As the days get longer and the sky bluer (a girl can dream), let’s stop, breathe and turn our attention to motivating people.
We love to turn motivation into a verb – as managers, we talk about how we plan to motivate our teams. However, motivation is not something that can be done to someone else. All you can do as the team’s leader is create an environment where people is able to motivate themselves with you offering them what they need to keep skipping back every day, working willingly and effectively. Individual motivators will be different, but you could do worse than concentrate on these three areas: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Daniel Pink refers to them in his book “Drive” as three consistent motivators for the modern workforce.
All teams need to feel they can work without checking back with you at every stage, so develop them to a point where they have autonomy. Especially now, where we seem to be having trust issues with people we trusted before – just because we don’t always work in the same physical space anymore. This is your problem, not theirs and most team members flourish with a bit – or a lot – of autonomy.
Teams want to move and grow – to feel they are mastering new skills and abilities, so provide opportunities for your team to stretch and develop. People also need to see a point to their work; to feel they are doing something valuable with their day, so ensure everything you do together has purpose and drives you towards results and success for your organisation. Ask yourself, if it isn’t important and it won’t take you forward, why are you asking the team to do it?
Providing a motivational environment is one thing, but what do you do when a team member has lost their mojo? Lack of motivation hits us all at one time or another, and it helps as their manager to take a coaching approach. By asking powerful questions, you can focus on why they’ve lost motivation and think through their options to turn things around. The most powerful question any manager has in their armour is quite simply – “How are you?” But you have to mean it and you have to allow time for the answer. Never ask this one with half an eye on the door and furtive glances at your mobile phone. Asking “How are you?” is a great way to start a conversation with someone who is clearly not okay but not talking about it. And then you can help them think through the highs and lows that may have led to a descent in motivation, plus what the options are to improve things.
You can’t re-motivate people any more than you can motivate them in the first place, but you can be a key player in supporting them to get themselves back on track. And once back, with autonomy, new things to master and a real sense of purpose it will be all systems go.