Welcome to the Momentum Business Coaching Newsletter for
March 2008

How Do You Motivate People?

Once Again, Just How Do You Motivate People?

You know you have a talented group of employees. All of this talent is meaningless, however, if you cannot motivate people to produce their best work.

When people feel inspired to live up to their full potential, companies thrive:

• People come up with new ideas about how to solve your company's most pressing problems.

• People get along well and collaborate in teams to create new ways of doing things that can revolutionise the marketplace for your products and services.

• People work with boundless energy, giving their time, enthusiasm and drive to forward the company mission.

• Even during challenging times, your people remain loyal.

• People take pride in their work and feel responsible for the company's future.

A Paycheck Isn't Enough

Many people look to their supervisor or team leader to supply the inspiration for becoming fully engaged in the work they do. It's up to you to map the path that leads to the results you need.

Even in a healthy economy, you must supply more than a paycheck to motivate people to perform optimally. Meaningful work is more important than money for most people. They want to feel they're part of something larger than themselves-needed and challenged.

You don't need expensive training programs or complex compensation plans to connect your people to what really matters to them. Instead, create a sense of "we're all in this together" by sharing what you know about the company's business plans.

Get to know what motivates each of your employees. You can determine this by observing their level of enthusiasm and interest in various parts of a project, be it the tech side of how things work or their desire to lead the team. You can then adapt your communication style and recognition systems to each person's intrinsic motivation.

8 Career Anchors: What Matters Most

More than 30 years ago, Edgar Schein, a Sloan Fellows Professor of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed that people are primarily motivated by one of eight career anchors:

1. Technical/functional competence
2. General managerial competence
3. Autonomy/independence
4. Security/stability
5. Entrepreneurial creativity
6. Sense of service
7. Pure challenge
8. Freedom to organise themselves around their private lives

Once you understand each career anchor, you can determine the one that best fits each person on your team (or ask employees to help define what's most important to them). Ultimately, the people who work for you must communicate what matters most to them, and you, as the manager, must continually ask for this information.

Fostering Commitment Beyond the Job

Motivated people demonstrate several distinctive personal qualities:

1. They are optimistic, yet realistic about limitations.
2. They take pride in their work.
3. They build relationships of mutual trust with their managers.
4. They manage their time well, prioritizing appropriately to take full advantage of their energy and creativity.
5. They take steps to avoid burnout.

When you motivate your people to excel, their energy and creativity ripple across the entire organisation. Motivated people make others feel fully engaged in their work and inspire others to focus on possibilities instead of problems. They feel responsible for entire business processes, not just their own tasks.

You can foster commitment beyond a task or job by clarifying the company's fundamental objectives and then demonstrating ways to measure a goal's progress. You can challenge people to identify opportunities to leverage existing knowledge and make sure they understand how all of the company's disparate parts work together.

Open-Book Management Style

An open-book bonus system is a powerful incentive program, providing substantial rewards to those who improve performance. Such systems allow employees to track their progress toward the bonus over the course of the year. You can tie a unit's performance to compensation in the following ways:

1. Large companies have employee stock-ownership plans. When workers are encouraged to become shareholders, they can be reminded of their interest in the company's long-term health.

2. Many companies also have profit-sharing programs. People know high performance ultimately contributes to plan payouts, and they recognize that better-performing units tend to be rewarded more frequently than underperforming ones over time.

3. Pride is a form of compensation, and people often take it as seriously as money. Open-book companies challenge people to be their best and share the scoreboard that shows how they compare to their competitors, whether internal or external.

4. Small rewards are sometimes as meaningful as larger ones. Achievement of customer service targets, shipment percentages and similar goals can be celebrated with pizza lunches, ballgame tickets or simple recognition.

9 Steps to Creating a Great Workplace

The Gallup Organisation interviewed about 1 million workers, including 80,000 managers,
over the last 25 years. Those surveyed were asked about all aspects of their work life. Gallup researchers found that people stay with a company largely because of the quality of their managers.

So, how can you start creating a great workplace?

1. Help people see the purpose of what they do. People stay at jobs that are intellectually stimulating or personally rewarding.

2. Expect a lot. Challenge your people to not only meet their goals, but to exceed them.

3. Don't dictate how to work. Good companies set high standards, but they're flexible about how people can meet them.

4. Be really available. Managers' availability is a crucial element in successful companies.

5. Break the Golden Rule. Treat people not as you would like to be treated, but as they would like to be treated.

6. Get the word out-in 24 hours or less. Let your people know within 24 hours about the issues discussed in your management meetings.

7. Make sure people have what they need to do their jobs. Next to knowing what's expected of them, employees are most productive when given the materials and equipment needed to do their jobs.

8. Say thanks.

9. Have fun!