As a manager, you can only be as good as your team is. What this means is that it’s your job to search for ways to use your manager skills to get the most out of your team. This is not an easy thing to accomplish. You need to find ways to connect with your team and to convince them that the entire team is better off working towards achieving the same goal. In order to rally the troops you are going to have to use all of your manager training and find ways to get them motivated.
What is Motivation?
Let’s all agree: motivation isn’t born out of a dollar sign, and passion doesn’t arrive after getting a raise. Managers need to realize that most people aren’t driven by money. If you are looking for ways to motivate your team, you must learn to look elsewhere. By getting clear on what your team’s personal needs are, you can find that you can discover different ways to motivate them and identify alternative opportunities to impact their lives. By doing so, this will allow for a greater level of commitment, intention, and passion to be poured into their day-to-day work and team building. One of the biggest gifts you can give your team members is a trusting and productive team. Here’s how you can spark exponential motivation amongst your team.
Find Ways To Encourage Their External Goals
Many of your team members will have a side hustle or side projects. Some businesses frown upon this, going as far as to have team members sign contracts prohibiting external work, but you shouldn’t ask them to stop. Instead, you should encourage them to continue following their curiosity and take it upon yourself to find ways to help them. You need to show up and ask how you can help them reach their goals. Make sure that you approach this kind of conversation with the same enthusiasm for both their internal career growth and side hustle.
If you told them to stop, they would lose motivation to do great work. Think about it for a moment. If you were to force someone to do something they don’t want to do, you wouldn’t be building trust. But by recognizing these are individuals who have goals in life outside of the workplace, you can build a stronger relationship and more respect as a manager. Rest assured, when you need something in the future, your team members will show up for you.
Be Working To Develop Other Managers
Strong managers create other managers – they shouldn’t create minions who follow them into battle. Allow members of your team to make the conscious choice to choose to work for you because you treat them so well they wouldn’t want it any other way. Empower your team members to lead, be it leading themselves, a smaller team, or a large project within the company. This empowerment generates a powerful organic motivation that has legs to grow.
Take The Time To Consider The Life Cycle Of Your Employee
As a manager, you have to be someone who sees people over the long term. Similar to how you view a product life cycle, consider the life cycle of your team members and adjust your actions and the root of the motivation accordingly. Although it may be tempting to think in the moment about your business needs, look at where your team members fit within the life of their career to know where to drive motivation.
Someone going through the early stages being a parent might be motivated by more time off to be with family or daycare perks. On the flip side, someone just out of university showing up for day one at the office might be motivated by the opportunity for a promotion, to travel for business, or to lead a project. When you know where your team members are in their careers, it’s easier to pinpoint what will inspire them to do great work. You need to learn to understand your employee’s short and long-term goals and even bucket-list dreams. We need to realize that sustained motivation goes deeper than occasional bonuses and annual raises. Take the time to identify this, and see how your team’s productivity grows.
What All Of This Means For You
As managers, we need to understand that our success is based on what our team will be able to accomplish. This means that we need to take the time to really understand what motivates our team. As a manager, there are things that we can do that will cause the members of our team to feel motivated. We need to take the time to learn what these things are and then do them.
Everyone on your team has life outside of the office. This means that as their manager, you need to find ways to encourage your team member’s outside interests. We want the people who are on our team to always be improving. This means that we need to be working with them to create new managers. Every person who is working as a part of your team is at a different point in their lives. We need to understand this and find ways to meet their current needs.
Motivating your team is not an easy thing to do. Each person on your team will be motivated in a different way. You are going to have to take the time to understand what motivates each person and then create a plan to make that happen. The good news is that this can be done. If you can do it well, then your team will be able to deliver the results that you are looking for.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™
Question For You: Is there any good way to measure how motivated the people on your team are?
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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
Congratulations, you are a manager. Your job is to use your manager skills to determine what the company needs to have done and then get your team to do it. Along the way, you need to work with each member of your team to keep them on track. Your goal is to make sure that everyone knows what they need to be doing all the time. This is fine, but now it’s time for you to jump to the next level. It’s time for you to become a leader. Just exactly what does this mean and how will you go about doing it?