Transcript
There are actions you might be taking as a leader that is killing your employees motivation and you may not even realize it. Now, sometimes these actions are what sometimes are considered normal leadership practices but really aren’t effective. And sometimes they are things that you might be doing to motivate your employees but in reality does the opposite.
1. You don’t trust your team
First is a lack of trust in your employees. When you don’t trust your employees, that leads to micromanaging and controlling and hovering over them and a compliance mentality. And when you do that, that is incredibly demotivating.
2. You create unneeded bureaucracy
And that also leads to number two, which is creating bureaucracy. Now one of the big reasons that bureaucracy is created is because it’s meant to control people because of a lack of trust to make sure they do what they’re supposed to do. It’s about compliance and making a bunch of rules that people have to follow.
The thing is, it isn’t effective.
What happens then is that you get people who are demotivated, who aren’t as productive, who get frustrated having to jump through all these loops just to get something done. If you feel like you have to control your employees to make them do what they’re supposed to do, that’s on you as a leader, not them, and you need the work to fix the reason why you feel that way or what you might be doing wrong as a leader and so that you can trust them and so they can be more productive and motivated.
3. You focus on finding people doing wrong
With that, sometimes leaders are about finding their people doing wrong. When they’re walking down the hall, when they’re walking to check on employees, they aren’t about finding how they can help or how they can serve.
They’re about finding them doing wrong so they can get them. They’re checking up on them. And when you do that, that of course is the motivating.
It makes people focus on playing it safe instead of being productive and producing excellence. It’s about mistake avoidance versus making the goal happen.When you walk around, your focus should be on helping them, not on getting them.
4. You’ve created an unsafe culture
There’s also the unsafe cultures that often come in many organizations. Too often people fear speaking up, or disagreeing, or making a mistake, or whatever it may be, because they’re afraid of being judged, or looked down upon, or they’re afraid it will hurt their career or their job. So instead of speaking up, instead of doing what they need to do to make things better and move things forward, they just play it safe.
And when the culture is that way, it’s definitely not motivating. Sometimes people try to use carrots, or external motivation, to get their employees to do what they want them to do, to motivate them.
Often they do this in toxic cultures, or bad cultures, or unsafe cultures, because the culture is bad, people aren’t motivated, so they try to hang out carrots to try to make them, or get them to be more productive. It’s like, I know our culture is terrible, I know you don’t feel safe, but please be motivated, here’s a carrot.
5. You use threats or fear
Then other leaders, they use threats and fear to try to get people to do something. They threaten their jobs or their career. They say things like they can’t protect them if they don’t do this or that.
And while threats and fear may work temporarily or short term to get people to do something, long term motivation hurts because of that. It kills it. It’s demotivating. It’s demoralizing. And you end up losing people whether in turnover or just lack of productivity because of it.
6. You don’t care about your people
Sometimes leaders see employees as just tools or cogs in their machine, and if they need to get rid of them to meet some number, they do that. The thing is, when you don’t care about your employees, your employees know it. When they’re just treated as a cog, just a discard at a moment’s notice, of course they’re not going to be motivated.
You need to actually care about your employees and treat them well. You want to treat them like you want them to treat your customers. When you treat your employees well, it affects most everything positively.
7. You think you are above or better than your employees
Then similarly, you have leaders who think they’re better or above their employees. They think they know leadership or what’s best just because they’re in the position of a leader.
But the thing is, that’s not true. And too often, these leaders are detached from reality.
So instead of listening and learning, they start implementing all these policies and procedures that they think is best when in reality it hurts instead of helps. And then sometimes they create more bureaucracy and stuff because people aren’t doing what they want them to do when really the issue is the policies they keep producing because they’re detached.
8. You are a poor listener
Similarly, leaders of all types can be poor listeners. And the thing is, one of the biggest demotivators employees have is when they feel unheard and that their voice doesn’t matter. They have these suggestions, they have these ideas, ways to make things better, but nobody listens.
Because again, the people think they know better because they’re the leaders or whatever reason. Don’t be that way. If you really want your team to be productive, to take ownership in what they do, listen to what they have to say and implement what you can.
The more input you get, the more you implement, the better you listen, the more ownership and the greater motivation you’ll have from your employees.
9. You have poor leadership throughout your organization
Another big cause of poor motivation is that our organizations are full of poor leadership.
And there’s different reasons for that. One reason is that we don’t deal with bad managers. When someone’s a bad manager or bad leader, too often they’re promoted out of that position instead of being dealt with, instead of being trained and seeing if they’re willing to learn, they just get moved to a different department. And we keep our organizations full of bad leaders.
And when you have bad leaders, you’re gonna have bad motivation. Because here’s the thing. The ultimate cause of success or failure of a team or organization is its leadership, but too often we keep bad leadership in our organizations.
And then we promote people and hire people who are bad leaders instead of making sure we’re moving up people who actually know how to lead. An educational degree doesn’t mean someone knows how to lead. Having done well as a graphic designer or salesperson doesn’t mean they can lead well as a manager of similar people.
We need to stop promoting and keeping bad managers. And we also need to make sure that we train managers and leaders well. Too often, training isn’t there, or it’s lacking. It’s not enough, or it teaches things like the duties or the theories or whatever it may be, instead of this is how you be a great leader.
Or we do the one and done trainings, and that’s it. And we just expect people to perform. If you want productive employees, you need great leadership and you need to train people to be great leaders to do that.
10. You don’t show appreciation (enough)
Another big cause of a lack of motivation is a lack of appreciation. Appreciation is so easy to give, but so often it’s not given. There are many reasons people may not give it, but whatever the reason, when you don’t show appreciation, people feel unappreciated and they quit their jobs because of that or they’re less productive because of that.
In fact, I believe it was 80% of employees in one survey said they would work harder if they’re a manager, just show them appreciation. One easy way to increase motivation is to show appreciation. You just have to make sure you actually care about the people and that their appreciation is genuine.
11. You don’t deal with negative behaviors or bad cultural fits
Another cause of poor motivation is that too many organizations and leaders don’t deal with negative behaviors or with bad cultural fits.
Someone has negative behaviors. Maybe they’re toxic. Maybe they just don’t fit in the culture. But because the person is a high performer, or because the leader is afraid to deal with the person, or because they’re trying to be nice, they don’t do anything about it.
But what then happens is that while this person stays, it hurts everybody else on the team. And they’re demotivated because of that. And many may even quit because of that, because you didn’t deal with this negative behavior, you didn’t deal with this person that wasn’t a cultural fit.
And the thing is, it’s not being nice to them to keep them in that position when they aren’t a good fit. Instead, the nicest thing can be to let them go to get somewhere where they can be a great fit. You do nobody any good by ignoring negative behaviors and not dealing with them or by keeping people who shouldn’t be kept.
12. You start employees off poorly
And one big thing that many organizations do that kill motivation from the beginning is that they start employees off poorly. I know for me, I’ve had multiple times going into a new job where the technology wasn’t ready, the email wasn’t ready, I’d have to sit in a room for a couple days reading a bunch of manuals and so on.
The thing is, when people come to a new job, they’re excited, they’re motivated. When you don’t have things ready for them, when you start them off poorly with a bunch of HR trainings and whatever it may be that’s just, ugh, you’re hurting that motivation.
Yes, you have to do those trainings at some point and put them in, but you want to start them off well, meeting their team, having everything ready, and doing things that will help push the motivation, not drag them down.