How An IT Leader Can Motivate Their Team

Motivation is how you get your team to take action
Motivation is how you get your team to take action
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Having an IT team report to you is a great complement – the company believes that you can lead them to success. However, in order to get your team to accomplish the things that you want them to do, you are going to have to first motivate them to take action. This motivation thing can be tricky, who among us really knows how to go about doing it? Looks like this is one more of the IT manager skills that we all need to master.

Just Exactly What Do You Want Your Team To Do?

Before you can motivate your team to accomplish great things, you are first going to have to make sure that you understand what you want them to do. The one thing that you are going to want to avoid doing is presenting them with confusing or contradictory messages. Knowing how to do this is something that we really should have all received IT manager training on. Assuming that that has not happened, perhaps we’ll need to do something about it…

One thing that will be very important for you to realize is how they may view what you are asking them to accomplish. Often times, your request may come across as being irrational. Often when we want our teams to accomplish great things, what we are asking them to do will appear to be impossible at first.

Just because it can be very difficult to motivate your IT team does not mean that it shouldn’t be done. Instead, that means that it is that much more important. The company has things that it desperately needs to have accomplished and it is looking to your team in order to find a way to get these things done.

How To Motivate A Team

Knowing that you want to motivate a team and knowing how to motivate a team are two completely different things. One thing that you need to do right off the bat is to make sure that your team knows that you don’t view them as one big team. Rather, you are going to have to show them that you view them as being individuals.

Next, you are going to have to convince them that you trust them to complete the role that they are being asked to play. This trust is a key part of getting them to commit to accomplishing what you are asking them to do. Finally, you need to make sure that they understand that what they are doing is important and that it matters to the company’s ability to accomplish a higher cause.

Just getting your team pumped up to take on a big challenge is not going to be enough. If you leave it at this, then they may very quickly start to forget why they agreed to follow you. Instead, once they are motivated and working towards accomplishing the shared goal, you need to spend your time being out there with the team while they are working. It is only by working side-by-side with them that you’ll be able to show them that you support what they are doing.

What This Means For You

As an IT leader, one of the tasks that you are going to be expected to do is to motivate your team. Think of this as a form of IT team building. That means that you are going to have to be able to convince them to perform an IT task no matter how big or challenging it may seem.

Before you can motivate your team, you first have to make sure that you know what you want them to do for you. You need to understand that what you may be asking them to do is either hard or even impossible. In order to motivate them you are going to have to show them that you care about them as individuals. You will also have to show them that you trust them to accomplish the tasks that you are entrusting them with.

Motivation is a skill that can be learned We need to study the people around us and understand who already has this skill. By studying how they do it, we can grow our own motivational talent. If you can get good at motivating your team, then they will be able to go on and accomplish great things!

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that it is possible to be too motivational – should you have to motivate your team to do everything?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

How big is your IT team? If you are a successful IT manager, your company will recognize that you have great IT manager skills and they will keep assigning more and more people to your team. What this means for you is that very quickly it is going to get hard to get your message out to the entire team. Yes, you can send an email blast, but that lacks the human element. A much better skill to have is the ability to deliver a speech to your team.