Information is the Root of Morale
June 8, 2026
Morale is an emotional response to what people believe about progress.
When people are constantly asking themselves:
- Are we making progress?
- Does leadership know where we’re going?
- Will my work matter?
- Are our goals achievable?
The resulting morale problem isn’t about motivation.
It’s about confidence.
A difficult milestone vs. A non-credible milestone
Teams will work incredibly hard toward difficult goals, as long as they believe in those goals. In my experience, teams actually work harder towards difficult goals than they do the easier one. Good leaders can “rally the troops” and incentivize them to rise to challenges.
What destroys morale is being asked to commit repeatedly to goals nobody believes anymore.
This often happens when milestones slip. What seemed hard but attainable becomes non-credible when it consistently slips just out of reach. Sometimes the milestone was unrealistic from the start. Other times the science, market, or business conditions changed. Either way, once the team stops believing the goal is achievable, morale begins to erode.
When Activity Replaces Progress
Scientists are busy by nature. Experiments run. Meetings happen. Data gets collected.
The morale problem emerges when nobody can tell whether any of that activity is reducing uncertainty, removing constraints, or moving the milestone closer.
Milestones that are poorly defined or unaligned may seem credible at first. Teams will rally and work hard. They generate lots of activity but because the destination is unclear, or unrealistic, there is no progress. This is “swirl”. Lots of work, little evidence of movement.
It is important to distinguish between slow progress and swirl. Slow progress can be a morale problem but that can be mitigated by information. Regular updates, and progress and alignment checks, inform your teams that they are making progress. Without these, they often cannot tell if their work actually matters.
The Cost of Undefined Success
Swirl is a state of stagnation. Undefined success, its close cousin, looks like progress, but isn’t.
A team can work for months optimizing an assay. Everyone is working hard, the data is improving. But if nobody has defined what performance threshold makes the assay commercially useful, the team has no way to know when they’re done.
That’s demoralizing because completion becomes impossible.
Teams use KPIs as targets to define success. But many KPI systems only measure output. They fail to measure alignment. As a result, your teams can hit every KPI and still feel disconnected from meaningful progress because the work is no longer clearly connected to business outcomes.
For KPIs to be meaningful, they must be aligned to long-term goals as well as top priorities.
The Silence After Tech Transfer
When a team hits its milestone or deliverable and the work leaves the group, it can disappear into a black box. This is a surprisingly common source of demoralization.
We often talk about morale inside teams but morale extends between teams. People want evidence that their work mattered. But when a team hands off a process and gets no feedback, morale can fail.
Feedback is not just recognition. It’s evidence. People derive meaning from seeing the consequences of their work.
Without that information, they start to wonder whether the work mattered at all.
This is especially common in large organizations where R&D, Operations, Manufacturing, Commercial, and Business Development are separated. A scientist may spend two years solving a problem and never learn whether the solution created value.
A team may spend months solving a process bottleneck. The process is transferred, production adopts it, and the team immediately moves on to the next challenge. Months later, they still don’t know whether yield improved, costs decreased, or customers benefited. The milestone was achieved, but the feedback loop was never closed.
When Priorities Change Faster Than Evidence
Organizations need to adapt. Markets change. New information emerges. Priorities should evolve.
The problem arises when priorities change faster than evidence can be gathered.
I’ve seen this in real life. A team was working on Project A. Suddenly the market shifted and we pivoted to Project B. A few months later a new opportunity emerged and Project C became the priority. Later, another pivot to Project D.
Each pivot made sense in isolation but nobody was able to answer the important question:
“Are we changing course because we’re learning, or because we’ve lost confidence?”
This distinction matters because learning creates confidence, even when the answer is “no.” Repeated course changes without sufficient evidence tend to erode confidence in the direction of the organization.
The answer is not to avoid pivots. It is to ensure that each pivot is informed by evidence and accompanied by a clear explanation of what was learned and why the new direction was chosen. Teams gain confidence when they can see how new information shapes decisions. They lose confidence when priorities appear to change without a visible connection to evidence.
Adaptability is a strength. Drift is not.
Connecting Effort to Outcome
In each of these situations, people lose confidence for the same reason: they can no longer clearly connect effort with outcome.
Milestones becomes non-credible. Progress becomes difficult to measure. Success becomes poorly defined. Feedback never arrives. Priorities shift before evidence can accumulate.
Morale is emotional, but the conditions that create morale are often informational.
When people can see progress, understand success, observe the impact of their work, and understand why decisions are being made, confidence grows.
And when confidence grows, morale tends to follow.