Three Ways IT Managers Can Motivate Employees Without Using Money

Employee motivation is a key IT manager task
Employee motivation is a key IT manager task
Image Credit: opensource.com

If you want to be managing the best team in the company, then your team is going to have to be motivated to do great things. What this means for you as an IT manager is that you are going to have use your IT manager skills to find ways to both motivate them and then keep them motivated. The challenging part of all of this is that one of the easiest ways to motivate your team, money, is generally not available to you. You are going to have to use your IT manager training and get creative

3 Ways To Motivate A Team That Don’t Involve Money

Not all members of your team are equal. In fact, there are probably some members who are much better at what they do than everyone else. These top performers are the kind of people that you want to highlight as an IT manager. Your goal here is to have a talk with your best workers and let them know that you value them and that you’d like them to be an example to everyone else on the team. By doing this, you are offering them a real challenge and because they are high performers, they are going to be motivated to live up to the reputation that they have.

One of the most powerful ways to motivate members of an IT team is to provide them with recognition and perhaps even some small rewards. Recognizing someone’s accomplishments in public can go a long way. Hosting games or, even better, contests in which the current status of all players is displayed in a public location can be a powerful source of motivation and IT team building. There are a lot of other “small” things that you can do also such as trophies, plaques, dinners or spa services.

Finally, to motivate your team to do the things that you want them to do, you are going to have to allow them to come up with their own ideas. The trick here is that you want their ideas to be the same as yours. What you don’t want to do is to have to tell them what to do. Instead, you are going to want to work your magic with them and have them come up with your ideas and believe that they are their own ideas. Once you do this, they’ll be fully committed to seeing them implemented.

What All Of This Means For You

If you want to be a successful IT manager, then you are going to have to find ways to motivate your team. Your success will be based on their performance. The easiest way to motivate any IT worker is to offer them more money. Unfortunately, most of the time this is a tool that is not made available to us. This means that we need to find other ways to motivate the members of our team.

One great way to go about doing this is to take the time to point out who your top performers are to the entire team. Let them know that you want them to help others be like them. Next you can make sure that you are generous with your recognition and that you hand out many rewards for a job well done. Finally, don’t try to force your ideas on your team. Instead provide them with room to come up with and implement their own ideas.

The best IT managers know that their success is based on the success of their team. In order to get the most out of your team you need to understand what it’s going to take to get them motivated. Use these three suggestions to get the most out of your team without having to resort to using money!

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

Question For You: How often do you think that you should recognize members of your team?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

How good are your IT manager skills? Have you ever gotten any IT manager training on how to really connect with the members of your team? I’m willing to bet that the answer to this question is no. What that means is that as you manage your team, you are going to have to learn how best to connect with your team. This will require that you take the time to develop some good listening skills.