The 3 "B's" to Greatly Improve Employee Motivation

Have you ever caught yourself saying “if only my employees would….”.  Chances are you have since the majority of business owners complain about such things as “Why do my employees give the bare minimum?”, “How do I get them to stop complaining and gossiping?”, “How do I get them to contribute more in meetings?”, and “How do I get them to keep their word and their agreements around following through with what they say they will do?”  Does any of this sound familiar?

Many business owners feel stumped when it comes to dealing with these issues.  The short answer to all of your questions about how to change the behavior of other is…you can’t.  We can never control what others do.  They chose their behavior and the more we try and control what they do, the more resistance we usually get.  Can you relate to that?

So what can we do to motivate the people around us to give us their best?  What do we have control of?  Well, we do have control of the consequences that are a result of another’s behavior.  And we do have control over the way we communicate in order to greatly improve the chances of being heard in a way that is intended. 

With that being said, the following ways that you can be to influence those around you in a greater way than trying to control what they do are:

Be Positive- In the realm of setting consequences, it’s easy to point out negative behaviors and then punish those behaviors.  As a manger, relying too heavily on negative consequences or feedback will result in employees doing just enough to avoid the pain of hearing those things.  Therefore they will never give you their fullest effort.  On the flip side, rewarding good behavior with positive consequences will greatly improve the chances of them being happy, therefore less complaining and gossiping, and more real effort on a daily basis towards their job.

Be Clear- People feel safe in an environment where they know what to expect.  Clearly defining the expectations of how the company operates with one another, their clients, and the outside world will build a context in which the employees can flourish, knowing what to expect of themselves and others.  Having a clearly defined culture statement is a must for any successful team.  That way everyone knows the rules of the road when they chose to work for your company.  And you have something to hold them accountable to. Chapter 19 of Unshackled Leadership, www.unshackledleadership.com, contains detailed instructions on how to create such a culture statement.

Be Consistent- this is key in any relationship, personal or professional.    Your consistent OR inconsistent behavior sends out a message to those around that they can count on.  If you consistently reward good behavior and address unacceptable behavior, the team will come to count on that.  If you are inconsistent, your team will also come to count on that.  The latter creates a lot of uneasiness in people as they never know what to fully expect.  As difficult as it may be, being consistent in your communication and behaviors creates a great level of safety, loyalty and respect.

The Power of Gratitude

I heard a startling statistic today and that was that women own less than 1% of the world’s properties. I heard this during a presentation about how empowering women can literally change the world, most especially in underprivileged countries where deep poverty is rampant. This article has nothing to do with empowering women, but empowering ourselves, no matter what your gender…empowering ourselves to come from a place of gratitude.

What this statistic stirred in me is an incredible sense of thankfulness and pride. Being a homeowner and a woman I underestimate the power that I have as an individual and often forget to be thankful for what seems like such an everyday occurrence. I don’t know about you, but I often times find myself focusing on what’s not working.  If there are 99 things working and one thing that’s not, guess what we often focus on? You guessed it…the one thing that’s not.

The problem with this way of thinking is that the Law of Attraction says that what we focus on we just continue to manifest and draw towards us. So if we focus on what’s not working we will most certainly create in our lives more of what’s not working.  It’s all we will see. On the flip side, focusing on what is working and being grateful for that, as well as everything in life, chances are we will create more of that!

In my years of study around this subject I have come to see that it takes a real conscious effort to be grateful. In fact, it takes a proactive approach. Deciding in advance to be grateful for what comes your way, whether it be situations, or people and their behavior, or what you already have in your life, will absolutely shape the course of your life. 

This includes being grateful for those little irritations that we experience. When someone behaves in a way that you don’t like, chose to be grateful for the lesson that is there for you to learn. Or when we have to wait in the airport because of a delayed flight, choosing to be grateful for all the ways that the Universe takes care of us even though we don’t understand why; there are reasons for everything.  You can imagine how grateful all of those people who escaped the 9/11 tragedy due to some inconvenience that had them be late for work that morning must be.

It’s a great exercise to take a personal inventory of all of the things you have in your life to be grateful for and do this on a weekly, monthly, or even daily basis. My husband and I have a tradition that every morning we leave the other person a note with 1 or 2 things that we are grateful for about the other. If I didn’t do this, I am positive that I would focus more on what I don’t appreciate. Adopt this exercise with your co-workers, employees, or family for 30 days and see how it feels. You just may find a magnificent difference in how those people are showing up and how you feel about them.

Right vs.Happy

They say that the two things that are too controversial to write about are religion and politics and while I’m not about to jump into either subject, they both provide a great example of a point I do want to make: life always only provides you with two choices: you can either be right or you can be happy! Unfortunately, far too many people think that the way you get to be happy is by being right. It just doesn’t work that way. Whether you like it or not or agree with it or not, those two choices are mutually exclusive.

Is anyone reading this happy about what’s going on in Washington or any other branch of politics? Isn’t it profoundly upsetting and even somewhat disgusting that our Congress can’t seem to get anything done. All the Democrats do is blame the Republicans for ever problem we have and the Republicans do exactly the same thing. Why is it that there seems to be no ability on anyone’s part across the political spectrum to get anything meaningful done? Simple answer: no one seems to be interested in being happy. They’re all too busy trying to be right. And I’m willing to bet that if you align yourself with one party or the other, you too believe that what your party is for is “right” and what the other party is for is “wrong.”

Same story with religion. Every group has their doctrine and, of course, it’s the “right” doctrine, even perhaps the only conceivable doctrine. You saw this played out big time in Ireland many years ago and you now see this played out in Iraq and many other countries in the middle east today.

While it’s bad enough that this passionate need to be right at all costs pits political parties and politicians against each other and people of one religion against those of other religions, it also goes on in our companies and in our personal lives. If you go into most companies, what you find is an environment characterized by arguments, conflict, competition, pettiness, gossiping and righteousness. Have you ever experienced any of those things? Of course you have. You may even see it at work on a daily basis. And what drives all of that is this passionate need to be “right,” even if it means that happiness is unavailable.

If any of this makes any sense, and I surely hope it does, here’s my suggestion. Choose being happy. Now I’m sure that in reading that, your reaction is: of course I want to be happy! Unfortunately, what it means is that you are willing to give up the need to be “right,” about everything. It means giving up being judgmental, making people wrong, taking sides, playing win/lose and good/bad. It means you let all of that go. Sound like a touch assignment? Not really, because doing so comes with a huge reward: you get to be happy! Give it a try and see for yourself.

Another Key to Effectiveness

Last week I suggested that if you’re like the vast majority of people, when the alarm goes off, you hop out of bed, take a shower, get dressed, hopefully eat a decent breakfast and you’re off to work. I further suggested that while that approach is pretty normal, it isn’t useful because you haven’t appropriately prepared yourself for the challenges of the day and then you wonder why, at the end of the day, you feel so stressed out and exhausted.

Do the research and find out for yourself. Take the time to eat a high protein breakfast. This will prepare your central nervous system to be as effective as possible as you deal with the events of the day. Otherwise, you’ll just race through your day, hardly noticing how the events of the day drain you emotionally and physically, and you’ll wonder why you end up going home stressed out and exhausted.

As I keep saying, you were meant to have an amazing life and we promoters of the Unshackled Leadership philosophy, www.UnshackledLeadership.com, are committed to supporting you in that. But you have to manage yourself if you’re going to experience that and mostly we don’t. I invite you to take a lot more responsibility for how life occurs for you and the ideas here will be a good start.

Leadership Strategy – “How to Win Friends and Influence People”

In many leadership workshops, people are asked to think about a great leader they’ve known and list the qualities that made them such a great leader. 

What would your answer be??

We’ve worked with some amazing leaders and here’s my answer.   

They were outstanding in ALL of the following areas:

•  People skills
•  Business skills and knowledge
•  Technical knowledge in their industry
•  Visionary

Many people are great in some of these areas but not all.  When a leader excels in all of these areas, success is inevitable.

One of the biggest challenges for leaders is in the area of people skills because this is not as “black & white” as the other areas.  It involves what’s often referred to as “soft skills”.   Leaders need to know “how to win friends and influence people”, as this motivates and brings employees along with the company’s vision and goals, resulting in outrageously successful companies. 

In preparing for a recent talk on leadership, I came across my yellowed and worn copy of Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.  One of the chapters gives simple steps on how to make people like you.  As I read these, I reflected on my list of amazing leaders and, interestingly, they did all these things.  AND the result was everyone loved and respected these leaders and were motivated to do everything they could to help make the company successful.  Here are Carnegie’s six “rules”:

1. Make the other person feel important—and do it sincerely

2. Become genuinely interested in other people. 

3. Remember that a man's name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in any language. 

4. Be a good listener.  Encourage others to talk about themselves. 

5. Talk in terms of the other man's interest

6. Smile 

Pretty simple, yet very powerful!   As a leader, if you are not doing these things already, try them on for the next 30 days and see what a difference it makes.  Let me know.  I can be reached at Lois@UnshackledLeadership.com.