Motivate Your Team! Eight Quick Tips to Motivate for Success
Motivation is the key ingredient for success in any
organization. You can have all the technical skills in the
world; however, if you can't motivate your team, you will not
achieve success. As a leader, a majority of your job is to
motivate others to succeed so that everyone's goals are
accomplished.
The following are eight quick tips to motivate your team:
1. Everyone Has Motivation Your employees are motivated on some
level. It is your job to find the level of their motivation and
move your employees to the next level.
2. Listen to WIIFM I wake up every morning listening to a very
important radio station, WIIFM. I hope you do too. WIIFM stands
for What's In It For Me? To truly be a motivator, you must
always be in tune to your employees' WIIFM. Find out why it is
beneficial for your employees to do a task, etc. Once you find
out the employees' motives, you find out how to motivate them.
3. It's about Pain or Pleasure Motivate your employees toward
pleasure or away from pain. You motivate toward the pleasure by
providing recognition, incentives, and rewards for doing a good
job. You motivate away from the pain of a corrective action,
losing a position, or doing a poor job. The key to this
motivation is to be consistent with all your employees at all
times.
4. Give Me a Reason Do it because I said so! Well, with our
educated workforce these days, that doesn't work anymore.
Employees like to know why tasks are being requested of them so
that they can feel involved and that the task has worth. Let
your employees know why doing the task is important to you, the
organization, and for them.
5. Let Me Understand You Take time to show sincere interest in
your employees as people. Understand what your employees are
passionate about in their lives. What are their special
passions? What are their personal needs? What brings them joy or
pain? What are their short-range and long-range goals? Once you
understand the answers to these questions, you can move them to
a new level of motivation, because you cared enough to ask the
questions and show interest in their success. Once you
understand your employee's needs and goals, they will take more
interest in understanding and achieving your goals.
6. Make Me Proud Napoleon Bonaparte once said, "A soldier will
fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon." Give your
employees the opportunity to be proud of their work. Reward team
members publicly for a job well done. Give them an opportunity
in a team meeting to explain how they accomplished the job. Have
your organization's Director, President, Vice President, etc.,
give recognition to these employees by personally sending a
note, recognizing them in an organizational or team meeting, or
creating a "Hall or Wall of Fame" recognition for employees that
really have gone beyond the call of duty.
7. Expect the Best Expect the best and your employees will rise
to that level. How do you do this? You do it with the words you
use. Are you expressing positive expectations, or are you using
words (kind of, sort of, we'll try, we have to, we haven't done
that before, and that will never work) that communicate negative
expectations? What does your body language say about you? Does
it say, "I'm ready to take on any challenge, and I expect you
can also;" or does your body language say "Please don't give me
another problem. I can't handle it."
Do our recognitions and rewards move our employees to do their
best? Do we consistently communicate our standards and
expectations for the best? Do we coach our team to always do
better?
8. Walk the Talk Our employees model our behavior. If we are
confident about a major change in the organization, our
employees will follow our behavior. If we come in late and leave
early, guess what will happen? Remember, even when you don't
think someone is watching...they are always watching. Set the
example for others to follow.
Apply these eight simple rules of motivation and you, too, will
have the skills to motivate your team to be inspired,
innovative, self-directed, and highly productive employees.