How Good Are Your Motivation Skills?

The first step in building a highly motivated team is providing interesting work, which is well organized to meet the needs and desires of team members. No matter how self-motivated a person is, how challenging the goals he or she sets, or how wonderful the rewards, if the work is badly designed, it will be hard to motivate people and work will be less than ideal.

Effective motivators understand that work design has a strong impact on performance. When a person finds a job inherently unsatisfying, there's not much you can do to motivate him or her. Job design and enrichment combine to match characteristics of the job with workers' skills and interests: The more variety, challenge and autonomy there is to a job, the more intrinsically satisfying it will be.

Our article on Job Enrichment   details how to set up meaningful work assignments. Other articles of interest include Pygmalion Motivation   , which addresses the impact that your work assignments have on conscious and unconscious motivators, and Dealing with Poor Performance   , which outlines steps that you can take to ensure you have a good fit between the person and the job.

When you are confident that the work you provide is well organized, the next thing to do is to ensure that workers have clear and attainable goals that they're working to achieve. Managing the goal setting process is essential for creating a highly motivating environment. The effectiveness of goal setting in motivation is a well-recognized fact, and by making goals specific, consistent, and appropriately challenging, you can set goals that are powerfully motivating. As such, the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound) acronym helps you define effective goals.

Specific goals are measurable, unambiguous and behavior-changing. They outline exactly what needs to be accomplished, and when it will be considered as "achieved." Having goals that are consistent with other personal goals as well as organizational goals is also important. If goals are inconsistent, the resulting confusion and incompatibility would like cause the person to do nothing rather than work in different directions.

For more on goal setting, read our articles on Locke's Goal Setting Theory   (which explains the principle of setting SMART goals); Management by Objectives   (which details how to align personal goals with those of the organization); Performance Management and KPIs   ; and, Performance Agreements   .

Finally, challenge is important, due to the observation that we get what we expect. Up to a point   , the more you expect from someone, the harder they will generally work. This has been shown time and again, and is explained by the idea of Expectancy Theory   : the idea here is that you need to link high effort with high performance, and high performance with a positive outcome. With those two linkages established, people are motivated to work hard to achieve a positive outcome.

Motivational techniques should bring out the best in people. That means they should build on an individual's strengths and minimize his or her weaknesses.

There are certainly some common denominators in motivation, like fair wages, decent working conditions, a sense of camaraderie with co-workers, and a good relationship with one’s supervisor. Abraham Maslow and Frederick Herzberg are two famous motivation theorists who established that even if these sorts of things are not necessarily motivating in themselves, they have to be present in order to even think about enhancing motivation.

However, the assumption in most modern workplaces is that these lower order, "hygiene" factors are being met, and that people are seeking the things that provide real motivation. These are things like challenging work, control, growth opportunities, and recognition for a job well done.

To decide which motivating factors to provide you need to look at the individual employees. Some will be motivated by more time off, while others may prefer to gain status and recognition in the company. Understanding these individual needs is mandatory for building a motivating workplace, and is why question 11 above is a "trick question": if you try to motivate everyone in exactly the same way, you're likely missing plenty of opportunities for motivating individual members of your team.

Meeting peoples' needs, providing challenge, using a variety of rewards, and matching them to the right people are issues discussed in the following articles: Using Maslow's Hierarchy   , Herzberg's Motivators and Hygiene Factors, Alderfer's ERG Theory   , Theory X and Theory Y   , Adam's Equity Theory   , and Expectancy Theory   .

When you know what you want to provide in terms of reward and recognition, it's important to establish an effective system. The primary focus of a reward system is fairness. Both reward and discipline have to be perceived as fairly distributed according to clear guidelines. This is why setting specific performance expectations is so important. ("Fairness" doesn't mean that everyone has the same reward package – it means that differences between people's reward packages need to be clear and understandable.)

It is equally important to make sure you give your team members the tools they need to be successful. If you're setting goals, then you need to make sure that they are attainable, and you do that by providing the necessary support, tools, resources, and training.

It's also important that you get to understand the challenges your team faces. This way you can appreciate the small victories that lead to the major accomplishments. Motivation is all about encouragement and appreciation.

When you are part of the team and not simply an "observer from above" you will have many opportunities to thank people and recognize good work right on the spot. This is a really important factor in successful recognition. You have to be in a position to show or tell people every day that you appreciate their contributions. Once or twice a year in formal review process is not enough!

To help you understand these key concepts and develop a great reward system, learn to use the following tools: Management by Walking Around   , DILO (Day in the Life Of)   , Expectancy Theory   , and Giving Praise   .