealing with poorly integrated ones.

Here’s what that looked like in practice.

When I was teaching in Los Angeles, my workspace was split awkwardly into two rooms. On paper, it was one big, glorious computer lab. In reality, it was a cave… with a bonus cave.

And in the most remote corner of the darkest cave, a small group of teenage girls online-shopped for prom dresses every single day. Every. Single. Day.

Work untouched. Eyes glittering. Energy fully accounted for — just aimed somewhere else.

At first, I tried everything I’d been taught to try. Gentle nudges. Cheerful invitations. Consequences. Incentives. The full motivational song and dance.

Finally (finally!) I shifted my approach.

Instead of chasing disengagement, I started designing for integration. I stopped trying to pull people back to the work and started building systems where the team owned the work — and took responsibility for bringing each other in.

I focused less on behavior and more on leadership.

I started teaching my people how to onboard peers. How to coach instead of complain. How to say, “Come sit with me — I’ll show you how this works.”

Every “They aren’t doing anything” was now answered with: “Great. Bring them with you.”

And that’s when things began to change.

Because here’s the truth — and this applies far beyond a classroom: When someone isn’t contributing, the issue is almost never effort.

It’s integration.

• Do they understand the mission?

• Do they know their role?

• Do they feel safe asking questions?

• Do they see how their work connects to others?

• Do they have real ownership, or just proximity?

Motivation doesn’t create engagement. Integration does.

So let me zoom this out.

1. You don’t have a motivation problem.

If it looks like a motivation problem and sounds like one, it still isn’t.

No one joins your team, your board, your neighborhood project, or your cause thinking, “I can’t wait to disappoint everyone today.”

People want to matter. People want to contribute. People want to feel capable and useful.

When they don’t show up that way, that’s not a personal flaw. That’s a system failing to integrate a human.

2. Integration requires training — not pressure.

Every person I ever labeled as “doing nothing” was missing one of three things: clarity, skill, or context.

So I started checking the setup:

• Are expectations explicit?

• Is the work modeled, not just assigned?

• Is learning normalized instead of punished?

• Is responsibility shared instead of hoarded?

Motivation is a unicorn. Integration is a process you can build.

3. Empowerment beats micromanagement. Every time.

When we hover, nag, rescue, or redo work “just to get it done,” we quietly teach people not to lead.

So I stopped rescuing and started empowering.

I let people try, mess up, recover, and eventually own their part of the mission — whether that mission was publishing a book, running a food drive, organizing a block party, or changing local policy.

Back in that two-room lab, I didn’t need better speeches. I needed better systems.

And once I started building them, the room changed — faster than any motivational tactic ever could.

A Question for You

Where in your life are you trying to motivate someone when what they actually need is integration — clarity, training, and real ownership?

And the spicier one: Where are you waiting to feel motivated instead of building the structure your future self is already asking for?

(Yes. I see you. Now go build the system.)