Mastering the art of motivation

Opinion

Jan 16, 20245 mins

IT LeadershipStaff Management

Effective leaders don’t do. They motivate those who do. And the trick to fostering a motivated staff lies in the subtleties of motivation itself.

Good CIOs don’t get things done. They build an IT organization that gets things done.

This starts with the dreaded organizational chart, but only because the org chart is the manager’s tool for documenting what responsibilities have been delegated and to whom. In an effective organization, it should go without saying, everyone knows who’s responsible for what.

But employees knowing what they’re responsible for isn’t the same thing as their caring a whole bunch about their responsibilities. That takes motivation.

Demotivating employees: What not to do

Before a leader tries to motivate those who report to them, they can first pursue the easier goal of not demotivating them. All that takes is decreasing your level of arrogance, disrespect, and unfairness. If you aren’t an arrogant, disrespectful, unfair dink you can proceed to the motivational starting gate.

How do you know? Ask someone you trust. If you aren’t sure whom you can trust you can engage a consultant to interview the employees in your organization, promising them complete confidentiality in exchange for their candor.

Motivating employees: What doesn’t work

There are those whose worldviews are built around the movies and television shows they watch. According to this Hollywood perspective, motivation is a matter of charisma and inspiring speeches.

Good luck with that. Charisma, like physics’ account of the electromagnetic force, follows a sort of inverse square law. Even for those who have it, its effect diminishes with distance.

Speaking of physical laws and their applicability, inspiring speeches resemble radioactivity — they have a half-life. Following your delivery of even the most inspiring speech, figure employees’ level of inspiration will diminish by half every day that follows.

What else doesn’t work? Financial rewards. Money, in the form of “Great job! Here’s your reward for it!” doesn’t work. Give someone a bonus as a reward for putting forth extra effort and all you’ve done is raise the baseline. A bonus becomes what’s expected, so the next bonus will need to be bigger. Otherwise, the absence of a bonus turns into a demotivator.

And that’s for the employee who received the bonus. For everyone else, who in their own eyes also went above and beyond, not getting a bonus when bonuses are a possibility isn’t merely demotivating. It will tick them right off.

And that’s before you take into account an effect described in Alfie Kohn’s groundbreaking Punished by Rewards: In a deep and fundamental way, financial incentives are insults, because what they communicate is that you think you have to bribe employees to get them to perform well.

To be clear, money does have its place, but only in that it’s used as an expression of gratitude, not as an incentive. Money, that is, is a business’s loudest voice. Saying “thank you” is motivating. Delivering a bonus and explaining that it’s the company’s way of expressing its appreciation?

That can work — but be judicious about it. It can still foster resentment on the part of everyone else.

Most often, thanking the team, not an individual, works better and with fewer unintended consequences.

What works

Want motivated employees? The first step on the road to what HR now likes to call “engagement” is to connect the dots — to make sure every single member of your organization understands, and can explain when asked, with pride, how what they do creates value for the company’s Real Paying Customers.

Not how they made a fellow employee in a different spot on the org chart happy, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But an employee who doesn’t know how their efforts create important results are unlikely to care very much about what they’re paid to do.

What works best

Once you’ve helped employees connect their dots, the best way to further motivate them is also the cheapest, easiest, and has the fewest unintended consequences.

Compliment them on a job well done, whenever they’ve done a job well enough to be worth noting.

Sure, there are wrong ways to use compliments as motivators. First and foremost the employee you’re complimenting must value your opinion. If they don’t they’ll write off your compliment as just so much noise.

Second, a compliment from you should not be an easy compliment to earn. “I really like your belt,” isn’t going to inspire someone to work inventively and late.

Third, with few exceptions compliments should be public. There’s little reason for you to be embarrassed about being pleased with someone’s efforts.

With one caveat: Usually you’ll have one or two in your organization who routinely perform exceptionally well, but also one or two who are plodders — good enough and steady enough to keep around; not good enough or steady enough to earn your praise.

Find a way to compliment them in public anyway — perhaps because you prize their reliability and lack of temperament.

There must be something that qualifies. Because if there isn’t … why are you keeping them around at all?

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