Motivating your team when promotions are frozen 

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

When operating as a leader in an industry downturn, how can you keep your team motivated?  

In today’s landscape, it’s easy to feel stuck as a leader during a period of large-scale constraint. Many companies have capped the available number of promotions, partially due to budget tightening and partially to course-correct the season of over-promoting during COVID.

Meaningful raises have been taken off the table, and many COVID-era benefits are being revoked. It can feel like the tools you once had for motivating and growing your team have all been taken away, leaving your hands tied.

When our ability to choose is constrained, our brain’s threat circuitry activates – dulling motivation, narrowing our focus, and sapping our creative problem-solving.

Consider this: What if you had options as a leader? What if there were choices you could still make to support and deepen your team’s engagement and motivation? What if I gave you a clear list of things you might choose to do, all within your control?

Now pause for a second. As you read those last few sentences, did anything shift inside you? Did you feel a bit more present? More open or curious? More energized?

That’s the power of perceived autonomy. And it’s one of the most effective tools still in your hands.

Perceived autonomy

From a neuroscience perspective, autonomy isn’t a “nice-to-have.” It’s a foundational need that directly impacts our cognitive and emotional state. As Dr. David Rock notes in his foundational SCARF paper, perceived control – even over minor aspects of a situation – can dramatically reduce the brain’s threat response.

And we see this at work every day. People leave high-paying roles to freelance or build companies, not for money, but for agency. We know this intuitively, and we feel it when we’re micromanaged.

I use “perceived autonomy” here intentionally. For most, the reality is that we are free humans, operating in high-agency roles, with more privilege and power than a large portion of others. If you feel boxed in at work, you can switch teams, start a job search, or even launch your own company. 

The number of actual choices available to us is staggering. And yet – it doesn’t always feel that way. 

Our brains don’t respond to reality; they respond to perception. So when we experience a situation as fixed or inescapable – whether it’s a frozen budget, a hard deadline, or a leadership directive that wasn’t ours — our brain responds to that perceived threat.

The key, then, is not just to increase autonomy, but to increase the sense of autonomy. And I don’t mean to trick people into an illusion of choice – in fact, I can’t discourage that enough. We want to give them choice and name it as choice so both reality and perception are aligned.

Simple ways to introduce choice 

Here are practical ways you can introduce autonomy into your team’s day-to-day and improve team motivation, even if budgets are frozen and your hands are tied on promotions.

Stop assigning work. Offer “menu-style” task assignments instead

Instead of assigning work for the upcoming quarter or half, present a list of the priority projects from the roadmap along with the skills required (technical and competency-based alike) for each.

Ask your team to rank the list of projects in the order they’d like to work on, indicating which skills they have to contribute to each project and which skills would be growth areas for them. Guarantee that everyone will get to work on at least one of their top three projects. In practice, I find that I can usually give people their first choice of project – people’s preferences tend to be diverse enough that it’s possible.

This practice is hands down the simplest way to allow engineers to express agency over how they contribute while continuing to move the business forward. 

Stop telling people how to grow. Let people design their own growth paths

By having team members rank the work they want to contribute to, along with the relevant skills they have to contribute and grow, they are choosing what’s most important to them right now. If learning is most important, they can choose to prioritize projects that allow them to learn or practice a new skill. If demonstration of excellence is most important, they get to choose projects where they will be a natural leader.

In this way, team members choose their own focus areas for the quarter. Then, let them choose how they will track, demonstrate, and report on their growth. This builds self-awareness and ownership over development – qualities that something like a formal promotion doesn’t guarantee.

Introduce a flexible framework with opt-in rituals.

In agile teams, it’s easy to feel like every ritual is non-negotiable. It can feel like we’re only doing a good job if every box is ticked, every sprint. But not every process has to be mandatory! There’s no rulebook that dictates you have a retro every single sprint. The agile police won’t arrest you if your team decides they want to do something different with that time.

Document your team’s operating system and consider allocating blocks of time for a selection of possible rituals. One sprint, you might have a structured retro; the next, a casual, chatty lunch. The key is to ask your team how they want to spend their time together.

When teams feel like they have a say in how they work – not just what they work on – they’re more likely to embrace new practices. This also allows you to experiment with new processes in a lightweight way.

Create space for experimentation.

Much like a maker week or a hackathon, this exercise helps spark creativity without huge commitment. Have everyone on the team pitch a “tiny bet” – an idea local to your team’s domain that can be completed in less than a week. Let the team vote on which ones to try within the quarter or half, depending on your planning cycle. Even small wins feel big when the team has proposed and chosen the initiative.

This way, you create an environment where engineering is in open dialogue with product and the business – bringing forward ideas, identifying opportunities, and shaping what gets built. It shifts the team from executors to co-creators, deepening collaboration and unlocking innovation from every level.

And finally, ask: “What options would you like to have?”

Sometimes the simplest way to increase choice is to ask what kinds of choice your team actually values. Where in their workflow or schedule would having more choice make a difference?

This helps uncover autonomy friction points – places where control has eroded without you realizing it.

Autonomy doesn’t mean chaos

Creating choice doesn’t mean anyone on your team can do whatever they want. Too much ambiguity or lack of alignment creates confusion, not motivation. The goal here is coordinated autonomy – clear policies, frameworks, and expectations, within which people can choose how to operate.

This kind of scaffolding is crucial. It keeps the team cohesive while still giving individuals the freedom to operate in ways that feel meaningful. An example of coordinated autonomy is when team members rank their preferred projects; we guarantee one of their top three choices, not their top choice. This ensures that, as leaders, we are maintaining our responsibilities to the business and investing appropriately in our most critical projects while also creating choice on our team.

The leadership shift

When you create space for choice within structure, you’re not giving up control – you’re exercising leadership. You’re building a team that knows how to think, not just execute.

And by modeling autonomy yourself – by choosing to pursue growth, engagement, and motivation, even in a constrained environment – you show them they have power. You help people feel safe, energized, and engaged through your very being. And this kind of leadership doesn’t just keep teams afloat in tough times; it creates high-performing, joyful teams in any environment.

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