Today’s guest post is from John Roulet, author of “The Supervision Solution.”
Are you motivated to do good work? If your answer is “yes,” you don’t need a boss to motivate you. If your answer is “no,” you are relatively rare to our species and shouldn’t be on a payroll.
Countless times I’ve heard and read the words of business leaders who feel that their job is to motivate their employees. Yet not once have a heard a single employee say, “I need a boss to motivate me.”
It seems that many business leaders and HR folks think that the people working in their organization need to be motivated. Such misperceptions fail to recognize and respect the long human history of hard work and sacrifice. We are actually quite astonishing when it comes to how hard we are willing to work and what we will sacrifice for a cause. Consequently, a bit of advice is appropriate for those aforementioned business leaders and HR folks: Be more respectful to the people on your organization’s payroll.
Being motivated is rarely, if ever, the issue for talented employees. They don’t need to be prodded or cajoled to do great work. The problems they typically confront are work environments that have become de-motivating. Talented employees need information, knowledge, skills and to perform. Without these, they experience frustration and de-motivation. The business leader’s job isn’t to race around trying to motivate employees. His job is to build and maintain the leadership system that eliminates employee de-motivation. Once that is done, he can give incentives, award certificates and parties.
Providing employees with needed information is foundational to avoiding employee de-motivation. There is one piece of information my research has shown that most business leaders fail to provide: their value to the cause. Without it, an employee’s natural motivation is diminished.
Does John’s advice ring true for you? How do you keep your team members from losing their motivation?
Image credit, iStock
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Very insiteful…
I have been kicking myself for searching for ways
that motivate…
John's comments absolutely resonate with me. People typically are very self-motivating, so the point, at least to me, becomes how to facilitate employees' growth. Of course, individuals' motivation should be compatible in some way with organizational goals, but if they're not, then the problem is most likely one of selection rather than motivation.
The establishment of a 'just culture' goes a long way toward providing folks what they need to grow and develop while they're doing excellent things for the organization as a whole. At any rate, this is an excellent, succinct article, John. Well done.
"Nothing can inspire ordinary people to extraordinary levels of effort like an environment where their efforts as well as their accomplishments are appreciated and reinforced! In every exchange with subordinates or superiors it is critical to maintain, if not increase, self esteem of those we want to drive to higher levels of performance or, in the case of bosses, to greater levels of accepting us as members of their irreplaceable team. Behaviors that are reinforced are behaviors that are repeated either upward or down ward in any organization. That is greater self driven motivation then any carrot and stick formula."
I am self-motivated too however, every so often I want the next-in-charge of my efforts to review what I'm doing and if need be, get me back on track.
I have found over the years, that many 'self-motivated' people are doing what they chose and not what has to and needs to, be done.
Once again, John Roulet hits the bulls-eye.
I'm 65 years old, have a few more months to work before retirement, and I'm more motivated than ever. I didn’t need a boss to motivate me, and most colleagues didn’t either. Responding to and satisfying Customers’ needs motivated us.
But de-motivating “individual contributors” (how demeaning is that name?) is so easy that anyone can do it without trying, and most companies have some de-motivators.
Those of us in this situation who are fortunate to have good health in these "golden years", and who think it's great to continue working if we want to, are as self-motivated as anyone. But I'm seriously thinking of going back to Contracting as I did when younger, because I won't have to deal with things like a "Job Performance Evaluation", the most de-motivating device ever devised. A Contractor gets a performance evaluation every two weeks, not just once a year, and that motivates too!
So what I hear and what I know is that even good Supervisors can't motivate ANYONE while we had the least fair and most punitive system of "Job Performance Evaluation" available.
It's a dance, a corporate one-partner dance, where American companies almost universally use a system where "upper management" determined how much to allocate for raises in the next calendar year. 8 months later the Supervisor had to devise ways to rate almost all employees at the “meets expectations” level, so no matter their contributions above and beyond average, the pot was divvied-up so most got 1 to 3 % increases if they were lucky, and a couple may have gotten more or less.
In ten years at one company, only one of the 7 or 8 Supervisors who rated me could tell me how to get above average ratings, and that one only said “do a lot of work”!! Positive attitude, good communication, excellent teamwork and satisfying customers are not valued as much. And taking the initiative to work past quitting time to get something done was viewed with suspicion as an attempt to get more overtime pay.
So self-motivation is critical for us when companies choose Supervisors who never learned how to lead or supervise, who had to work within the performance evaluation system they were given, who were only motivated to keep their own positions or avoid any public mis-statements or “career-limiting” errors, or who never knew how hard we worked to keep the annual one-partner dance from de-motivating us.
Thanks for the soap box, keep up the good work and keep posting!
Having the proper motivation is a the key for everything in life. Rewards are fine to skirt de-motivation. Sometimes rewards are not available so we have use other no cost rewards such as employee personal satisfaction of good performance and verbal praises.
Leaders may not be able to motivate in the way that you describe, but they can certainly recognize employees for effort. In countless polls and surveys, employees say a top factor for their "lack of motivation or engagement" at work is that they are not appreciated or that their boss never recognizes them.
Giving incentives and parties as you suggest isn't the whole answer either. Rather, strategic recognition has direct, measurable impact on changing a company culture into one of appreciation in which employees are not demotivated by their environment and the mood in the office. Such strategic recognition encourages frequent, timely recognition of actions and behaviors that either demonstrate a company value or help achieve a company objective. In this way employees begin to understand how they, individually, make a difference in the company success. Measuring those recognitions over time and by department or geography also allow management to target intervention or training in low performing areas.
An example of how Symantec is successfully applying this approach is available here: http://globoforce.blogspot.com/2009/03/symantec-m…
The comments I read here are just wonderful! Please forgive me for choosing just one. It's from Bill Darbyshire. Bill cites supervisors who are only motivated to keep their own positions or avoid any public mis-statements or “career-limiting” errors.
We humans have a long and tragic history associated with such behaviors by our leaders. Sadly, it will never change, at least not significantly and never sustainably. Such behaviors are a manifestation of our aversion to losing what we already have (loss aversion). Loss aversion is likely genetically hardwired into each of us. Our species, or any other higher-order species, could not otherwise survive. Certainly there are other factors at play when we see leaders avoiding behaviors that could threaten their position, even behaviors that could benefit the group they lead. But loss aversion is likely the strongest of these factors.
It's frustrating because it is contrary to what we expect from leaders. Still, when we see such behaviors, we are observing something that is just so human. The leader who can regularly subordinate his own aversion to losing what he has for the good of the group or a cause is a relatively rare find.
Regards!
Hi,
After a long time (eternity?) I came across this article and it seemed just so true.
I think we're forcibly conditioned to externally "motivate" employees, ergo team lunches (bored faces), fun events (forced particiaption), outbound programs et al. I am NOT saying that these do nothing for motivation or that they are necessarily a bad thing. Just that over time, their relevance is lost (and lost very quickly) and they become rote.
I think that basically there is a 'hygiene' level of performance for which the employee does not expect any pat on the back. Beyond this some recognition of work propels him/her to work harder or at least with more enthusiasm. Recognizing work below this 'hygiene' level becomes heavily counter-productive and the employee then sets far lower benchmarks for himself thus hurting himself & the organization.
Regards,
NS