Motivation can't be added once the objective is written. It comes from three decisions made before the quarter

The first decision concerns who writes the objective. A sense of agency comes from two things: the objective wasn't imposed, and the way of achieving it stays in the team's hands. That is why in no way of working I know of are objectives created by the board alone. The order matters too: first the objective as a business result for the company, and only then the choice of people. The reverse order, writing objectives so that every department has its own, builds nothing but silos. The negotiation of the objective itself can't be reading it out from a sheet of paper. It needs the whole story, from the vision, through the strategy and the clients, to why this particular quarterly objective moves the annual goal forward. And it needs the sentence that is said least often: that this is a draft, not the final version. Without a sense that the objective can still change, nobody will give you a valuable contribution. Send the materials a few days in advance, not the evening before a morning meeting, and make sure the person actually has time to read them and isn't busy putting out a fire at a client's.

The second decision is context. Companies expect engagement with goals without giving people the information they would need to think. The board says everything is clear, while in practice the strategy is written down nowhere, sits in the heads of two people, or changes every other moment. The proof that the context has really got through is easy to recognise, and it appears only during planning. Someone says then that we won't do something because it doesn't fit our strategy. That is the moment when the weight of the decision stops resting on the leader alone, because in an informed team there will be people who point out what the leader didn't take into account. I don't have one answer to how widely to involve people in writing objectives, because it depends on the size of the company. It looks different below twenty people, different between twenty and two hundred, and different again above that.

The third decision is the make-up of the team, and it has three layers, not one. Skills are obvious. The second layer is availability, and this is where the sharpest sentence of the whole episode comes: setting objectives while ignoring people's availability is a ready-made recipe for failure. If you need someone from a given department, you have to take duties off them or free up their time in some other way. You don't assume the time will turn up. There are teams whose work consists of supporting the rest of the organisation, and by nature they have little room for development objectives. The third layer is natural working styles, because a team made up only of analysts will search for the best route, and a team made up only of activators will launch a hundred actions at once. On top of that come two mechanisms that quietly kill motivation. Cascading objectives down successive levels of the structure turns work on the objective into administering objectives: multiply the leaders by the number of key results, and you will see how much of it becomes ordinary paperwork. The second is a bonus system that rewards something at odds with the strategic goal.