One of two things is going to happen when a newcomer joins your team TISI -0.15%.
They’re going to see right away how to plug into their own power source
on the job and feel great about coming to work, or they’re not.
When you make it easy for a person to learn, to succeed and to grow a
little bit every day on the job, you never have to worry about
motivation.
Employee motivation is a multi-billion-dollar industry based on lies
and vanity. Any consulting firm that tells you “We can motivate your
employees” is lying. You know that in your gut, because motivation isn’t
something that comes from outside. Rewards won’t motivate people,
although most of us don’t mind getting perks and prizes. We have an old,
defective model for motivation that comes from the junk science school
of business most of us grew up in.
We’ve deluded ourselves that we can motivate our teams through punishments and rewards.
We use a model to illustrate the old, idiotic view of motivation. We
use a donkey with a carrot suspended in front of his face and a stick to
flick against his flanks when he moves too slowly. What a horrifying
model! We hire brilliant, talented people, not donkeys. They have their
own motivation. We don’t need to supply external forces to get people to
do great things at work. All we have to do is to remove the barriers
that make it hard to move forward.
We built the bureaucratic Godzilla machine and now we can’t see how
to dismantle it. What keeps people unmotivated at work is the red tape,
the constant measurement of every process, no matter how insignificant,
and the presumption that the people we carefully chose for their
positions can’t manage their own tasks and priorities without our help.
Let’s tell the truth about employee motivation. If our team members aren’t motivated, it isn’t their fault. It’s ours!
People don’t come to new jobs without motivation. They were motivated
enough to slog through the job interview process and get the offer. If
we hired the wrong person, what does that say about us? “This guy isn’t
motivated” is shorthand for “There are barriers that are keeping this
employee from bringing his full self to work, and I don’t know what they
are, and I’m too proud to ask him.”
We even stoop to writing people up and putting them on probation in hopes that doing those things will motivate them.
The way to motivate your team is to drop the fiction that as the
manager, you know the answers. The way to motivate your team is to hire
smart people and set them loose to do what you hired them to do. That
takes courage, because the bureaucratic machine doesn’t like variation.
We like to know that people are sitting in their cubes in the big ice
cube tray, completing their tasks on schedule and in accordance with
Standard Operating Procedure.
Anyone who is motivated by that kind of job can’t help you solve problems. That person can’t see a solution outside the ice cube tray. Anyone with pluck and creativity is going to lose his or her motivation within weeks in a place like that. Then you might call our office and say “Something happened to my employee! He seemed fine when I hired him, but now I can see that he’s not motivated!”
Anyone who is motivated by that kind of job can’t help you solve problems. That person can’t see a solution outside the ice cube tray. Anyone with pluck and creativity is going to lose his or her motivation within weeks in a place like that. Then you might call our office and say “Something happened to my employee! He seemed fine when I hired him, but now I can see that he’s not motivated!”
The problem with employee motivation is this: in the traditional
management framework we treat motivation as an X + Y = Z transaction.
If I give my employees a longer break in the afternoon, maybe that will motivate them.
Here’s what will motivate your teammates: trusting them to do their own
jobs, and making yourself available to answer questions, not to ride
herd over them like the oar room supervisor in one of those Roman galley
ships.
Why did you hire talented people if you’re afraid to let them bring their spark and jazz to the job?
We put up impediments to the human energy that people naturally bring to work when there are no obstacles in their way.
We call these impediments Mojo Blockers. You can see them illustrated on the drawing in this column.
We install too many policies and make them tedious and insulting. We
don’t give people clear direction, or we change course every five
minutes. We leave burning issues to fester because we’re afraid to talk
about them. Then we complain that our teams aren’t performing.
We make it impossible for people to fly. We weight them down with
chains and locks and then we say “What’s wrong with these people? They
aren’t flying.”
We can be smarter than that. We can drop the pretense that being a
manager means anything at all apart from organizing the action around
us. We can stop pretending to be in control, and we can be honest enough
to tell the folks on our teams “You know a lot more about this than I
do. What do you think we should do?”
We can tell the truth about our own uncertainty. We can bring ourselves to work and stop reading from the script called I am the Manager, and I Know What’s Best.
In traditional leadership training courses we don’t teach managers
how to be human with their teammates. We teach them about carrots and
sticks, instead.
We teach them to bring the hammer down when employees screw up. Who
learns anything then? No one learns, but we can tell ourselves that
we’re acting decisively when we knock somebody’s bonus down a few
percentage points or give them a bad performance review. That isn’t
leadership. It’s just petty power wielded for the sake of our fragile
egos.
If you want to motivate your team, ask them what they need. Tell them
that your job is to take away whatever is in their way, whether that’s
an ill-conceived process, an internal disagreement that is slowing down
the action and blocking the team’s mojo or the lack of a cohesive plan.
Be honest with them and tell them that you need them more than they need
the job. Can you find it in yourself to be that honest?