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For more than three decades, Susan Fowler has challenged one of the most deeply entrenched assumptions in business: that leaders must motivate people to perform.
An internationally recognized expert on self-leadership and motivation, Fowler has worked with leaders in more than 40 countries and coauthored several influential books with leadership legend Ken Blanchard. Her books Why Motivating People Doesn’t Work … and What Does and Master Your Motivation translate decades of self-determination theory research into practical guidance for leaders navigating modern workplaces.
“We need to shift our focus from talking about how much motivation people have to what is the quality of their motivation,” Fowler says. “The science shows that there’s six different types of motivation, and some of them are healthy, and some of them are like junk food.”
That junk food metaphor is the spine of her framework. Three of the six motivational outlooks are suboptimal—disinterest, external, and what Fowler calls “imposed.” And while each can produce a short-term spike of energy, none of it lasts. “When you have energy that’s based on external rewards or fear or anger, resentment, self-righteous indignation, that will give you that burst of energy, but then it’s going to fall,” she says. “You have to keep stoking the fire of fear, hate, loathing, whatever it is—or you’ll do anything to win the prize.”
The crash is already visible across the workforce: “Look at this generation. They talk about quiet quitting. They’re suboptimally motivated. A lot of them have the disinterested motivational outlook where they just don’t give a heck anymore.”
The deeper structural problem is that leaders have been trained into the wrong defaults. Ever since B.F. Skinner did his experiments on pigeons, organizations have run on reward-and-recognition theory—assuming the only lever available is an external one. Fowler rejects that binary entirely. “Just by understanding that when you’re offering people incentives and rewards, you’re actually undermining the very behavior that you’re hoping to get from those people—their full being, their energy, their sustainable vitality toward a goal,” she says. A sales manager who resorts to bonuses because a salesperson dislikes cold calls is making a logical mistake: “If they don’t like doing it, they’re not intrinsically motivated. So what does the leader think? Oh, my only default is giving them external rewards because they’re extrinsically motivated. And that’s just not true.”
Susan Fowler
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What is true, according to decades of self-determination theory research, is that every human being has three psychological needs whose fulfillment determines whether they thrive or merely comply. The first is choice: not unlimited autonomy, but the felt sense of genuine agency. “You need to think or feel that you’re actually choosing what you’re doing,” Fowler says. “Even if you say, I’m going to do everything you tell me to do, and I’m doing it because I trust you, because I admire your values, we’re aligned—I’m choosing to follow.” Strip that away and resentment follows. “When people don’t understand why that autonomy is missing, then they resent whatever it is they’re being asked to do.”
Connection, the second need, is what transforms a task from a job into a calling. Fowler invokes Viktor Frankl, whose account of surviving a Nazi concentration camp she returns to throughout her work. Starving on forced marches, Frankl noticed a sunrise and realized something his captors couldn’t touch. “He realized, they can’t take that away from me. I can choose to see the beauty of that sunrise,” Fowler says. “He could choose to help someone if they fell, even though he knew he’d get whipped for helping. If he got a piece of bread and the man next to him didn’t, he could choose to share his piece of bread.” In the most stripped-down circumstances imaginable, Frankl was fulfilling all three psychological needs at once. “That’s why he thrived,” Fowler says.
Connection also lives in a far more cheerful story, one that performance researcher Charles Garfield encountered on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. Pulling up to a toll booth one day, Garfield found the operator dancing and singing as he collected the fare. When Garfield tracked the man down afterward and asked what his deal was, the tollbooth operator explained that he was an aspiring actor who had decided his booth was a stage. “He said, ‘I realized that it’s not that I just want to be a dancer, singer, and actor. It’s that I am a dancer, singer, and actor. That’s who I am. I’m a performer,’” Fowler recounts. “He didn’t see what he was doing as something other than who he was, his sense of purpose.” This, she explains, is the integrated motivational outlook—when work and identity become indistinguishable.
The third psychological need is competence: the desire to grow, not the guarantee of mastery. “It’s like toddlers learning to walk,” Fowler says. “They keep falling, but they don’t start crying and think, I’m such a dumb kid, I can’t even walk. They stand up and they’re laughing and joyful and they almost run before they can walk. They’re so excited.” What erodes that drive is the evaluative gaze—including, counterintuitively, praise. Citing Carol Dweck’s growth mindset research, Fowler cautions that cheerleading can backfire: “Praising is one of the most detrimental things we can do to people because the way it’s interpreted by them is that we’re evaluating them, we’re judging them.” The better move is to ask how they felt about what they did, and let them build their own internal measure of progress.
The framework has sharp implications for artificial intelligence. Fowler argues that AI, as currently deployed, is structurally eroding all three psychological needs at once. “AI leaves people feeling they don’t have a choice. It’s here whether they want it or not,” she says. “It’s giving people a false sense of connection. It’s not fulfilling their need for connection because it’s not genuine and caring and mutual.” Even AI’s sycophancy worries her. “One of the reasons people turn to AI is because it’s programmed with sycophancy, to praise you, to make you think you’re the smartest thing ever,” she warns. “It’s a new form of suboptimal motivation delivered at scale.”
McKinsey’s post-pandemic research confirmed what the science had been predicting. The three primary reasons people left their jobs were a desire for autonomy, escape from environments where profits trumped people, and a lack of growth and learning. “The very reason people leave organizations is that their psychological needs are not being fulfilled,” Fowler says. Those same people, she adds, often chase external perks into a psychologically identical job. The problem follows them.
After 30 years of coaching in dozens of countries, what still surprises Fowler is not ignorance of the science but resistance to it. “People spend 75% of their time awake as adults connected to their work,” she says. “If we’re not having our psychological needs filled through our work, we’re not thriving, not just at work, but even in our lives. There’s no such thing as compensatory need satisfaction.”
The science is not ambiguous and the stakes could not be more personal. The question Fowler leaves on the table is whether organizations care enough about people—not as assets to be managed, but as the very reason they are in business at all.
