Last month’s article focused on
how to discover what motivates your staff. In this article we’ll look at what
you can do to increase their motivation, starting with the most popular
motivator, achievement. Almost all of your team members are motivated by
achievement to a certain extent. Are you capitalizing on that? Let’s find
out. 

Harness the Achievement
Motivators 

When you ask anyone what
motivates them at work, most often they will first talk about the satisfaction
they feel when they have achieved something. I’ve witnessed people putting
great effort into a project without much concrete gain apart from the feeling
of satisfaction from achieving something significant and challenging. It’s a
strong motivating force and something relatively easy to harness in the
workplace, if you know how. 

To harness this type
of motivation, you need to make sure of two things: 

1) Your employees know the results of their
work. 

2) Your employees believe they have control
over the results. 

Seeing,
Hearing and Feeling Results 

Think about
it. Imagine you are preparing a PowerPoint presentation for your boss to
deliver, and you will not be present for the delivery nor get any feedback on
how well it is received. How will you know if you have been
successful? 

If you don’t know what aspects of your
efforts were appreciated and what parts could be improved, why would you make
an effort to do it well? Any extra effort you make may well be wasted and you
wouldn’t even know it. 

True to form, your boss
comes back from the presentation and tells you it was ‘fine’. You feel like
your job is not very exciting and there’s nothing to motivate you to do any
better than you normally do. 

In contrast, think
about what would happen if you were in the audience when your boss delivered
the presentation. 

You would be able to watch her
as the presentation slides guided her and supported her. You’d notice the
reactions of the people in the audience. Maybe they get puzzled by a slide and
need to ask for confirmation. You hear their murmurs of confusion. You hear
their ‘hmms’ as they understand. You feel the confidence of your boss and the
feeling of assurance she gives the audience. In other words, you get to sense
and experience the results of your actions. Yes, it’s motivating because it is
concrete feedback on your results. 

Apart from
actually witnessing the impact of work first-hand, it is also very motivating
to receive specific feedback. In this case, your boss could have taken the time
to note what she particularly liked about the presentation slides, and also
what she would prefer to change, or which aspects didn’t have the desired
effect. With this kind of constructive feedback, you would feel motivated to
improve your results next time. 

Both positive and
corrective feedback are important and motivating. But in general positive
feedback is more important and more powerful. I’ll go more into this topic in a
future article. 

Controlling Results and
Expressing Yourself 

Likewise imagine
what happens to your motivation when you are working on an interesting and
important project but your boss keeps insisting on making the most important
decisions himself. You feel you are just doing busy-work and not really
contributing to the results. You feel uninspired, even used. You might react by
doing the minimum so at least you can get off work early and do something you
really like. 

I’ve had numerous coaching clients
complain about being treated this way by their supervisors. Most likely the
boss is not aware of the damage being done to the motivation and morale of the
team. 

In contrast, have you ever worked for
someone who trusted you with a project that was a real challenge for you? Maybe
it was a previous boss, a teacher or a leader in a voluntary
organization? 

If you remember a time like that,
you may recall an adrenaline rush of excitement as you thought ahead to how you
would do the job. You probably felt honoured that you were trusted and you
really wanted to live up to that trust. You decided to yourself to do the best
you could both to test yourself and also to prove yourself to that important
person who trusted you. 

Missed
Opportunities 

When people don’t have the
opportunity to sense and control their results, they quickly lose motivation.
It’s human nature. And you know, your employees are human too. 

Many managers make these same mistakes with the best of intentions.
Here are some of the thinking patterns that lead to these missed motivational
opportunities. 

1) “I am more
qualified to do this work and I can do a better job than my
staff.” 

All managers must
strike a balance between getting the work done and developing other people to
get the work done. Very often doing the work yourself is playing it safe. I
would challenge you to delegate and develop more. You, your company and your
team will benefit in the long run. 

2)
“My people are too junior and inexperienced to achieve very
much.” 

With junior people it
is even more important that you develop them, both to get them up to speed and
to train them to expect to learn and grow. You can start with small tasks to
gradually build their confidence and experience. You will need to experiment with
what size of task motivates them and what is too overwhelming. Everyone has a
different capacity for challenge and learning. 

3)
“I need to receive credit for my team’s work in order to ensure my power and
position in the organization, or for my personal gratification and continued
motivation.” 

This issue is a
challenge for many managers. We can blame the organizational culture for
requiring power politics, however, I believe this problem comes more from the
personal realm. Is it really true that your company won’t value you unless you
take all the credit? Or is it more a question of your own level of confidence
and belief in yourself? 

The most motivating
managers that I’ve met are all very self-confident people. They don’t need to
prove themselves much. They have a pattern of thinking that allows them to feel
secure in the most power-hungry workplace. They often use a sense of integrity,
of ‘doing the right thing’, to keep themselves focused on developing their
people and their organizations. 

To use the
achievement motivators effectively may require a shift in your thinking that
marks a milestone in your development as a successful manager. It is a key area
of personal growth for all managers and often a focus for much of the
leadership development coaching I do. 

But… 

When I bring up this type of motivation to my clients or students, I
often hear the complaint that their people are not motivated to do a good job
in their work because … their employees want to avoid being given more
work. 

Yes. Of course. Wouldn’t you do that? If you
give your employees MORE work when they do a good job, you are punishing them
for their efforts. You are probably giving them more stress, less free time and
more of the same kind of work that is becoming boring and tedious to
them. 

To motivate them to work harder and do a
better job you need give them BETTER work. Better work is work that challenges
them, for which they get a new and better kind of recognition or credit. Work
they are responsible and accountable for and that you count on them to do well.
I mean also work over which they can express their talents and preferences,
where they can make their mark and feel a real contribution. 

It is also, by the way, work that contributes more value to your
organization. It challenges them to give their best and to tap into their
higher-level talents. Wouldn’t you want them to do that? 

Once again you may need to let go of some of the control you have as
their boss. You may need to figure out how to upgrade some of the busy-work into
higher accountability work. 

You may also need to
figure out how to communicate the benefits of this kind of work to your staff.
If they are accustomed to being given only more work and not better work, it
may take some honest talk to relate how you intend to change things. 

Are you thinking now about how you could do this? If yes, I would love
to hear your ideas of what you will do and also the particular obstacles and
challenges you face. 

Actions to Take 

In
summary, here is a list of questions to answer and actions to take that will
help you harness the achievement motivators of your staff. 

1) Consider how each of your staff receives feedback on his or her
responsibilities. How can you increase the amount and quality of both positive
and corrective feedback? 

2) If you could give each
of your staff members a motivating challenge, what would it be? 

3) What stops you from delegating higher-level responsibilities to
your staff? What change in your thinking or actions would be needed to increase
your level of delegation?