Managing enthusiasm
Since COVID it feels like the world is running on five percent battery. Tired is the new black. The minimum participation stamp has become not just acceptable but somehow expected, and the people who still show up with genuine energy are starting to feel like the odd ones out.
I do not think this is laziness in the traditional sense. I think it is something that got set during lockdown and never fully reset.
How We Got Here
Lockdown created a new floor. No commute, no social accountability, no real separation between work and not-work. You rolled out of bed, opened a laptop, ticked enough boxes to stay employed, and doom-scrolled until it was time to pretend to sleep. For a significant stretch, that was the entire structure of the working day for a lot of people.
The problem is that standards, once lowered, do not automatically return to where they were. Inertia works in both directions. The habits formed during that period, the minimum viable effort, the transactional relationship with employment, the sense that showing up in body is sufficient regardless of what happens next, those habits persisted long after the lockdowns ended.
And now managers are navigating a new set of problems that would have seemed absurd a decade ago. Staff with outrageous expectations attached to genuinely modest output. People who need a recovery plan for the small amount of work they actually did. A general atmosphere in which unenthusiasm has been normalised to the point where it barely registers as a problem.
My dad used to say that ‘nothing is as catching as enthusiasm’, except for a lack of it. He was right, and the world has spent several years proving it.
Why This Hits Sales Harder Than Anywhere Else
Unenthusiasm is a problem in any role. In sales it is catastrophic.
Enthusiasm is not a personality quirk or a nice-to-have in this function. It is a commercial instrument. Buyers read energy. They can feel, within the first sixty seconds of a conversation, whether the person across from them believes in what they are selling. If the salesperson does not believe it, the buyer certainly will not. Enthusiasm is, at its core, proof that you believe in what you are doing. The absence of it signals something the buyer interprets, usually correctly, as doubt.
A disengaged salesperson does not just underperform. They actively undermine the proposition they are supposed to be carrying. Every flat call, every phoned-in presentation, every follow-up that lacks any real conviction tells the market something about the business they represent.
There is a statistic worth sitting with here. Research consistently finds that around seventeen percent of staff are actively working against the companies that employ them. Not just coasting. Actively undermining. When that kind of energy gets into a sales team it spreads, because sales floors are social environments and mood is contagious in both directions.
The Momentum Problem
The hardest part of dealing with widespread unenthusiasm is that inertia is a powerful force. A body at rest tends to stay at rest. A team that has settled into low-energy habits does not naturally accelerate. And the longer the pattern continues, the more normal it feels, which makes disrupting it feel increasingly unreasonable to the people inside it.
This is why the solution is not a motivational speech, a team day, or a new set of values printed on the wall. Those things might create a brief spike, but they do not address the underlying mechanical problem. The issue is not that people have forgotten why enthusiasm matters. It is that they have lost the habit of operating from it, and rebuilding a habit requires repeated small actions more than it requires insight.
The things I have found genuinely help are not dramatic. They are structural and consistent.
Know your north star. This applies to the individual and to the team. Values, reasons, the thing that makes the work worth doing beyond the pay cheque. When the compelling reason for being there is clear and visible, it is easier to orient toward it on the days when motivation is low. If the north star does not exist or nobody can articulate it, that is a separate problem that needs to be solved before anything else will stick.
Just start moving toward it in whatever small way you can. The activation energy required to begin something is almost always the hardest part. It does not matter how small the movement is. Movement generates more movement. A single call made, a single email sent, a single meeting prepared for properly rather than winged, these small acts rebuild the neural pathway of doing the work.
Write down your activity for the day, not the outcomes. Outcomes are the result of activity and they are not always in your control. Activity is. A list of things you are actually going to do, reviewed at the end of the day against what you did, creates accountability without the demoralising weight of a result you could not fully determine.
Try to do slightly more each day than you did the day before. Not dramatically more. Slightly more. The compounding effect of marginal increases in effort over time is significant, and the psychological burden of one percent more is almost nothing. This is how momentum gets rebuilt in practice rather than in theory.
Spend time together in the office. The social accountability of a shared environment is real and it matters. Remote work removed it and hybrid work has partially restored it, but teams that are physically present together more often tend to perform better and recover faster from collective low periods. This is not about surveillance. It is about the environment of success being partly social and partly constructed.
Build a staff routine that includes genuine switching off. Unenthusiasm is often exhaustion in a thin disguise, and exhaustion that is not properly addressed just deepens. A team that has permission and structure to fully disconnect outside of work hours tends to come back more capable of full engagement. Always on does not produce high performance. It produces burnout, which looks a lot like unenthusiasm but is harder to recover from.
A Question Worth Asking
How are you managing unenthusiasm in your team right now?
Not the policy version of that question. The real version. What is actually happening in your sales environment when it comes to energy, belief, and momentum? Are people showing up to win or showing up to tick boxes?
Because if the answer is closer to the second, the pipeline is not going to fix itself. Sales performance is downstream of sales energy, and sales energy requires active management, not just targets and accountability conversations.
