How to Motivate Employees
Martha I. Finney
If You’re A Manager, You’re A Career Coach
No one is in a dead-end job, not even those people who think they are. There is always a way out—even a way up—from any job. Help your employees find that line of sight between what they’re doing now and what they’d like to be doing in their future. You are helping develop the future of your entire business. Managers who help their employees control the quality of their career prospects control the quality of their own prospects, including the high costs of turnover and replacement. Sooner or later, your employees will start looking for their next opportunity. You should have already helped them spot it, plan for it, and train for it—within your company, not down the street. Career pathing—the practice of helping employees identify where they want their careers to go and what steps they need to take to get there—is a people service any company can provide its employees, no matter who they are or where they sit on the org chart.
Before you can advise others, understand how your company maps and tracks the success steps of all its employees throughout the organization. Talk to as many long-tenured, high-performing employees as you can to discover what behaviors, work habits, and transferable skills helped them move the most freely throughout the entire organization. What characteristics, knowledge, and initiatives does your company reward beyond the strictly defined skill set of any one particular job?
Then research more job-specific promotion opportunities that might be available to your people. This project actually has two channels—researching the jobs most commonly filled by people in your department looking for any next step and those jobs most commonly desired by your people looking for the next step of their dreams. Discover what skills, education, experiences, and attributes each of these jobs requires. And if a collection of these descriptions doesn’t already exist, put one together! A binder with sheet protectors—one page per job description—could do the job just as effectively as an elaborate internal Web site. Just make sure it’s always available to your employees to browse through in relative privacy. And make sure you’re available to talk to your employees about what might be their next developmental goal.
Make career counseling one of your most important roles in your department. And assume nothing when you speak to your people about their individual ambitions. Let them tell you what their ideal next step is. It might not be a promotion for the sake of more money. It might not be a transfer out of your department. It might not even be a job that already exists, but one that you can custom-design for your employee at no additional expense.
In a Tucson call center, a young war veteran was happy in his job as a customer service rep, but he wanted to use the leadership skills he had learned in the Army to help his coworkers develop their own prospects. No specific job title already existed that would officially tap into that employee’s drive, so his supervisor helped him design his own job description, folding coaching into his role. In addition to a set number of hours he was still expected to take care of customers, he now had permission to use another portion of his workweek to counsel his coworkers on their own performance and prospects.
And now, instead of being frustrated that his boss didn’t see and make good use of his energy (and consequently leaving), this one customer service rep remained on the job. He is still enthused about his work, exciting others about their duties and speaking to community groups of small businesses (his customer base) and high school and college students about what a great company he works for.
Not only did his supervisor creatively work with him to find a way to stay and grow, he’s now helping other prospective employees conclude that they can find their future with this company as well.
Ask for Cheese—You Might Get the Moon
In 1933, John Jay Whitney was strolling through his 600-acre Long Island estate one day when an amusing notion crossed his mind. So he turned to his groundskeeper and said, “Wouldn’t it be great to be able to play polo right here?” Then he went on vacation.
When he returned, he came back to discover a lovely, leveled polo field where the gentle, natural swells of Long Island seacoast landscape used to be.
Oops.
Most of us don’t think, operate, or make mistakes on the scale of a John Jay Whitney (one of the country’s wealthiest men in those times, who started the first venture capital firm, financed Minute Maid orange juice and Gone with the Wind, and served as ambassador to Great Britain during the Eisenhower administration). But managers have more power than they know. And they sometimes think aloud.
The result? A polo field!
It’s hard to imagine that in these days of more democratic, team-based workplace cultures such a thing can happen. Four words immediately come to mind, though: five-figure shower curtains. This is not about executive excesses, by the way. It’s about that small reptilian noodle that basks inside all our brains with one assignment only: Do whatever you have to do to keep alive. These days that translates into the mandate of keeping a steady paycheck coming. And for your employees (no matter how egalitarian you pride yourself in being), that translates into two words: “Yes, boss.”
Even though we don’t like to think of ourselves as whip-cracking leaders, we do like to think of ourselves as the kind of people who know how to get things done—especially via the impassioned dedication and innovative talents of our team. But abject hop-to-it-iveness is nothing to be proud of. It’s the feudal squeaking of the gecko inside us all that pleads, “Keep feeding me!”
If you have the power to hire and fire, you hold many little reptilian brains in the palm of your hand.
Your employees are acutely aware that their advancement and survival may be, for the moment at least, at the service of your pleasure and fancies. If you think you may be getting more from your employees than you actually ask for, it’s time to do a proportion check.
Do you think aloud to the wrong people? Yes, you should neutralize your inner yes-man by exploring exciting ideas outside the safe, and ever-so-reassuring confines of your own skull. But if you’re sharing all your thoughts with just your direct reports, you may be exchanging your internal cheerleader for a whole cadre of people who are, in fact, paid to tell you you’re brilliant. If you want real, brutally honest feedback on your latest ideas, build a team of friends and authorities who aren’t counting on your goodwill for their rent money. Once you’ve tested it with trusted and respected people who are meeting their basic needs elsewhere, you can safely bring it to your team and request their feedback, ideas, processes, budgets, and schedules.
Are you making it safe for your direct reports to double-check your meaning and intent? This is an economic era when we build our competitive advantage by bringing things to the world it has never seen before. Few people get ahead in their careers these days by saying, “It can’t be done.” And that type of economic climate stifles the “no’s” in your department, which could ultimately prove to be very expensive and regrettable for you. So, while you certainly don’t want a team made up solely of entrenched “‘no’ men,” it’s good for your entire department to know that it can ask, “Are you sure?”
If you get that second question, stifle your own inner reptile, and ask a few questions back: “What are you seeing that I’m overlooking?” “Do you see a better (cheaper, more efficient) solution to this problem?” “Can we get the results we’re looking for without such drastic measures?” “So you think a party on Malta might not be the best way to invest stockholder funds?” Welcome that double-checking function as a trusted measure against huge mistakes that can change the landscape of your entire business. Give your team permission to say, “Maybe there’s a better way.” Your successes may be less dramatic. But your blunders won’t be the stuff of cautionary tales 75 years later.
If They Aren’t Buying It, They Aren’t Doing It
Over recent years, the wise thing has been to help employees see the connection between their work inside the company and their external customers’ experience with their product. Southwest Airlines, of course, has been famously trotted out as an example of this internal branding. It gives its customers the “freedom” to fly affordably and enjoy life through travel. Therefore, the employees should feel the same kind of freedom to do their jobs well—and enjoy life on the job. With internal branding, all the “whys” of how they’re expected to do their job are embedded in the cultural conversations employees have with the company overall. Make the experience of doing the job consistent with the experience of using the resulting product, the reasoning goes, and you’ve got a better product (not to mention a stronger customer relationship and larger market share).
On an organizational, macro level, these kinds of conversations are driven via big campaigns coming out of corporate communications, marketing, and HR. But, as a people manager, you have the micro-level responsibility of making the same kinds of emotional links to the employees’ daily deliverables. Marketing managers understand that customers are volunteers—they can always go somewhere else for what they need. Your employees are also volunteers—they can always go somewhere else for a paycheck.
You’re the ultimate brand manager—helping your employees connect the value of what they do in their jobs to the value of the jobs themselves. This isn’t about engaging what you might have once considered to be your employees’ discretionary efforts. This is about engaging the basic fundamentals of their job responsibilities. If your employees aren’t fully engaged in the spirit behind the tasks of their days, they will do only the bare minimum and then sit around waiting for you to tell them what’s next. In addition to telling them the “what,” you have to inspire them with the “why.” Do that well, and you’ve got employees who are sold on the mission of the day.
Your clout as the boss won’t cut it anymore. “Because I said so” may have worked with a five-year-old (once), but not with people who probably know their job better than you do. And, of course, you better forget about “My way or the highway.” Just as you can’t force a customer to buy, you can’t compel a valued employee to perform. “My way or the highway” will result in just one response: “Yeah, okay.” And it won’t be the “okay” of compliance.
In today’s daily workplace, your job as manager is to sell the value of the mundane as much as the marvelous. Your challenge is only as difficult as your customer (your employee) is resistant, or as easy as your employee is emotionally bought-in to the powerful value proposition behind the task.
Sell your employees on the mission of the job they do. Speak about their roles and responsibilities in terms of customer service. Help your employees see how their duties and tasks serve customers down the line—even if that customer is in accounting down the hall. An understanding of the entire value proposition of your department and how its function serves your business unit and the entire corporation will help your employees see how their daily efforts have meaning beyond the immediate sense of hassle and deadline.
And don’t make the mistake of interpreting resistance as a demonstration of “no.” Salespeople don’t take “no” for an answer; neither should you. Find out what the resistance is based on and address that issue specifically. Lack of time? No money? Lack of other essential resources? Need to be convinced that their effort is essential? Do what successful salespeople do. They take resistance as a hint from the customer on how they can successfully seal the deal. When you get resistance from your employees, don’t punish them. Convince them to buy.
Focusing on What’s Right Can Help Solve What’s Wrong
When you face a mandate for change within your department or company, you can choose two different approaches: You can obsess on the problem until you’re limply depleted of ideas, or you can go the other way and obsess about what’s going well and allow the power of positive focus to drive a constructive plan for the transformation you need. Metaphysical theorists will tell you that whatever you focus on is the thing that expands. For a more managerial perspective, the late Peter Drucker, widely considered to be the founding father of the study of management, put it this way: Leading change is about aligning people’s strengths so that their weaknesses become irrelevant. Either way, the message is this: If you want to build positive change, sharpening your beam of attention strictly on what’s wrong and needs to be changed is not going to motivate your team toward the better future. The ideal future is built on what’s already great, highly functioning, healthy, and whole.
If you want your team to work toward positive change in your organization, the practice known as appreciative inquiry can be just the approach you need for gathering your people into a workplace community of forward-thinking, mutually supportive, change agents. In this approach, the task is broken down into five phases, all of which tap into your employees’ creative attentions, strengths, resources, and assets toward creating positive change—which is a lot more motivating that trying to fix only what’s wrong:
Phase 1—Frame the task in a positive, affirming way. For instance, instead of asking, “How can we reduce this high turnover?” ask “What is it about this organization that inspires people to stay?”
Phase 2—Focus on what is great about the organization as it is right now. Lead your team into discussing in as rich detail as possible all those elements that make up your organization’s positive core. Create an opportunity for your team to exchange stories about times they felt that the company was at its best, when they were at their best, and what can be learned and borrowed from those examples to catalyze the change that’s necessary now.
Phase 3—Dream about what could be. Allow your team to brainstorm as vividly as possible all the different ways the organization can improve to serve your customers even better. If there was ever a time to indulge in “blue sky thinking,” this is it. There should be no limits to the grandiosity of the vision and ideas. The ideas should be as emotionally compelling as possible, without regard (at this point) to practical applications.
Phase 4—This is the practical application phase. The dreams take a significant step closer to becoming real in the design phase. This is where the emotionally compelling ideals are translated into processes, outcomes, decisions, and systems that will help the Phase 3 ideals actually take shape.
Phase 5—The destiny phase calls upon the participants to actually commit themselves to all the actions necessary to transform the dreams they devised into the realities essential for moving their organization forward.
The power of the appreciative inquiry approach to motivating change is drawn from the fact that all players are invited to participate within a positive culture of possibility. This is far more inspiring and motivating than the more traditional shame-based focus of determining what the root cause of a problem is (barriers, failures, resistance). With appreciative inquiry, possibility-based brainstorming is launched from the belief that the organization is already at its best.
It’s human nature to be more inspired by improving on what’s already great, rather than wallowing in the muddy trenches of what’s going wrong. Make a point of reminding your team members of their excellence. And keep them in the habit of appreciating the strengths they bring as a group to the organization, as well as the successes that they have already racked up in their collective histories.