Understanding what motivates people can help you form a high-performance corporate culture.

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What gets you out of bed every morning, ready for another productive day at the office?

When you’re working to build a high-performance culture at your company, this should be the first question on your mind.

In fact, motivation can be broken down into three categories: play, purpose and potential.

Play motivates you to take an action simply because it is fun to do so. You might be curious and enjoy experimenting, or simply eager to learn or adapt.

This is why people spend time enjoying a hobby, solving crossword puzzles or listening to music. But in turn, if you’re trying to do something difficult like losing weight, play motivation can help; you might enjoy trying new recipes or researching vegetarian restaurants to reach your goal.

Purpose motivates you to do something because you value the outcome and impact of your actions, even though the process itself may not be enjoyable. The long shifts and stressful days of being a nurse may be tough, for example, but deep down you value caring for people.

Potential motivates you when you value the indirect outcomes of a certain activity. In essence, you think that your actions will lead to something important, such as fulfilling a long-term goal.

If you were a paralegal, for example, you might not enjoy the day-to-day work, but you see the job as a necessary step toward applying to law school.

So now you know the three types of motivation. The more closely these three are connected to the work you do, the more strongly they’ll influence your overall performance.

Of the three, play is the most powerful motivator as it’s closest to the work itself. This means the more you see your work as play, the better you’ll perform!

But don’t ignore purpose and potential — they’re still strong motivators!

Building a high-performance culture starts at the top. A leader needs to encourage positive ToMo.

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Increasing your company’s ToMo can help employees perform better and become more adaptive. But to do this effectively, you need leaders who demonstrate and encourage such behavior by always pushing the direct motives of play, purpose and potential.

How can a company leader do this?

To encourage play, leaders should inspire curiosity and experimentation within the workforce. By doing so, they can pique employees’ interest and get them involved in work. Employees, freed from rigid instructions or heavy-handed codes of conduct, will be happy to work on projects that excite them.

To stimulate purpose, leaders should emphasize shared values and common goals among employees. Be sure to explain the positive outcomes your company will inspire and how customers will benefit.

To inspire potential, leaders need to help connect employee work to personal goals and needs. Focus on employee strengths, and on teaching and coaching them; treat everyone as a valuable individual. The idea is that a leader shows employees that their investment in the company is an investment in themselves.

But this isn’t all a good leader needs to do. Leaders also need to discourage indirect motives, such as emotional and economic pressures. It’s up to a leader to assure employees that the company has set reasonable goals that they can feel confident pursuing. Setting reasonable goals can remove unnecessary emotional pressure, allowing employees to focus on more positive motivation.

A leader also needs to translate tactical goals into adaptive ones. For example, if a tactical goal is to increase market share by 30 percent, the adaptive equivalent would be to learn five new strategies for boosting market share in general.

This works. In a study, one group of students was given a tactical goal and another an adaptive goal. The tactical group lost eight percent of its market share while the adaptive group grew its business by 59 percent!