One of two things is going to happen when a newcomer joins your
When you make it easy for a person to learn, to succeed and to grow a little bit every day on the job, you never have to worry about motivation.
Employee motivation is a multi-billion-dollar industry based on lies and vanity. Any consulting firm that tells you "We can motivate your employees" is lying. You know that in your gut, because motivation isn't something that comes from outside. Rewards won't motivate people, although most of us don't mind getting perks and prizes. We have an old, defective model for motivation that comes from the junk science school of business most of us grew up in.
We've deluded ourselves that we can motivate our teams through punishments and rewards.
We use a model to illustrate the old, idiotic view of motivation. We use a donkey with a carrot suspended in front of his face and a stick to flick against his flanks when he moves too slowly. What a horrifying model! We hire brilliant, talented people, not donkeys. They have their own motivation. We don't need to supply external forces to get people to do great things at work. All we have to do is to remove the barriers that make it hard to move forward.
We built the bureaucratic Godzilla machine and now we can't see how to dismantle it. What keeps people unmotivated at work is the red tape, the constant measurement of every process, no matter how insignificant, and the presumption that the people we carefully chose for their positions can't manage their own tasks and priorities without our help.
Let's tell the truth about employee motivation. If our team members aren't motivated, it isn't their fault. It's ours!
People don't come to new jobs without motivation. They were motivated enough to slog through the job interview process and get the offer. If we hired the wrong person, what does that say about us? "This guy isn't motivated" is shorthand for "There are barriers that are keeping this employee from bringing his full self to work, and I don't know what they are, and I'm too proud to ask him."
We even stoop to writing people up and putting them on probation in hopes that doing those things will motivate them.
The way to motivate your team is to drop the fiction that as the manager, you know the answers. The way to motivate your team is to hire smart people and set them loose to do what you hired them to do. That takes courage, because the bureaucratic machine doesn't like variation. We like to know that people are sitting in their cubes in the big ice cube tray, completing their tasks on schedule and in accordance with Standard Operating Procedure.
Anyone who is motivated by that kind of job can't help you solve problems. That person can't see a solution outside the ice cube tray. Anyone with pluck and creativity is going to lose his or her motivation within weeks in a place like that. Then you might call our office and say "Something happened to my employee! He seemed fine when I hired him, but now I can see that he's not motivated!"
The problem with employee motivation is this: in the traditional management framework we treat motivation as an X + Y = Z transaction.
If I give my employees a longer break in the afternoon, maybe that will motivate them. Here's what will motivate your teammates: trusting them to do their own jobs, and making yourself available to answer questions, not to ride herd over them like the oar room supervisor in one of those Roman galley ships.
Why did you hire talented people if you're afraid to let them bring their spark and jazz to the job?
We put up impediments to the human energy that people naturally bring to work when there are no obstacles in their way.
We call these impediments Mojo Blockers. You can see them illustrated on the drawing in this column.
We install too many policies and make them tedious and insulting. We don't give people clear direction, or we change course every five minutes. We leave burning issues to fester because we're afraid to talk about them. Then we complain that our teams aren't performing.
We make it impossible for people to fly. We weight them down with chains and locks and then we say "What's wrong with these people? They aren't flying."
We can be smarter than that. We can drop the pretense that being a manager means anything at all apart from organizing the action around us. We can stop pretending to be in control, and we can be honest enough to tell the folks on our teams "You know a lot more about this than I do. What do you think we should do?"
We can tell the truth about our own uncertainty. We can bring ourselves to work and stop reading from the script called I am the Manager, and I Know What's Best.
In traditional leadership training courses we don't teach managers how to be human with their teammates. We teach them about carrots and sticks, instead.
We teach them to bring the hammer down when employees screw up. Who learns anything then? No one learns, but we can tell ourselves that we're acting decisively when we knock somebody's bonus down a few percentage points or give them a bad performance review. That isn't leadership. It's just petty power wielded for the sake of our fragile egos.
If you want to motivate your team, ask them what they need. Tell them that your job is to take away whatever is in their way, whether that's an ill-conceived process, an internal disagreement that is slowing down the action and blocking the team's mojo or the lack of a cohesive plan. Be honest with them and tell them that you need them more than they need the job. Can you find it in yourself to be that honest?
