Transcript
When it comes to motivating your employees, before you look at techniques or things you can do to motivate them, it’s important that you get certain foundational parts right. Because if you don’t get the foundation right, it doesn’t matter what techniques or tips or tricks you do to try to motivate your people, it’s not going to be that effective. You have to get the foundation right.
Have the right mentality about motivation
The first part of the foundation is having the right mentality about motivation.
Simon Sinek in his book The Infinite Game says it’s not about trying to get the most out of your people, it’s about creating an environment where they can be their best. There’s a difference between those two mentalities.
And in fact, with the first one, he adds that your people aren’t towels that you’re wringing out to get the most out of. They’re people. You want to create the environment where they can thrive.
Create a great culture where motivation happens
With that, one of the most important aspects that you can do, the things you can do to motivate your people, is to create a great culture.
When you have a bad culture or you have a toxic culture, it doesn’t matter what techniques or tricks or carrots you use to try to motivate people, you’re not going to motivate people very well because your culture is bad.
You want a culture where people feel safe speaking up, making mistakes, disagreeing without fearing they’re going to be judged or punished or people are out there to try to get them when they do wrong. If you have the right culture, you’re well on the way to creating an environment where people can be their best.
The difference between internal and external motivation
It’s also important that we talk about the difference between internal and external motivation. External motivation is motivation that comes from outside you. It could be from fear of being punished, it could be some kind of reward, whatever, you’re doing it because of something outside of you.
Internal motivation is something from within you. You’re doing it because of the desire you have to make it happen.
When it comes to motivating your employees, you want to use internal motivation as much as you can. Sometimes people use external motivation because they have that bad and toxic culture, so they try to compensate by trying to throw money or perks or trips or whatever it is to try to motivate people when really that’s not really effective in the long term.
And as a side with that, money is not the motivator people often think it is. Yes, you have to pay people well. And it’s not that you can never use any kind of varying pay or commission or anything like that. But often when you do money, it becomes transactional. It changes the mentality of things.
And just from different studies and from different books, I think it’s in the book Drive and Leading with Gratitude, they talk about studies and things that show that money isn’t really the motivator people try to make it to be.
You want to focus on internal motivation, not trying to get the external such as using money or whatever to get people to do something. Again, pay them well, but don’t use that as the motivator you use.
Hire the right people
Once you have the right mentality and the right culture, you want to focus on hiring the right people. Jim Collins in his book Good to Great said the second most important thing after finding the right leader is to hire the right people and make sure they’re in the right seat. He goes on to say that if you have the right people, you don’t have to worry so much about motivating people because they’re already motivated because they’re the right people, because they’re the right people that fit into your culture and they’re passionate about your mission and so on.
So when you’re hiring, try to make sure you’re getting the right people who fit into your culture and want to pursue your mission. It’s also important that you have great leadership starting with you and throughout your organization.
You can have a great culture and then have a toxic manager, and that toxic manager will destroy the motivation of the people who work for them.
It’s crazy to me sometimes how poor leaders are allowed to just stay where they’re at. Or they’re even promoted, they’re not doing here, they’re a bad leader, so they’re promoted to something else to get them out of there instead of dealing with, hey, they’re just not good at that. They either need specific training or need to be moved to a different position because they’re harming everything.
Everything’s built off leadership. The success of any organization or team is based on the leader. And if you want your people to be highly motivated, you need great leaders throughout your organization. If you don’t, that’s going to kill motivation no matter what technique you use.
And it starts with you in whatever position you’re in.
So now that we have the foundations set, your mindset, the culture, hiring great people, having great leadership, how do you motivate people? Daniel Pink in his book, Drive, gives three main motivations that humans have.
The first one is autonomy.
Give people autonomy in their work
People want autonomy in their work. And with autonomy comes trust. People want to be trusted by their leaders, by their team. They want to be trusted to be allowed to do their work the way they know how to do it and to do their best to get to the objective they have.
When you micromanage, when you try to control and have that lack of trust of people, try to make all the decisions for them, that’s demotivating and demoralizing. And people don’t like that. They want to have some kind of control in their work.
So what you want to do is set great expectations, offer the support, training, resources that people need, set the guidelines of everything they’re supposed to operate in, and then release them to do the work the best they can to reach that outcome.
Yes, be there to offer support. Yes, to be there to hold them accountable, to meet with them, to follow up, to help make sure things are on track and to support them in the ways they need, but give them trust in what they do, give them autonomy in it, and even with the decisions that they have to make, provide autonomy.
Give purpose in what they do
Next is purpose. People want to find purpose in what they do. They want to know that what they’re doing has meaning. So when it comes to your organization, first you need to make sure you have a clear mission. This is what we’re trying to do. This is what we’re trying to accomplish. This is our purpose.
And it’s not profit. It’s how do you serve people. It’s how do you serve society. How do you serve your customers?
Then you want to help people see how their work or how it helps it accomplish the goal. You want to connect their work with the ultimate purpose that you’re trying to do. You also want to show how it helps other people, whether it’s the customer directly or how it helps other people or even you as a manager or a leader.
You want to show that, hey, what you’re doing is helpful and impactful and it helps me do my job and it helps them do their job. It helps the customer this way, whatever it may be. Some companies even bring customers in to show the employees the impact that their work has.
But you can also think of purpose when it comes to individual purpose as well, in the sense that different people have different goals that they’re pursuing, whether career or otherwise. And if you can show how the work they do connects with the goals that they have, then they’re going to be even more motivated because of that.
Help people grow in their work
Third is mastery, to provide growth opportunities for your people. People want mastery. They want to get better. They want to grow. So try to help them do that. It makes sense in many ways.
First, it’s motivating. But also when your people grow, then they do their jobs better, which makes them more productive, which gets more results for your team and organization.
There’s different ways you can do that. You can provide different trainings in the things related to their jobs or future jobs they may have within the company or so on. You can provide training on leadership, time management, public speaking, computer programming, whatever it is. Provide them opportunities to grow in those areas.
But it can also be in the work that they do. Provide challenging work. If something’s super easy and boring, and it’s, they have to do it all the time, that’s demotivating. But if you have work that challenges them and keeps moving them forward, then that can be motivating.
Find ways to help your people continually grow and that can help motivate your people.
Help people feel connected
People also want to be connected with other people. When you have high functioning teams where people can be open and don’t fear judgment and so on from other people, that they can come together, share ideas and disagree, but in the end everyone comes together for the main purpose, then you have a good team and you have people where they’re starting to feel connected with one another.
And it may not just be with a specific team, but just people in general. People like to be connected, and when they feel connected, that can also help motivate them.
Provide clear expectations
It’s also important to provide clear expectations for your employees. It can be very frustrating when you’re not sure exactly what you’re supposed to be doing. Like, is this the right thing? Or does it change from this day to this day? Am I even working on the right thing?
It can be very frustrating and demoralizing when that happens.
So for your employees, for your team, you want to make sure that they know exactly what’s expected of them. What’s expected from their job? What’s expected of them when it comes to the company and the culture and so on? What’s expected and then hold them to those expectations.
People want to know and it’s assuring to know what’s expected and what’s not.
Provide great feedback
With that, you also want to provide great feedback. Now just giving feedback won’t necessarily motivate people to a huge amount, but people want to know where they stand. Here are the expectations, hey you’re doing really good here, hey you can improve here, this is where you can grow.
And with the right culture, people are much more likely to accept that feedback. People need clear expectations and they need feedback on how they are doing. It may not be a great motivator by itself, but without it, it can hurt motivation.
Communicate well
You also want to provide great communication. Sometimes leaders, people, they withhold information because of a lack of trust or power or whatever it may be. But that just builds distrust back towards you and that hurts motivation and morale and influence and loyalty.
You want to be as transparent with your information as you can be. And it just makes logical sense in the sense that if you’re providing autonomy, if you’re wanting to make good decisions, if you’re wanting to do their best work, wouldn’t you want them to have all the information they can to make the best decisions and to do the best work?
Be a great communicator about what’s important and the information that’s going on.
Show appreciation
One of the big things you can do to help motivate people is to show appreciation. Appreciation is huge, but it’s lacking in so many organizations. People go day to day and week to week and maybe even months without anybody acknowledging the work they’re doing. People want to be acknowledged for what they’re doing and appreciated for.
In fact, in one survey, I believe it was about 80% of employees said they would work harder if their manager showed more appreciation. In fact, many people have quit their jobs because there is no appreciation.
So if you want people to stay in their jobs and be motivated in their jobs, then show appreciation to them for what they do. Make it a consistent thing. Try to show something to everybody at least once a week. This lets people know that they’re recognized and that they’re appreciated for what they do.
And it also reinforces the behaviors that you want.
Listen well
You also want to be a good listener as a leader. Leaders sometimes talk a lot and listen little. You want to do the opposite, flip it around. Listen more than you speak.
One of the biggest frustrations people have is that they don’t feel heard and they feel their voice doesn’t matter. Be someone who listens to feedback. Be someone who listens to ideas. Be humble and realize you probably don’t know as much as you think you do, that you might be detached from reality, because often leaders are, and realize the people on the front lines, the people who are doing the work, often have the best ideas.
So listen to them, listen to their ideas, implement what you can. When you do that, it encourages them, because they know they’re heard, but it also creates ownership, which helps motivation, because they’re giving ideas, which are being implemented, and they’re being part of the growth of the organization.
Listen well to your employees.
Kill the bureaucracy
And kill the bureaucracy. Often bureaucracy is created for two reasons. Yes there’s good reasons like safety and so on, but often it’s created because of a lack of trust to control people to make sure they do what you want them to do, or it’s a passive aggressive way of dealing with people problems.
Someone messes up and instead of dealing with that person directly and just dealing with that person, they create a new rule that affects everyone. And over time those rules get bigger and bigger. And it becomes a huge frustration, all the bureaucracy they have to deal with, just to do their jobs or get things done.
You want to kill any piece of bureaucracy that doesn’t help your people be productive. In fact, one of the best things you can do when it comes to listening is ask what policies are hurting you, what rules or hindrances, and see what you can do to remove them.
As we discussed in the beginning, having great leadership is an important aspect of building great motivation in your employees.