Word count:2306
hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this quick self-help segment in about ten minutes I'm going to show you and give you some tips about how to better motivate employees all right so what is the the bottom-line core of motivate employees and this is somewhat deep concept I mean their food books written about this how to be a better leader how to be a better manager so this is a sub component of being a good manager being a good leader so I'm not going to cover it in the depth that I would like here but I'm going to give you some practical tips and some key insights that you can take away with you and implement right now if you're a manager if you're a leader okay so motivating employees the biggest point here that needs to be made and where people go wrong where managers go wrong is that they try to incentivize their employees with the simple old psychological model of carrots and sticks so they give employees carrots for doing the things that they want them to do and they give them sticks or penalties for not doing the things that are required to them to do and sometimes there's some discussion there's like should I be using negative motivation or positive motivation should I give them a carrot or a stick that whole bottle is wrong that's not going to get you good performance optimal performance from your employees to really motivate an employee what you want is you want the employee to be autonomous you don't want them to be just a robot chasing a carrot or avoiding a stick that's going to make a robot employee what you want is you want a creative autonomous employee who is going to be internally motivated so this is about intrinsic motivation and in fact studies have shown that when people are intrinsically motivated naturally motivated to do something and you go in there and you give them even a positive incentive on top of that like let's say this is the situation they have actually done experiments where you could have a child playing with some crayons and just drawing just for the fun of it they have playtime right for 30 minutes and they do that you split that group in half and you give one group the control just time to play for 30 minutes and draw with crayons and you give the other group the same exact times exact crayons everything's the same except you tell them that you're going to pay them now let's say twenty dollars each to sit there and draw something for for those thirty minutes then what actually happens counter-intuitively is that group that you incentivize extrinsically with the money even though it's a positive motivation because it's an extrinsic motivator it actually diminishes their enjoyment of that activity and it reduces their performance and actually you get better drawing more of that more creativity out of the group that's just doing it because they like to rather than because they have they to get it sent avise to so this example shows you two carrots just giving employees carrots is not always the best strategy telling your employee that he's going to get a bonus for doing something creative and doing something bold on the job sometimes that can be a benefit sometimes it can a be it actually be a detriment because if you wanted to do it anyways you incentivizing him with money kind of cheapens the deal right it's almost like think about it if I just did something kind to you on the street and then you're like wait let me let me pull out my wallet and let me give you a hundred dollars because you just did something kind like you opened a new held open a door for me while I was carrying a stack of books it kind of cheapens the like the humanity of that act like I was just giving you something I was just opening the door out of the kindness of my heart I felt like that was kind of a nice thing to do and I don't expect any compensation for it yet here you are you're like this hotshot with hundred-dollar bill now wanting to compensate me I feel kind of dirty taking that money from you because this was something I was happy to do anyways it's kind of that kind of thinking so if you really want to motivate your employees properly what do you think you have to do it's not getting them more carrots necessarily and it's certainly not giving them more sticks nobody likes to be penalized for their performance at work instead what you do is you inspire them great leaders inspire great generals inspire their troops in battle great presidents inspire the nation to rally around a cause and the same is true for great leaders in companies every great leader in a company is visionary he has a vision he has some ideal that he is driving towards something that's a mission of his and he is able to articulate this mission effectively all the way down the line so his troops know about it so that when they're out there and you ask them to go to slaughter to go face the trench machine guns when you ask them to do that they better have a damn good reason that they're doing it it's not because you're paying them an extra thousand dollar bonus they're not going to do that but they will do it if you appeal to their higher values and what higher values am I talking about these are higher values that all of us all human beings appeal to on a certain level we all want this and we want it intrinsically we don't even need money for it these are things like beauty excellence honesty justice order love kindness fairness these are principles that people resonate with because these are like appealing to their highest self so what you got to do is you got to appeal to the highest self in each one of your employees so what do they really want what are their high selves so maybe you've got a sales force right one tactic you can use to motivate them is you can just say we're going to give we're going to give the top three salesmen in this 100 people sales force we're going to give them an extra $5,000 bonus whoever ends up of the top 3 people at the end of the quarter and so that might be kind of a traditional strategy a better strategy though instead of having them fight for some bonus which actually will be counterproductive a better strategy is to create a vision for what they're working towards have them buy in to the company's mission right not on a superficial level on a deep level so that makes that means for example have a product that your sales people can be proud of that they want to sell don't have them out there selling a crappy product that they can't believe in have them want to believe in it for example have them sell a product that's important to humanity that's progressing humanity what do you think there's a difference between having a sales person for example sell oh I don't know like a cheap defective Chinese product that they know breaks two months down the road and then customers have to go and buy and replace it or their sell or you're selling something like your salespeople are selling like high quality wheelchairs to allow people to move better or they're selling like a prosthetic leg a better engineered high quality prosthetic leg that helps War veterans overcome tragedies of war and amputee and like amputations which of those do you think is gonna like appeal to their higher higher values right it's kind of a no-brainer and you can motivate people with that and make sure that they see what they're actually doing with the positive influence they're having so if your pop if your product if your service if your company is having a positive influence in the world and it should and if it isn't then that's really the problem you fix first but let's say it is make sure that your salespeople or whoever's working for you is realizing what is happening and the role that they're playing people are motivated when they have a vision that they're working towards and they see that that vision is doing good and they see that what they're doing is impacting that vision so that's the next point is you want to make sure that your employees know what it is that they're contributing to the cause because if I am sitting in a cubicle I'm just typing away the computer all day and I don't see the effect that that is having on the ultimate goal then I'm not bought in I can't be it's not possible I'm disconnected from that problem disconnected from the vision I'm not seeing the feedback but for example if I'm typing stuff up and then I'm also seeing the emails that we're getting from the kinds of customers with rave reviews and all these thank-you letters that we're getting and we're literally like dragging in piles of thank-you letters into the office and like dumping them on the on the floor and on the coffee table what do you thin like once in a while like we'll get up and we'll read one of those thank-you letters or an employee can just walk by and read one at random how do you think that's going to make them feel totally different right they can see the impact it's like oh I made this piece of code if I'm a program I made this of code and it allowed somebody to all the sudden have this amazing experience and then somehow that positively impacted their life now I can be bought into that that might be important to me so that is a very important point to keep in mind and finally I think the last point that I'll make here is if you really want your employees to be motivated then you want them functioning as it as a unit you want them to be cohesive and to do that as the leader and as the manager you have to be first of all in touch with your employees go out there and be connected with them listen to their concerns ask them what they want give them training actually care about them if you treat them like cattle they're going to behave it like cattle and it's going to be hard to motivate them in any other way but a carrot and a stick and that's not a very effective way to motivate humans so treat them like humans and then they will be motivated by human desires so that is important and then also of course values values are important make sure that your employee base is bought into the values that you as a leader are espousing so first of all that means you have to articulate your values what is the company stands for what is it that this division stands for what do we try to accomplish like is it excellence is that loyalty is it customer service you know what is it define that stuff and then make sure that the people that are on your team are actually bought into it not just in name don't craft up some hokey mission statement and values listen then just like pin it to some some some board in the cafeteria this is something that people have to be bought into because actually they've done research on this Jim Collins famously did research on this and and they found out that really what what it takes to keep an organization very successful over the long run is to have cohesion among values of employees everyone has to be on board and they have to be bought into the values of the leader if there's a lot of disparity of values and one person has this opinion another person has this opinion and the leader has another direction and everyone's pulling in different directions what do you think happens everyone's pulling in different directions and the ship is going nowhere it's going around in circles you want a clear direction to where you're going and you want people that are bought into that direction and are on board and are saying yeah I want to go there too and when every one of your guys and girls wants to go in the same direction as you do then what do you think you're going to go you're going to go there so those are some of my basic basic fundamental tips about how you want to set up your motivation strategy for employees this is a deep topic I think I'm going to shoot some more videos with more specifically breaking down each one of these points and may be covering some other ideas that I have about motivation and specifically team engagement so go ahead and check out my site for those but anyways I'm gonna wrap it up here go ahead leave your comments I'd love to hear what you have to think what you have to say about this please like it please share it and check out actualize that org for more advanced personal development videos like this one you