How do I motivate my team?
With thousands of books, seminars, workshops, and training about motivation, one would think that motivating your team would no longer be an issue. Being that the question keeps coming up, could it be that managers are either lazy, they still need to read just one more book, or maybe attend one more training session? We’re thinking not. We believe most people have their focus on the wrong area when it comes to motivation. To effectively motivate employees you need to focus on two specific areas. First on selecting the right person for the right role on your team and then the daily responsibility of motivating.
The right person for the right job
You can’t motivate a 5 foot 5 inch, 140 pound, 50 year old guy to be an offensive lineman in the NFL. This is an extreme example, but it’s basically what many managers are attempting to do as they try to motivate miscast employees. It can’t be done. So the first step in motivating your employees and team is to make sure you’ve done a good job in selecting the right people for the right role on your team. A good rule of thumb is, if you can’t spot anything within a 7-day period to recognize an employee for, then you might have her in the wrong role.
The daily responsibility
You must understand that motivating is a daily responsibility. It’s not something a so-called motivational expert can do for your team in a morning workshop. While that may get everyone fired up and “motivated” for a week or two at best, you’ll usually find things going right back to where they were. Motivating an employee is individual, it’s specific to the accomplishment, and it’s a daily responsibility of every manager. The manager’s goal should be to motivate the engaged employees. The leader’s goal should be to motivate the best employees in a team setting.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when motivating
- A pat-on-the-back is free – The number one motivator for most people is a simple pat. It could be a good word, a note, an email or a text. It can be private or public. If you can’t recognize an employee for doing something well at least every seven days, then you’re either not paying attention or you have a miscast employee.
- Avoid the group hug – Group praise is most often false praise. Just because you tell everyone in the team meeting they are doing a great job, doesn’t mean you are motivating. In fact, you’re very likely doing the opposite with your best people by giving them the same recognition as the weakest employees.
- Be specific – Saying, “thanks for all you do”, is not specific enough. If you can’t point out what the employee did and how that impacts the customer, team, or organization, then hold your praise until you can clearly and specifically state it.
- The weekly hero – Recognize the remarkable accomplishments in the weekly team meeting. This may only be just one person that did something that will show others the example to follow. AND, it could be the same employee every week.
- They’re not you – Just because you like to be motivated by having the CEO ask you to share a few words to a group of employees on your recent success, doesn’t mean everyone else would enjoy that. If you make some employees stand in front of a group to share, they may avoid doing anything exceptional again so as not to be forced to speak in front of a group again. Remember, public speaking is the number one fear for most people. Understand your employees and get to know how they like to be motivated.
Final points
Never focus motivational efforts on the non-negotiables of Attitude, Communication, Compliance, and Minimum Standards.
- Attitude – You should never have to motivate your employees to smile or to be in a professional mood.
- Communication – Motivating a gossiper not to gossip? Good luck with that.
- Compliance – Try telling regulators, as you’re being written up, that you have a plan in place to motivate your employees to improve in this area.
- Minimum Standards – Take the phone standard for example. Trying to motivate someone to be professional on the phone and abide by basic standards that a 12 year old could handle is a wasted exercise.
Before we end this article, we want everyone to know you did a great job in reading and understanding it. How does that make you feel? Motivated?
