Motivating Your Team

Make sure that every individual realizes the link between their performance and the rewards.

There are other methods of motivating employees in addition to direct positive reinforcement. These include:

• Strengthening effort-performance-reward expectancies. To get the best from your team, emphasize the anticipated reward value, whether extrinsic or intrinsic. Make sure that every individual realizes the link between their performance and the rewards. Even if you organization does not provide performance-based pay, you can bestow other extrinsic rewards, such as allocating more favorable job assignments.
• Giving performance feedback. Provide feedback to demonstrate that you know what the members of your team are doing and to acknowledge improved performance or a job well done. Especially when individuals are unsure of themselves, you should point out ways in which the person is improving. Praising specific accomplishments will help to bolster the person's self esteem.
• Reinforce the right behavior. Quite often what managers say they want, what they reward, and what they get from their teams are quite different. If you verbally espouse innovation but reward doing things by the book, you are sending mixed signals and reinforcing the wrong behavior that you want to see repeated.
• Empowering employees to achieve. Empowering the people you are managing, by giving them the authority, information, and tools they need to do their jobs with greater autonomy, can greatly improve their motivation levels.

ACTION POINT: Reinforce right behavior and empower your team for independence.

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.

How to Motivate the People You Need

Work to win over those key people who aren't enthusiastically behind you or who for some reason may feel threatened by you and your vision.

To ensure that your vision is embraced and fulfilled, you have to pay attention to the people around you--those who will help and those who may hinder your progress. Take care to handle both the political and the personal sides of leading and implementing your vision.

Know who could hinder you or help you. Take the time necessary to identify those who might resist you in some way--for example, by blocking your access to needed resources. Plan how you will deal with such problems. Work to win over those key people who aren't enthusiastically behind you or who for some reason may feel threatened by you and your vision.

An effective leader has to be a persuasive communicator. Building coalitions is when this skill becomes particularly useful. You will need cooperation from people at all levels of your organization and beyond.

Choose carefully whom you assign to important roles. People in key positions need to be competent in their roles and loyal to your vision.

If the changes you are making are significant, then make sure everyone is involved and understands what's happening. If you are realigning the company's organizational structure, for example, do it quickly and fairly.

You may not be able to make dramatic changes simultaneously. There may be technical or political barriers. But even if you can make only small changes that show success, you'll be on your way. Any movement toward your vision should be noted as positive.

ACTION POINT: Pay close attention to the politics, people and progress that are necessary for pursuing your vision.

Expand Your Leadership Skills

...few leaders today use formal authority and the power to command and control

There will always be a time and place for charismatic leaders, but few leaders today use formal authority and the power to command and control; rather, they influence and motivate people to achieve clearly defined goals. The power to influence and motivate requires skills such as:

Communication skills to speak and write persuasively

Interpersonal skills to listen and hear what people are really saying

Conflict-resolution skills to handle the inevitable times of friction and tension

Negotiation skills to bring differing groups together

Motivational skills to convince people to strive for the same goal

ACTION POINT: Develop the skills required to motivate and influence people.