Assignment 2 - Wald

WHAT MOTIVATION IS NOT

Leading by Motivating

Motivation drives people to take action. Without proper motivational leadership, things simply would not get done. As a leader, your capacity for motivating plays a key element in the success of your team and your organization. This course provides you with an understanding of why motivating leadership strategies are important and offers practical techniques for encouraging team motivation.

Leading by Motivating

[Video description begins] Topic title: Leading by Motivation [Video description ends]

Effective motivational leadership blends the energies of persuasive influence, attractive incentives and positive recognition as a means to develop and reward individual potential and excellence. Channeling these energies, motivational leadership inspires teams with the desire to achieve common goals.

In this course, you’ll learn how to avoid falling for common myths that undermine motivation, and how to utilize intrinsic motivation to inspire your team. You’ll also explore ways of using existing workplace processes to motivate the individuals that comprise it.

What Motivation Is Not

[Video description begins] Topic title: What Motivation Is Not [Video description ends]

Some people willingly pour themselves and all their energy into a project, while others do the bare minimum and go home early. Why? Motivation. Motivation boosts initiative, productivity, and creativity. A lack of it dampens enthusiasm, blunts innovation, and stunts the desire to excel. As a leader, your ability to motivate others can make or break a project, initiative, team, or even the whole organization. Whatever the motivational need, an individualized approach is essential, as not everyone on your team has the same motivations.

Everyone’s different. Some respond best to public accolades, while others prefer a quiet handshake and a simple “good job” from the boss. Some find validation through work and professional achievement, while others see work as merely the means to providing an income to support a fulfilling home life. Motivators change as lives change. Consider money as a motivator. Everyone needs to pay bills. Just about everybody needs a regular paycheck. But once people have achieved a stable, satisfactory standard of living, money is often no longer a driving motivator. Other needs become more motivating.

Even authority, alone, is not an effective motivator. If a manager simply orders their employees around, there may be initial compliance, but appeals to authority generally wear thin quickly, leading to resentment and bad feeling. Successful leaders strive for buy-in. They show their people why their work matters and address their concerns about it. They listen closely to their teams and, in turn, their team members tell them, perhaps inadvertently, what motivates them. And like appeals to authority, neither is fear an effective motivator.

It’s true that fear of penalties or negative consequences can sometimes achieve short term compliance, but long term, fear breeds resentment, pushback, and disrespect. Coping with a fearful situation will become the driving motivator, a demotivator. People will expend a great deal of time and effort to avoid or work around penalties they find unreasonable. Either way, being fearful on the job means that one is not focusing positively on achieving either personal or organizational goals.

As a leader, part of your job is to turn the situation around, from a fearful environment to an inspiring one. Leadership expert, Bob Chapman, has said: “You’ve got to inspire those people to allow them to be what they’re intended to be…” Let them come together for a common purpose that inspires them to contribute value to the organization. Be that inspiration for your team. Lead by example and model the behaviors you want to instill in others. Live the lessons that you want others to learn. Your staff will respect your ideas when you’re consistent and follow through with what you say. Don’t fall prey to common motivational misconceptions. Not everyone responds to the same motivators. Money is not everyone’s prime motivation. Authority alone is not motivating, and neither is fear.

Fostering Intrinsic Motivation

[Video description begins] Topic title: Fostering Intrinsic Motivation [Video description ends]

Motivating a team is an ongoing, never-ending task for a successful leader. To one degree or another, they spend their entire professional careers working to achieve and maintain a motivated workforce. It is a process of assessment, synthesis, and action. That is, leaders, assess their team’s needs and motivators, then synthesize attainable goals, and finally implement a plan of action for applying them.

Abraham Maslow, an influential psychologist, studied human needs and explored how they guided people’s activities, creating his famous hierarchy of needs. Adapted to the workplace, it creates a pyramid that starts with a base of physiological needs, like physical access to a suitable workspace and bathrooms, eventually tapering up to a summit of self-actualization. It’s important to keep all of these factors in mind when you’re considering how to appeal to your team members’ intrinsic, or internal, psychological motivations.

The three lower levels, Physiological, Safety and Professional Resource, are basic needs. Once met the focus shifts toward fulfilling the higher needs for Social Belonging, Esteem, and Self-Actualization. These higher needs are the source of intrinsic motivation. They come from inside of the individual team member. It's their need for satisfaction or accomplishment; that’s when they find an activity rewarding. The rewards of social belonging and acceptance are found through involvement with the individuals on your team and in the organization. The way in which they can share ideas, in an open, accepting atmosphere, brings personal satisfaction.

A canny leader works to provide organizational mechanisms for their people to share ideas about productivity improvements, support collaboration, and cross-pollination between teams. These leaders let communication flow back to the individual, sharing the details of organizational performance that can motivate individuals. And most of all, they freely share any and all news of success. This validation of success fulfills the need for esteem, which can carry individuals through their work, through their career, and to organizational success. It can put your staff into overdrive. Strong motivational leaders give them recognition for work well done. Everyone wants to feel appreciated.

Everyone needs to know their work is valued. Positive motivators like praise and rewards bolster a team's confidence and self-esteem. It instills an intrinsic pride in their work. They reward them with increased decision-making autonomy and independence with their work, letting them take ownership of what they do. They will be more engaged and demonstrate more sustained commitment. Finally, leaders engage their staffs in development, which helps fulfill the need for self-actualization. It helps shape their personal and professional ambitions into specific attainable goals that align and support those of the organization.

You can help your team to think SMART; to applying SMART guidelines as you develop common goals, together. Are they lacking a specific work skill, or do they need more experience with a certain aspect of their job? Do they show a talent that needs to be fostered and developed? What are their professional aspirations? Conversely, do they need to achieve greater work-life balance? What do they, as individuals need in order to become the best they can be? Making an action plan with your team members, you can, together, lay out the professional development that fits your common goals. When you can provide opportunities for training, certification and advancement, everyone benefits. Your team members gain focus and satisfaction. The whole team gains in its abilities and performance.

Inspiring a Team

[Video description begins] Topic title: Inspiring a Team [Video description ends]

Inspire, from Latin, literally means to breathe in air. Inspiration is the fresh air that allows your team to excel and achieve. Inspiration takes on-going, long-term engagement. To quote Leadership expert, Bob Chapman, "A lot of inspiration is simply letting people know that they matter, and giving them a responsible freedom in the environment of continuous improvement…” Successful leaders let their teams take ownership of what they do and how they do it and then show their appreciation for what the team accomplishes.

Appreciative involvement with the team is a foundation for motivating people. When you value each individual for their unique contributions and talents, it lets them know that they belong; that their work is important to meeting the goals. Along with valuing talent, these leaders make positive connections with their staff. They look for and leverage things they have in common. Sharing a sense of humor creates a positive atmosphere where motivation for the work can come naturally. Sharing who you are, and letting your people be themselves fosters open, accepting communication in the group and encourages teammates to make connections among themselves. A good team dynamic is essential.

And motivating leadership reinforces what you want repeated to validate good work and positive behaviors. The simplest and sometimes most influential validation is on the spot praise: a quick positive word or even an approving smile. And when the work or behavior is not stellar, leaders must look for a way to turn it around. Give constructive feedback, not criticism. Show how to do it better, and always end with a positive comment. This even gives underperformers something positive to build on. Leaders should recognize everyone’s contributions individually, in the manner most appropriate to them, as individuals.

Some will be delighted to be lauded in front of the team, while others may dread public scrutiny and will be far more comfortable being praised in private. This is another example of how leaders must get to know their people. But the point is that everyone should be included, at one time or another, in one way or another. Feeling consistently left out can breed resentment, while getting recognition from the team, and the boss, helps to build self-confidence and promotes self-motivation. And be sure to reward significant efforts and successes. These milestone validations can help motivate the team, even through tough stretches.

Even in those rough patches, when teams may not be enjoying their work, they can still have recognition and reward to look forward to. As a team of individuals, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Team development represents a synergy between individual development and skills. Good leaders regularly assess their team's strengths and weaknesses, and with team and organizational goals in mind, they determine where the team needs to be augmented, where skill and performance gaps exist, and which team members are best suited to learn the necessary skills to fill those gaps.

Whenever possible, successful leaders attempt to enable their peoples’ ambitions. This could be accomplished with training opportunities to learn vital skills or through new or expanded responsibilities. Perhaps a mentoring program can bring your people in contact with others whose experience is in line with their career ambitions. Giving your team opportunities to self-actualize will help them to develop their potential. Inspiring with a clear sense of purpose breathes new life into your team. Align activities and discussions with this mission in mind. Involve your staff in developing strategies to be more productive. Give them a sense of ownership of their work and watch them grow.

Motivating through Workplace Processes

[Video description begins] Topic title: Motivating through Workplace Processes [Video description ends]

Most organizations use well-established systems of performance appraisal and rewards, in which each employee has regular reviews that are often tied to end of year bonuses or promotion opportunities. These reviews can be a powerful force for positive motivation and change, but they can also be a source of destructive negative feedback and demotivation. Successful leaders apply some helpful guidelines to approach them for positive motivation and encouragement. One approach is to run a performance gap analysis, in which you assess your staff’s current performance level or ability and compare it to targeted goals.

In the process, you may offer satisfaction surveys or Key Performance Indicators, of individuals or teams. In any case, a positive, supportive approach will help you find the most appropriate organizational systems to use, to boost performance, and reward that improvement. For example, involve your people in training and development. If their performance needs are for more knowledge or skills, seek out job aids or specific training opportunities to address performance gaps.

You will want to align a performance criteria for your team, and its individual members, with organizational goals. Focus on needed, mission-critical work, and be sure to individualize performance criteria. Everyone brings a different set of aptitudes and abilities to the team. Let people compete against themselves, their own previous performance, not that of others. When it comes time for performance reviews, include feedback from colleagues. Comparing feedback from all levels of an organization can often reveal a perspective on an individual’s performance that the direct supervisor might not otherwise have.

When they can, motivational leaders make rewards and compensation meaningful to their people. Overall you want rewards to function as a form of recognition of work well done. Recognition fulfills the need to garner the esteem of others and helps to build one’s own self-esteem and confidence. These in turn foster self-motivation and lead to higher performance, which completes the cycle by fueling promotion and professional advancement.

The underlying factor in utilizing healthy organizational motivators is consistent managerial standards, communicated loud and clear. Everyone needs to know what is expected of them in order to meet and exceed those standards. Standards need to be fair and reasonable, providing for extenuating circumstances. Combining this foundation with your ongoing encouragement and support will help to create a happier and more engaging work environment for your teams.

Motivating Individuals

[Video description begins] Topic title: Motivating Individuals [Video description ends]

When its tires aren't properly aligned, a car doesn’t perform well. There are frictions and parts get worn out. It's the same with your organization. When people aren't working toward the same goals, you don't get anywhere. When considering how to motivate the individuals who make up your team, it’s important for leaders to think about how to get them coordinated and working together toward a common goal. It all begins with setting the right goals. Motivational leaders use SMART principles to review organizational goals and how their team’s goals fit in.

They can be challenging, but they must be realistic, attainable. When the goals you set for your team align with the company’s and make sense, you will have a much easier time getting your people to buy-in. Take the time to discover your team members’ individual motivations. Talk with them, listen and learn. Let them speak frankly and openly. Learn their working styles and the things they enjoy doing. Learn their aptitudes and how they feel about their work. Then, assess their individual motivators.

Do they have a strong drive to finish a job? Are they self-confident, or do they need regular reassurance? Maybe they have skills they want to upgrade. Maybe they want to retire soon. Find out. Depending upon the work at hand, each of these could be employed as a motivator. Use them to boost their enthusiasm for the job at hand. Relate their personal motivators to the goals you need them to accomplish.

The idea is to get their intrinsic motivators involved. Communicate with your people on their terms, in language they’ll relate and respond to. And then let them know how they matter. Show them the benefits, personal and professional, of their work and how that work is good for the organization. Explain to your people, in individual terms, where their work and their efforts are important to making the company successful, and that it will translate into recognition and reward.

Use your influencing skills to get team members coordinated with each other and aligned with their goals. A well-oiled machine requires everyone pulling together and doing their parts. As disparate and individual as each part maybe, one cannot succeed without the others. The leader’s job is to address each of those parts individually, engage each individual's personal motivations, align their goals, and point them in the right direction.

[Video description begins] Topic title: Motivating Individuals [Video description ends]

When its tires aren't properly aligned, a car doesn’t perform well. There are frictions and parts get worn out. It's the same with your organization. When people aren't working toward the same goals, you don't get anywhere. When considering how to motivate the individuals who make up your team, it’s important for leaders to think about how to get them coordinated and working together toward a common goal. It all begins with setting the right goals. Motivational leaders use SMART principles to review organizational goals and how their team’s goals fit in. They can be challenging, but they must be realistic, attainable. When the goals you set for your team align with the company’s and make sense, you will have a much easier time getting your people to buy-in. Take the time to discover your team members’ individual motivations. Talk with them, listen and learn. Let them speak frankly and openly. Learn their working styles and the things they enjoy doing. Learn their aptitudes and how they feel about their work. Then, assess their individual motivators. Do they have a strong drive to finish a job? Are they self-confident, or do they need regular reassurance? Maybe they have skills they want to upgrade. Maybe they want to retire soon. Find out. Depending upon the work at hand, each of these could be employed as a motivator. Use them to boost their enthusiasm for the job at hand. Relate their personal motivators to the goals you need them to accomplish. The idea is to get their intrinsic motivators involved. Communicate with your people on their terms, in language they’ll relate and respond to. And then let them know how they matter. Show them the benefits, personal and professional, of their work and how that work is good for the organization. Explain to your people, in individual terms, where their work and their efforts are important to making the company successful, and that it will translate into recognition and reward. Use your influencing skills to get team members coordinated with each other and aligned with their goals. A well-oiled machine requires everyone pulling together and doing their parts. As disparate and individual as each part maybe, one cannot succeed without the others. The leader’s job is to address each of those parts individually, engage each individual's personal motivations, align their goals, and point them in the right direction. Motivated and empowered, they'll take it from there.