It’s true that almost anyone can be a manager. But when it comes to leadership, the ability to inspire others is what sets the bar higher. To motivate staff is a persistent challenge for nearly every leader I meet. They want to know what the secret is, and as it turns out, it’s not really a secret at all.

Thanks to a century of research, we now know that failing to motivate others isn’t all our fault. As Daniel Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, says, “There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.”

This means that the modern workplace needs to play catch up with what we know about true motivation. Extrinsic rewards, like performance-based raises, benefits and paid time off, dominate much of the conversation surrounding workplace satisfaction. But according to Pink, these only work under a limited set of conditions to motivate top-performers.

“These contingent motivators — ‘If you do this, then you get that’ — work in some circumstances, but for a lot of tasks, they actually either don’t work, or often, they do harm,” explains Pink in his TED Talk on motivation. “This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored.”

The secret is intrinsic motivators.

Autonomy, mastery and purpose are the solution to our workplace boredom and disengagement. These serve our desire for self-actualization, which is the highest need on Maslow’s hierarchy and the most relevant in the 21st-century workplace. While things like benefits and salary appeal to our more foundational needs for safety and security, our deepest need in the modern workplace is meaning.

“Typically, if you reward something, you get more of it. You punish something, you get less of it. And our businesses have been built for the last 150 years very much on that kind of motivational scheme,” Pink explains.