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Progress! Manager as Coach E-Zine - Issue No. 3/ March 2006

Dear Reader,

Times are good. Let's not miss it!

Now that the holidays are over, Hong Kong people have really kicked into high gear. The economy is up (okay, some of us don't like the rent increases), businesses are thriving (sometimes that means unwanted additional work) and the rain and wind are clearing up the air. There are so many exciting events happening in this town. But when we get very busy, sometimes we forget to notice that times are good. So please look up from your desk for a minute and notice. We're busy and it's good!

This month's article is a continuation on the topic of how to motivate your staff. Now, more than ever, you need your staff to contribute to the best of their abilities. As their supervisor, you have the power to make that happen.

Cheers,

Angela Spaxman

Alliance Partner of Progress-U Limited

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Help Your Staff Achieve More

By Angela Spaxman, Business and Career Coach, Director of Spaxman Limited,
Coach Training Expert for Progress-U Ltd.

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"We find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve."

-- Maxwell Maltz

Last month’s article focused on how to discover what motivates your staff. In this article we’ll look at what you can do to increase their motivation, starting with the most popular motivator, achievement. Almost all of your team members are motivated by achievement to a certain extent. Are you capitalizing on that? Let’s find out.

Harness the Achievement Motivators

When you ask anyone what motivates them at work, most often they will first talk about the satisfaction they feel when they have achieved something. I’ve witnessed people putting great effort into a project without much concrete gain apart from the feeling of satisfaction from achieving something significant and challenging. It’s a strong motivating force and something relatively easy to harness in the workplace, if you know how.

To harness this type of motivation, you need to make sure of two things:

1) Your employees know the results of their work.
2) Your employees believe they have control over the results.

Seeing, Hearing and Feeling Results

Think about it. Imagine you are preparing a PowerPoint presentation for your boss to deliver, and you will not be present for the delivery nor get any feedback on how well it is received. How will you know if you have been successful?

If you don’t know what aspects of your efforts were appreciated and what parts could be improved, why would you make an effort to do it well? Any extra effort you make may well be wasted and you wouldn’t even know it.

True to form, your boss comes back from the presentation and tells you it was ‘fine’. You feel like your job is not very exciting and there’s nothing to motivate you to do any better than you normally do.

In contrast, think about what would happen if you were in the audience when your boss delivered the presentation.

You would be able to watch her as the presentation slides guided her and supported her. You’d notice the reactions of the people in the audience. Maybe they get puzzled by a slide and need to ask for confirmation. You hear their murmurs of confusion. You hear their ‘hmms’ as they understand. You feel the confidence of your boss and the feeling of assurance she gives the audience. In other words, you get to sense and experience the results of your actions. Yes, it’s motivating because it is concrete feedback on your results.

Apart from actually witnessing the impact of work first-hand, it is also very motivating to receive specific feedback. In this case, your boss could have taken the time to note what she particularly liked about the presentation slides, and also what she would prefer to change, or which aspects didn’t have the desired effect. With this kind of constructive feedback, you would feel motivated to improve your results next time.

Both positive and corrective feedback are important and motivating. But in general positive feedback is more important and more powerful. I’ll go more into this topic in a future article.

Controlling Results and Expressing Yourself

Likewise imagine what happens to your motivation when you are working on an interesting and important project but your boss keeps insisting on making the most important decisions himself. You feel you are just doing busy-work and not really contributing to the results. You feel uninspired, even used. You might react by doing the minimum so at least you can get off work early and do something you really like.

I’ve had numerous coaching clients complain about being treated this way by their supervisors. Most likely the boss is not aware of the damage being done to the motivation and morale of the team.

In contrast, have you ever worked for someone who trusted you with a project that was a real challenge for you? Maybe it was a previous boss, a teacher or a leader in a voluntary organization?

If you remember a time like that, you may recall an adrenaline rush of excitement as you thought ahead to how you would do the job. You probably felt honored that you were trusted and you really wanted to live up to that trust. You decided to yourself to do the best you could both to test yourself and also to prove yourself to that important person who trusted you.

Missed Opportunities

When people don’t have the opportunity to sense and control their results, they quickly lose motivation. It’s human nature. And you know, your employees are human too.

Many managers make these same mistakes with the best of intentions. Here are some of the thinking patterns that lead to these missed motivational opportunities.

1) “I am more qualified to do this work and I can do a better job than my staff.”

All managers must strike a balance between getting the work done and developing other people to get the work done. Very often doing the work yourself is playing it safe. I would challenge you to delegate and develop more. You, your company and your team will benefit in the long run.

2) “My people are too junior and inexperienced to achieve very much.”

With junior people it is even more important that you develop them, both to get them up to speed and to train them to expect to learn and grow. You can start with small tasks to gradually build their confidence and experience. You will need to experiment with what size of task motivates them and what is too overwhelming. Everyone has a different capacity for challenge and learning.

3) “I need to receive credit for my team’s work in order to ensure my power and position in the organization, or for my personal gratification and continued motivation.”

This issue is a challenge for many managers. We can blame the organizational culture for requiring power politics, however, I believe this problem comes more from the personal realm. Is it really true that your company won’t value you unless you take all the credit? Or is it more a question of your own level of confidence and belief in yourself?

The most motivating managers that I’ve met are all very self-confident people. They don’t need to prove themselves much. They have a pattern of thinking that allows them to feel secure in the most power-hungry workplace. They often use a sense of integrity, of ‘doing the right thing’, to keep themselves focused on developing their people and their organizations.

To use the achievement motivators effectively may require a shift in your thinking that marks a milestone in your development as a successful manager. It is a key area of personal growth for all managers and often a focus for much of the leadership development coaching I do.

But…

When I bring up this type of motivation to my clients or students, I often hear the complaint that their people are not motivated to do a good job in their work because … their employees want to avoid being given more work.

Yes. Of course. Wouldn’t you do that? If you give your employees MORE work when they do a good job, you are punishing them for their efforts. You are probably giving them more stress, less free time and more of the same kind of work that is becoming boring and tedious to them.

To motivate them to work harder and do a better job you need give them BETTER work. Better work is work that challenges them, for which they get a new and better kind of recognition or credit. Work they are responsible and accountable for and that you count on them to do well. I mean also work over which they can express their talents and preferences, where they can make their mark and feel a real contribution.

It is also, by the way, work that contributes more value to your organization. It challenges them to give their best and to tap into their higher-level talents. Wouldn’t you want them to do that?

Once again you may need to let go of some of the control you have as their boss. You may need to figure out how to upgrade some of the busy-work into higher accountability work.

You may also need to figure out how to communicate the benefits of this kind of work to your staff. If they are accustomed to being given only more work and not better work, it may take some honest talk to relate how you intend to change things.

Are you thinking now about how you could do this? If yes, I would love to hear your ideas of what you will do and also the particular obstacles and challenges you face.

Actions to Take

In summary, here is a list of questions to answer and actions to take that will help you harness the achievement motivators of your staff.

1) Consider how each of your staff receives feedback on his or her responsibilities. How can you increase the amount and quality of both positive and corrective feedback?

2) If you could give each of your staff members a motivating challenge, what would it be?

3) What stops you from delegating higher-level responsibilities to your staff? What change in your thinking or actions would be needed to increase your level of delegation?

For more information related to Progress-U Leadership Training and Coaching, please click here.

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