Motivating Others

There are two aspects to what makes a person perform well: ability and motivation.

Everyday, people make decisions about how much effort to put into their work. Managers have many opportunities to influence these decisions an motivate their team by providing challenging work, recognizing outstanding performance, allowing participation in decisions that affect employees, and showing concern for personal issues.

As a manager, you need to understand what drives your team to do the best that they can. American psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed that every individual has a five-level hierarchy of needs that they are driven to attempt to satisfy. Once a lower-level need has been largely satisfied, its impact on a person's behavior diminishes, and they begin to be motivated to gain the next highest level need.

There are two aspects to what makes a person perform well: ability and motivation. Ability is the product of aptitude, training, and resources, while motivation is the product of desire an commitment. All of these elements are required for high performance levels. If someone is not performing well, the first question you should ask yourself is: "Is their poor performance the result of a lack of ability or a lack of motivation?" Motivational methods can often be very effective for improving performance, but if the problem is lack of ability, no amount of pressure or encouragement will help. What the person needs is training, additional resources, or a different job.

ACTION POINT: Evaluate your team through the lens of ability and motivation.