How to motivate your team: 3 basic tips
“Take away my people but leave my factories, and soon grass will grow on factory floors. Take away my factories but leave my people, and soon we will have a new and better factory.”
—Andrew Carnegie, cited by Josh Kaufman
Leadership and motivation go hand in hand. It’s easy to say that one of the most relevant leadership skills is keeping your team motivated, but it is definitely not an easy job. Of course, we all want to be surrounded by people who love to come to work and are doing their best to move the project forward. But, we as individuals struggle to keep our own motivation going, even great leaders have hard times finding motivation sometimes. So how can you help your team to stay motivated? In this article you will find will three basic tips on how to motivate your team.
What is motivation?
First of all, let’s go over the concept of motivation. I like to define it simply as having reasons to do something. There are two types of human motivation: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.
Extrinsic motivation comes from outside. It’s the classic metaphor of the carrot and the stick. External motives might be positive (as in the carrot) or negative (the stick). But as psychology tells us, every reinforcement (negative or positive) proves that someone is paying attention to the phenomenon, and thus it has the potential to backfire.
Intrinsic motivation comes from the inside: is what a person “brings from home” — part of their own personality, and part of it is the job they’re coming to do. Not everyone can be motivated to carry out any job, so the first task on the list is selecting people who are at the very least predisposed to perform their job well. Then your job as a leader is to feed that predisposition and not let it starve.
How to motivate your team
Active Listening
Let’s go back to the origins of the psychology of motivation. Humans have hierarchies of needs (remember Maslow’s pyramid?). A company has an obligation to provide its employees with basic physiological and safety needs (food, water, shelter, rest, security, safety, health, property). But as we spend so much time at work, it’s only natural that we look for all our other needs there as well (connection to peers, recognition, respect, freedom, self-actualization).
The first part is the “easy” part (although much work is still to be done until all companies provide all that). But the psychological and self-fulfillment needs are more complicated. Motivation is a private emotion; it is personal and not at all interchangeable. So the first step is to listen, listen, and listen.
Active listening is an undervalued leadership skill. It’s easy to think that just because you’re silent or not interrupting the other person, you’re a good listener. However, only by listening without judging or interspersing your own comments or experiences can you make sure that you’re a) receiving the information correctly and b) making the other person feel heard.
Once you have mastered active listening, you will be able to better understand each one of your team members and their needs, so you can offer them the right motivators and making sure they are present in their day to days.
Motivation means having motives
Once you’ve heard and interiorized your team’s individual motivations, it’s time to list the conclusions you’ve obtained. What are your team member’s internal motivations? What makes them feel they can develop their autonomy, mastery, and purpose? Do you have mechanisms in place to communicate the mission and vision your team can identify with? Are you there for them when things get tough?
Growth goes both ways
You want a motivated team so that your project grows fast and in the right direction, right? But what is your team gaining in exchange of helping you? Once you have practiced constant active listening and have understood what motivates each one of your team members, you should start to reflect on what you are doing for them as well, in terms of personal and professional growth. To help them grow, you need to understand their aspirations and passions, and be sure that they are working on tasks they enjoy and that are challenging for them.
I can guarantee you, that if your team feels like they are constantly learning with you and your project, they will stay motivated. Focus your effort on guiding your people towards being great people by reinforcing basic human values, and towards becoming extremely prepared and efficient professionals. Remember if they grow, you will grow too.
