The Surprising Thing That Kills Team Motivation

3 days ago
5 min read

It wasn't laziness. It wasn't an attitude. It was something so simple I missed it for years.

How can your team focus on a target they can’t see and don’t understand?

My husband and I were goal-oriented. After all, we had started chartering whole commercial jet airliners to take our customers from Alaska to Hawaii to enjoy the vacation packages we were selling. We knew we had to sell enough seats to pay for the whole plane.

We communicated our goals to the team and tried to drum up enthusiasm for hitting the goals. A major component of our culture was a Win-Win philosophy — if the company succeeded, everyone succeeded with it. It was baked into our guiding principles. We proclaimed it out loud, all the time.

But you can't ask someone to feel invested in a scoreboard they can't read.

An employee shows up, does the list of things asked of them, and goes home. That's not a character flaw — that's just the job as it was handed to them. An owner does something different. An owner asks, “Is this actually working?” They notice what's off even when nobody assigned them to notice it. They treat the company's money like it's their own money.

The difference was never effort. It was ownership of the outcome. And you cannot own an outcome you don't understand.

Working hard and caring about the outcome are not the same thing.

And these were good people. Hard workers. People who showed up early, stayed late, and cared about doing their job well. But somewhere between “doing your job well” and “caring whether the company wins,” there was this gap. I didn't understand it yet. But in retrospect, I realized that gap was costing us more than any bad hire or slow season ever had.

The lunch on the Big Island that changed everything.

One day in 1994, John and I had lunch on the Big Island with our mentor, Robert Kiyosaki (who later became famous for his book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”). After hearing about how our young company was growing, but was still keeping us tied to operating it, he told us to get two books: “The E-Myth” by Michael Gerber and “The Great Game of Business” by Jack Stack.

We purchased and devoured those two books immediately. And by the time we returned to Anchorage, we were determined to change the way we ran the company. Jack Stack encouraged the use of a concept he called “Open Book Management.” It was radical, revolutionary, but we liked the idea.

We opened the books.

Not metaphorically — literally. We shared our financial statements with our entire team, not just the managers. But we quickly discovered that they did not have the faintest idea how to read a financial statement. Many of them had never seen one.

So we had to take it one step further. We needed to teach them. I sat our team down and walked through the P&L, line by line. I explained what our gross revenue was, and how the cost of goods sold was subtracted from that. I showed them where the money we paid for the charter jets hit the P&L, and also what we paid the vendors for the tour components like hotel rooms, condos, and rental cars. What was left was our gross margin. Then I showed them how subtracting other operational costs like telephone lines, labor, and advertising led to net profit.

This was a concrete dollars-and-cents illustration of what “a good month” actually meant in real numbers, not just feel-good vibes.

I'll be honest, it was risky. Most business people we knew thought we were crazy to do it. And it left us feeling vulnerable - exposed. There's a version of you as a business owner that wants to protect that information — maybe out of habit, maybe because you're not sure your team can handle knowing the company had a rough quarter. I had that instinct too.

But here's what happened instead: the moment our people understood how the business actually made money, they started asking better questions. They stopped guessing. And — this is the part that surprised me most — they got more forgiving of the tough months, because now they understood why they were tough. AND they started caring about the costs.

You can't expect people to care about numbers they've never been shown.

If you handed your P&L to your team tomorrow, would they know what they were looking at?

Here's the biggest part: teaching people the numbers got us only partway there. They understood more. They cared more. But something was still missing.

Understanding isn't the same as benefiting.

So we took it a step further. We built goals tied to those same numbers we'd just taught everyone to read. We put a company-wide bonus plan behind hitting them. And — this mattered more than I expected — we made a genuine habit of celebrating when we won. Not a quiet line in a memo. Actual celebration. We handed out $100 bills at staff meetings for hitting the monthly goals. And when we met our annual goals, we handed out checks that were usually 4 digits and sometimes 5 digits.

Then we threw a party! A BIG party! Fancy restaurants, limousines, even weekend trips.

That's when the real shift happened. Not just because they understood the business. Because they understood the business and had skin in the game. The wins that hit their own pockets were what generated the motivation we were seeking. We had created a team that was aligned and cohesive. We worked together to achieve a common goal, and then we came together to celebrate. The bonding and unification of the team was incredible. It was magic!

People don't get motivated by numbers. They get motivated by numbers that pay them.

Our team stopped acting like people clocking hours and started acting like people who owned a piece of the outcome — because, in a very real sense, they did.

Podcast Spotlight

Knack 4 Business with Bernie Franzgote

In 1999, my husband and I bought a second home on Maui.

Not because the business was winding down — because we'd finally built it so it didn't need us to stay in it all the time.

That's the destination that Bernie and I unpacked on Knack 4 Business: what it actually takes to go from the founder who can't leave to the owner who doesn't have to stay. We covered delegation that actually sticks, and why building an advisory board changed how we made decisions.

The metaphor I keep coming back to: the owner's job is to be like the orchestra leader who sets the tempo, but does not play every instrument. The sooner you internalize that, the sooner the business can scale without you holding it up.

🎧 Business Systems That Free The Owner | Ral T. West

Final Thoughts

So if you're in a meeting wondering why your team doesn't seem to care the way you do, I'd gently push back on the story you're telling yourself about why.

It's probably not laziness. It's probably not an attitude.

It's probably that you're asking them to be invested in a scoreboard they've never been shown — and to win a game where winning doesn't actually change anything for them.

Fix those two things, and watch what happens.

Try This This Week

You don't need a full Open-Book Management rollout to start. Just start.

Pick one number from your P&L that matters most right now.
Explain it to your team in plain language — no jargon, no assumptions.
Ask them: “Based on this, do you think we had a good month?” Let them answer before you do.
Tell them what's in it for them if that number moves in the right direction.

To your freedom,

Ral West