Ultimate Guide To Motivating Others
In the world of business, one of the most important qualities to have in a leadership role is the ability to support and motivate other people who work with you. Even when thinking about motivation, it is important that we take into account that there are both positive and negative ways to motivate people. Some of the negative ways of motivating others can be found in general examples like intimidating people or making them feel fearful. It may work in a swift manner; however, these motivational tactics ultimately leave people feeling exhausted, and overall making their productivity short-lived.
That is why it is important to look into more positive ways to motivate people, such as coaching and efficiently delegating responsibilities. They’re more constructive in their approach and have long term benefits to them. They’re also much more customizable. No human in the world is the same, and therefore different things motivate different people. For some people, they want to make a difference. For others, they want to make good money. Some people love the social aspects of their jobs. Consequently, when you find yourself in a leadership role, you’ll want to consider different ways to help motivate people and to figure out what motivates them individually. That’s where this guide can help you. Here’s a guide to the importance of motivating others in a business setting.
Debunking a Few Misunderstandings About Motivation
One of the best ways to learn about motivating others is to learn what not to do. If you’re in a management position, it’s important to keep these in mind. This misinformation constantly gets thrown around and can create a very uncomfortable work setting. Let’s take a look at a few that need debunking.
Motivation comes from them not you
There’s an old saying: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. That’s important to keep in mind with other people. We can inspire people to do better, but ultimately it’s up to them. Your goal is to create a space in which learning and growing are available, but sometimes leaders come across employees who don’t want to grow. For example, if you’re a manager of a retail store, and you’ve got employees who are late, don’t really do their job, and generally, lack motivation. In this case, you can assess what the problem is an attempt to help them. But if you’ve done all you can, and they’re still lacking motivation, then it’s more of a personal problem. They need to find their own motivation.
Don’t expect money to be a primary motivator
It’s true that we all need to make money in order to live and thrive in this world. We have bills to pay, mouths to feed, and need transportation to get back and forth. But without a personal reason for doing something, chances are we’re going to find ourselves in a situation where we’re dragging our feet and struggling to find the motivation to do our best. Your goal in a leadership position is to understand the person who is working for you. They’re more than a paycheck and will only go so far if you assume that an occasional pay raise will keep them going.
Keeping employees on their toes is a great way to motivate them
No, it’s not. Fear or anxiety will only drive a person so far. It can work when you’re in crunch time and need to get stuff done, but it is unhealthy and exhausting to make someone fearful or uptight for extended amounts of time. Our bodies aren’t meant to be in fight or flight mode for extended periods of time. Eventually, we come crashing down and that’s when people quit or no longer work at an optimum level. It can also make their work productivity suffer. For instance, if there’s a deadline coming up, and a writer and editor need to pump out a few stories and proofread an entire magazine spread, they will lack focus and end up having errors slip through and the lack of polish in their work will show.
What motivates you will not necessarily motive others
As mentioned earlier, we are all individual people, and therefore have different things that get us out of bed in the morning. Don’t automatically assume that what gets you out of bed will get your employees out of bed as well. Perhaps you have a husband and two children, and they are what motivate you to do your best each day at work. This will not be the same for those who are single. Their motivation may be more individually based. Perhaps they want to see themselves thriving in their career path several years from now. In this case, appealing to their family to help them find motivation may not be as helpful.
How to Motivation Others and Yourself
Now, let’s get into the meat of understanding motivation. You may be surprised to see that we’ve included you in the motivational factor. The reason is, as you’ll see, motivation comes from a personal space. That means, it’ll start with you and spread to those around you.
Motivate them by starting with yourself
Have you ever found yourself feeling negative after being in the presence of someone who gave off negative energy? Regardless of how great you were feeling prior to being around them, it feels as if they’ve tied an anchor to your leg and have taken you down into the proverbial sea of frustration and anxiety with them. You don’t feel like doing anything productive and are probably trying to look for the nearest exit. Consider this but consider it when you’re stuck with this person or people for over eight hours. Day in and day out, you’re feeling this, and your motivation will be visibly affected.
This is why you’ll want to consider what energy you’re giving out and if you’re feeling motivated yourself. It starts with you. Take a moment to learn about what motivates you. You want to learn what motivates your employees, so first ask yourself what motivates you. Think about this outside of work. What in your life puts a smile on your face? What gives you the most pleasure? Contemplating about it will make it more visible to you and make it easier to conjure up on the harder days. It’ll help calm you down and keep you motivated. The same will happen to those under your employment. But it must start with you.
Find a medium between the organization’s goals and personal goals
Motivation is a great thing to have. When employees are excited, they’ll do what they can to get the job done. The thing is that motivation in business should still be focused – at least on a certain level – with that of the organization. While the individual is important, at the end of the day, there’s a business to run and productivity is just as important as the individual. That’s why you’ll want to find a happy medium between the organization’s goals and the individual’s goals. The best way to do this is to both identify and review the goals of the organization with the employees. These can happen in occasional meetings or other events in which open dialogue up to everyone. It’s also a great way to remind employees of their importance to the overall goals. It makes them feel connected with everyone else and helps to build comradery. Try to keep the goals simple to understand so that employees can easily conjure them up in their individual time and can internalize them. Simplicity will also allow them to find their own personal ways of customizing the goals to their roles in the job.
Supporting employees isn’t a one-time deal. It’s a process.
The business world never stays the same. With the changes in products and other demands comes the need for businesses to change as well. This goes for the motivations and goals of the people involved in the business as well. This means that you’ll have to be able to adapt to the changes in people’s goals and motivations as well. One example is when one person leaves, and another comes in to replace them. In this situation, the motivations of the group as a whole will change in some respects. A new person means a new set of personal motivations as well. Don’t push the same motivations that were there on the new person or else it could put them in an awkward position.
The thing to keep in mind is that it’s a process. You’re never finished motivating people. New challenges come up and they’ll need to be addressed. Sustaining not just their motivation but yours as well is something that’ll be done on a weekly basis. In the end, though, it’s fulfilling and keeps the ball rolling, so to speak.
Procedures, policies and other organizational systems work better than working with just good intentions.
As mentioned earlier, the individual relationship is important, but so is the business factor. Just like motivation, relationships between individuals change. If motivation is primarily based on interpersonal relationships, it’s setting the motivation up for eventual failure if something uncomfortable happens. What if someone assumes that you’re playing favorites, and what was initially a healthy interpersonal relationship with a motivation to receive praise for their job all of a sudden becomes one of hostile feelings? This can also be problematic for those times when stress is high because the company is in its busy season.
This is why you’ll want to rely more on comprehensive systems to keep motivation high. One way you can do this is to establish different systems like a compensation system, organizational policies, and procedures, or an employee performance system. Having a clear system established keeps the understandings between you and your employees clearer. The goal of motivation is to respect the individual but also respect the fact that a business must be run.
About This Motivating Others Guide
This guide offers the most insightful articles, educational videos, expert insights, specialist tips and best free tutorials about motivating others from around the internet. The learning guide is split into four levels: introduction, basics, advanced and expert. You can learn at your own pace. Each item shows an estimated reading or watching time, allowing you to easily plan when you want to read or watch each item. Below you’ll find a table of contents that enables you to easily find a specific topic you might be interested in.
Why Employee Motivation Is Important
Employee motivation is a critical aspect at the workplace which leads to the performance of the department and even the company. Motivating your employees needs to be a regular routine. There are companies that sadly fail to understand the importance of employee motivation. Research shows that many companies have disengaged employees with low motivation; only 13% of employees are engaged at work.
The Benefits of Highly Motivated Employees
By understanding the reasoning behind employees’ actions, and using those results to motivate them, you can improve business performance. In addition to being more highly engaged, motivated employees handle uncertainty more easily; are better problem-solvers; have higher levels of innovation, creativity, and customer-centricity; are more profitable; create higher levels of customer satisfaction; and increase employee retention rates.
What Effective Motivation Looks Like
Knowing how to motivate your workforce will help ensure they’re enthusiastically bringing their best efforts each day and helping the company meets its sales and performance goals, whatever they might be. But let’s talk about motivation in practical terms. What does it actually look like? There are many ways modern leaders can motivate their employees to deliver their best every day — here are just a few of them.
What Really Motivates Employees?
According to Paul Marciano, Ph.D. and author of Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work: Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles of Respect, 40 years of research proves that not only does the traditional reward and recognition programs not work, they actually decrease overall morale.
In the U.S. workforce, 70% of employees are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” at work according to Gallup, so management teams are highly motivated to find ways to motivate their employees.
Motivating Employees to be More Productive
Reinforcement and expectancy theories also attest to the motivating power of money. According to reinforcement theory, if pay is contingent on performance, it will encourage employees to maintain high levels of effort. According to expectancy theory, money will motivate to the extent that employees perceive it as satisfying their personal goals and to the extent they perceive their pay as being dependent upon performance criteria.
Things That Ultimately Motivate Employees to Achieve
While assessments, books and other tools can help project and inspire short and long performance, the factors that motivate employees to achieve evolve as they mature and begin to truly understand what matters most to them. Therefore, as leaders we must hold ourselves accountable to build meaningful and purposeful relationships that matter with our employees. This allows us to better understand those we are serving, just as much as ourselves.
What Motivates Millennial Workers
In this age of technology, employees are no longer limited to the 9-to-5 workday, or regulated to their office desk. In fact, because of this, work/life balance has never been more popular.
According to the study linked above by Deloitte, when choosing a job, the number one priority for Millennials is one that offers a good work/life balance. That means that the companies that offer flexible schedules will have a better chance at snagging and retaining top Millennial talent.
Employee Motivation: A Powerful New Model
Getting people to do their best work, even in trying circumstances, is one of managers’ most enduring and slippery challenges. Indeed, deciphering what motivates us as human beings is a centuries-old puzzle. Some of history’s most influential thinkers about human behavior—among them Aristotle, Adam Smith, Sigmund Freud, and Abraham Maslow—have struggled to understand its nuances and have taught us a tremendous amount about why people do the things they do.
The 4-Drive Model Theory On Employee Motivation
The four-drive model of employee motivation is a holistic way to look beyond typical financial workplace rewards. It is an innovative and unique approach for organizational leaders, and each drive is necessary to understand motivation in the workplace. Executives typically concentrate their energy on the need for their employees to achieve by offering incentives, benefits, and higher base pay.
Psychological Theories of Motivation
We all want to be more productive but getting motivated enough to actually get things done can seem impossible. Social scientists have been studying motivation for decades, trying to find out what motivates our behavior, how and why.
Dozens of theories of motivation have been proposed over the years. Here are 5 popular theories of motivation that can help you increase workplace productivity.
How to Create a Motivating Workplace
Motivation is a powerful energy that drives and excites employees, which results in their maximum contribution. Setting and achieving goals, clear expectations, recognition, feedback, as well as encouraging management all contribute to an increase in workplace motivation. It flourishes in a positive work environment, which is why so many leaders want to learn new ways to motivate their workforce.
Causes Of Workplace Demotivation
Beyond the frustration of having checked-out paper pushers or haters in our organizations, this lack of satisfaction and motivation costs us billions in lost productivity.
But what actually causes the disengagement? If you’re trying to understand your own job dissatisfaction, or root out a morale problem at your company, consider these common reasons people hate their jobs.
Adams’ Equity Theory: Balancing Employee Inputs and Outputs
Adams’ Equity Theory calls for a fair balance to be struck between an employee’s inputs (hard work, skill level, acceptance, enthusiasm, and so on) and an employee’s outputs (salary, benefits, intangibles such as recognition, and so on).
According to the theory, finding this fair balance serves to ensure a strong and productive relationship is achieved with the employee, with the overall result being contented, motivated employees.
Motivating Unmotivated Employees
Even the most motivated team can lose their enthusiasm over time. The good news is you don’t have to give up on your demotivated employees — at least not just yet. Before you go searching for replacement candidates, try to motivate your demotivated employees with the following tactics.
How to Become a Motivational Leader
The starting point of motivational leadership is to begin seeing yourself as a role model, as an example to others. One key characteristic of leaders is that they set high standards of accountability for themselves and for their behaviors. They assume that others are watching them and setting their own standards according to what they see.
What Leaders Do to Motivate Their Employees
What science has already found is that positive emotions (how work and culture make employees feel) are at the root of human motivation. We are wired for it in our creation design.
Therefore, managers must acquire the knowledge of what truly inspires loyal human beings to enthusiastically perform at a high level.
Let me prescribe eight strategies to help managers create the right atmosphere for motivating others.
The Google Way of Motivating Employees
Google has acquired for itself a huge and bright workforce (over 50,000 employees spread throughout the world) that serves millions of people all over the globe. However, what is even more exemplary is how Google heavily pampers its employees while still being able to extract one-of-a-kind and outstanding ideas and products from them.
Effective Ways to Motivate Employees
These days your team seems to be fine going through the motions. That star performer who put up those crazy numbers in her first three months? She’s hit a plateau, and lately her work product has the telltales signs of complacency – sloppiness, surface-level analysis, and an overall lack of creativity.
The frustrating thing is you know how great they can be. You’ve seen them at their best, but for the moment, the spark seems to have gone out
What’s going on here?
Well, it’s good news / bad news time.
First, the bad news: your team lacks motivation.
The good news? This is an entirely fixable problem.
How to Motivate and Inspire Employees
Motivating your team can be more art than science, but here are my simple techniques that will increase your chances of finding the right fuel. Leaders must understand that in today’s new workplace, there does not exist a single recipe to encourage employees to perform better. Rather, it’s about how to maximize the ingredients to create hundreds of recipes that are customized and authentic; that provide long-term continuity and impact. To get you started, this video will teach you how to inspire teams to optimally perform.
Stop Trying to Motivate Your Employees
t’s a misconception that you can motivate your employees. They’re already motivated. The key is to unleash their motivation. The Founder of Aperio Consulting Group, Kerry Goyette takes a deeper dive in this 17-minute video into motivation, how to leverage it, and the counterproductive motivations that may be holding us back from success.
The Puzzle of Motivation
Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don’t: Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories — and maybe, a way forward.
Further Reading: Best Books About Motivating Others
The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work, and Team with Positive Energy. This book takes readers on an enlightening and inspiring ride that reveals 10 secrets for approaching life and work with the kind of positive, forward thinking that leads to true accomplishment at work and at home.
Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work: Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles of RESPECT. This book gives you specific, low-cost, turnkey solutions and action plans– based on seven key drivers of employee engagement that are proven and supported by decades of research and practice―that will empower you to assess, troubleshoot, and resolve engagement issues in the workplace.
Manager’s Guide to Motivating Employees. This book is the perfect primer for managers looking to jumpstart the work ethic, excitement, and company synergy by engaging and motivating their employees. This new edition provides entertaining case studies and examples of how readers can create an environment in which employees feel passionate about their jobs and put the best of them in everything they do.
Be a Motivational Leader: Lasting Leadership Principles. You’ll discover how to: Build personal character to build your team, Take responsibility in your life and job, Cultivate both professional and personal success, Mentor and develop new leaders, Model achievement to those around you. Throughout, you’ll be challenged to grow, encouraged to lead with integrity, and inspired to help your team catch a vision bigger than their own.
Further Learning: Best Courses About Motivating Others
Inspiring and Motivating Individuals Course by the University of Michigan. In this course, you will learn how to create a shared vision for your team and effectively communicate it to your teammates. You will also learn how to set effective goals and expectations in a way that best enables your team to attain the shared vision.
Organizational Behavior: How to Manage People. Through the study of organizational behavior, we can gain insights into what makes people tick within a work context. Increasing your understanding of your own behavior and that of your colleagues, teams and leaders, is an important first step to bringing positive change to how you and your organization work.
Motivation: The Science of Motivating Yourself and Your Team. Motivation is not a speech or pep talk! It is the skill of creating a worthy purpose, an effective team environment, designing work for intrinsic motivation, and using positive reinforcement in an effective way. This course will enable you to develop a system of sustained motivation for yourself and your team.