| “We find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve.”
–Maxwell Maltz |
Last month’s article focused on how to discover what motivates your staff. In this article we’ll look at what you can do to increase their motivation, starting with the most popular motivator, achievement. Almost all of your team members are motivated by achievement to a certain extent. Are you capitalizing on that? Let’s find out.
Harness the Achievement Motivators
When you ask anyone what motivates them at work, most often they will first talk about the satisfaction they feel when they have achieved something. I’ve witnessed people putting great effort into a project without much concrete gain apart from the feeling of satisfaction from achieving something significant and challenging. It’s a strong motivating force and something relatively easy to harness in the workplace, if you know how.
To harness this type of motivation, you need to make sure of two things:
1) Your employees know the results of their work.
2) Your employees believe they have control over the results.
Seeing, Hearing and Feeling Results
Think about it. Imagine you are preparing a PowerPoint presentation for your boss to deliver, and you will not be present for the delivery nor get any feedback on how well it is received. How will you know if you have been successful?
If you don’t know what aspects of your efforts were appreciated and what parts could be improved, why would you make an effort to do it well? Any extra effort you make may well be wasted and you wouldn’t even know it.
True to form, your boss comes back from the presentation and tells you it was ‘fine’. You feel like your job is not very exciting and there’s nothing to motivate you to do any better than you normally do.
In contrast, think about what would happen if you were in the audience when your boss delivered the presentation.
You would be able to watch her as the presentation slides guided her and supported her. You’d notice the reactions of the people in the audience. Maybe they get puzzled by a slide and need to ask for confirmation. You hear their murmurs of confusion. You hear their ‘hmms’ as they understand. You feel the confidence of your boss and the feeling of assurance she gives the audience. In other words, you get to sense and experience the results of your actions. Yes, it’s motivating because it is concrete feedback on your results.
Apart from actually witnessing the impact of work first-hand, it is also very motivating to receive specific feedback. In this case, your boss could have taken the time to note what she particularly liked about the presentation slides, and also what she would prefer to change, or which aspects didn’t have the desired effect. With this kind of constructive feedback, you would feel motivated to improve your results next time.
Both positive and corrective feedback are important and motivating. But in general positive feedback is more important and more powerful. I’ll go more into this topic in a future article.
Controlling Results and Expressing Yourself
Likewise imagine what happens to your motivation when you are working on an interesting and important project but your boss keeps insisting on making the most important decisions himself. You feel you are just doing busy-work and not really contributing to the results. You feel uninspired, even used. You might react by doing the minimum so at least you can get off work early and do something you really like.
I’ve had numerous coaching clients complain about being treated this way by their supervisors. Most likely the boss is not aware of the damage being done to the motivation and morale of the team.
In contrast, have you ever worked for someone who trusted you with a project that was a real challenge for you? Maybe it was a previous boss, a teacher or a leader in a voluntary organization?
If you remember a time like that,you may recall an adrenaline rush of excitement as you thought ahead to how you would do the job. You probably felt honoured that you were trusted and you really wanted to live up to that trust. You decided to yourself to do the best you could both to test yourself and also to prove yourself to that important person who trusted you.
Missed Opportunities
When people don’t have the opportunity to sense and control their results, they quickly lose motivation. It’s human nature. And you know, your employees are human too.
Many managers make these same mistakes with the best of intentions. Here are some of the thinking patterns that lead to these missed motivational opportunities.
1) “I am more qualified to do this work and I can do a better job than my staff.”
All managers must strike a balance between getting the work done and developing other people to get the work done. Very often doing the work yourself is playing it safe. I would challenge you to delegate and develop more. You, your company and your team will benefit in the long run.
2) “My people are too junior and inexperienced to achieve very much.”
With junior people it is even more important that you develop them, both to get them up to speed and to train them to expect to learn and grow. You can start with small tasks to gradually build their confidence and experience. You will need to experiment with what size of task motivates them and what is too overwhelming. Everyone has a different capacity for challenge and learning.
3) “I need to receive credit for my team’s work in order to ensure my power and position in the organization, or for my personal gratification and continued motivation.”
This issue is a challenge for many managers. We can blame the organizational culture for requiring power politics, however, I believe this problem comes more from the personal realm. Is it really true that your company won’t value you unless you take all the credit? Or is it more a question of your own level of confidence and belief in yourself?
The most motivating managers that I’ve met are all very self-confident people. They don’t need to prove themselves much. They have a pattern of thinking that allows them to feel secure in the most power-hungry workplace. They often use a sense of integrity, of ‘doing the right thing’, to keep themselves focused on developing their people and their organizations.
To use the achievement motivators effectively may require a shift in your thinking that marks a milestone in your development as a successful manager. It is a key area of personal growth for all managers and often a focus for much of the leadership development coaching I do.
But…
When I bring up this type of motivation to my clients or students, I often hear the complaint that their people are not motivated to do a good job in their work because … their employees want to avoid being given more work.
Yes. Of course. Wouldn’t you do that? If you give your employees MORE work when they do a good job, you are punishing them for their efforts. You are probably giving them more stress, less free time and more of the same kind of work that is becoming boring and tedious to them.
To motivate them to work harder and do abetter job you need give them BETTER work. Better work is work that challenges them, for which they get a new and better kind of recognition or credit. Work they are responsible and accountable for and that you count on them to do well. I mean also work over which they can express their talents and preferences, where they can make their mark and feel a real contribution.
It is also, by the way, work that contributes more value to your organization. It challenges them to give their best and to tap into their higher-level talents. Wouldn’t you want them to do that?
Once again you may need to let go of some of the control you have as their boss. You may need to figure out how to upgrade some of the busy-work into higher accountability work.
You may also need to figure out how to communicate the benefits of this kind of work to your staff. If they are accustomed to being given only more work and not better work, it may take some honest talk to relate how you intend to change things.
Are you thinking now about how you could do this? If yes, I would love to hear your ideas of what you will do and also the particular obstacles and challenges you face.
Actions to Take
In summary, here is a list of questions to answer and actions to take that will help you harness the achievement motivators of your staff.
1) Consider how each of your staff receives feedback on his or her responsibilities. How can you increase the amount and quality of both positive and corrective feedback?
2) If you could give each of your staff members a motivating challenge, what would it be?
3) What stops you from delegating higher-level responsibilities to your staff? What change in your thinking or actions would be needed to increase your level of delegation?