The Remarkable Leadership Podcast · The Kevin Eikenberry Group

Motivating the Unmotivated with Matt Granados

·38 min·3 clips

Matt Granados explains why motivation is a state of mind, not a character trait, and how leaders can influence it.

Motivation starts as the problem leaders think they already understand. The host sets it up as a common management headache, then Matt Granados pushes back on the label unmotivated. That label may say more about the leader's missing context than the person's drive. Granados talks through a nine-question practice, with the first three used as a weekly team check-in. The prompts stay simple: what people are focused on, what they are grateful for, and what they are working toward. That is the point. Once the team knows the routine, ten people can get through it in five or six minutes. It is not supposed to turn into a long meeting. It gives the leader a regular way to hear small signals before they become bad guesses. Granados pays close attention to patterns and trends. A one-word answer might be happy news, a warning sign, or a cue to ask a better follow-up. The marriage example makes that clear because the same word can mean celebration or pressure depending on what is happening outside work. Then the episode gets heavier. Granados describes an employee who answered cancer after he had already been thinking about letting her go. What looked like disengagement was something else entirely. The check-in exposed how much he had been assuming about her energy, schedule, and attitude. The practical lesson is plain: before calling someone unmotivated, build a habit that helps you see what they are focused on and what they are carrying.

As heard by us

A practical reset on motivation, centered on weekly check-ins and the signals leaders can actually hear.

The episode treats motivation as one of leadership's hardest and most misunderstood problems, then keeps the advice practical. Matt Granados lays out a simple framework built around three questions, and the discussion works best when it moves from theory to the patterns and…

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Want a simple way to read your team before you label them unmotivated?

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