Get Motivated, Stay Motivated!
Newsletter 20 - 24 March 2005
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Welcome to Mind Tools' March 24th Newsletter!
from James Manktelow & Kellie Fowler of MindTools.com
In This Issue.
In this issue of the Mind Tools newsletter, we focus on motivation: an area we're often asked about by newsletter readers.
This is an important, and broad topic. High motivation is vitally important if you and your team are to achieve peak performance. It's also a topic littered with myths and misconceptions: This is why most managers find it so difficult to motivate people, and why so many well-meaning attempts to motivate go astray.
Because it's such a wide topic, we've broken it into three short articles. In this newsletter we share the first of this three-part series, entitled "Myths Dispelled: What Really Motivates People". This will be followed in subsequent editions by "The Nuts & Bolts of Motivation," and finally "A Manager's Motivation Survival Guide."
This issue also provides you with information on time management, helping you to schedule more effectively with the final goal being to make better use of your valuable time.
Finally,
we take a quick look as a book by Sir Robert Alistair McAlpine and Kate
Dixey called “Triumph From Failure, Lessons from Life for Business
Success.” Appropriately informative, the book is written in a
charming and easy-to-understand style, making it both a quick read and
a huge help. This guidebook is a must for anyone looking for success
in the corporate world, as it provides a reliable roadmap for a journey
that ends with balance and, as the name implies, triumph.
As
always, we hope you enjoy this issue of the Mind Tools newsletter and
encourage you to continue to send us your thoughts, suggestions and
comments. Not only do we respond to your comments, we act on them, with
the three-part series on motivation the latest example of how we put
to use your ideas and requests.
And
as ever, if you find these articles useful, we encourage you to share
the newsletter with your team and your co-workers.
Best wishes, and
enjoy this issue!
James
& Kellie
Myths Dispelled: What
Really Motivates People
Part 1 of a 3-part series on Motivation
By: Kellie Fowler
Within
every organization lies the opportunity for employee performance improvement.
And, if you’re a manager or in upper level administration, motivating
your team is a must: it can be one of the quickest ways to increase
the bottom line of your business.
Because
of this, a great deal of time and effort has been invested in motivation
practice and theories. Despite the various researchers who have worked
to understand exactly what motivates us and the numerous theories that
have been applied, one common denominator prevails: To understand motivation,
one must first understand human nature.
We
will dive into the various theories (theory y, theory z, achievement
motivation and two factor motivation hygiene theory (some of which is
touched on in this article)) in the second article of this series. But
for now, we will work to understand that motivation in the workplace
may best be defined as performance improvement.
So,
just how can you increase motivation, improve employee performance and
sit back and watch your bottom line grow?
Perhaps
we should start with the old saying: “You can lead a horse to
water, but cannot make it drink”. The same is true for people.
Thus, making the first step in this direction one that ensures your
employees and/or your colleagues want to be motivated.
While
it seems that some people are born with higher levels of motivation
than others, this is not always the case. In fact, it has been proven
that motivation is a skill, one that must be mastered to achieve success.
Motivation
- A Key Contributor to Performance
Thus,
performance is considered to be a function of ability and motivation.
You can think of it as a simple equation
Job
performance = ability x motivation
Ability
is hinged, to some degree, on education, experience and training. This
makes improvement a continual, lengthy process. By contrast, motivation
can be quickly improved.
There
are a handful of very basic, broad strategies that exist to improve
it. These include:
- Positive reinforcement
- Effective
discipline
- Treating people
fairly
- Satisfying
employee needs
- Setting attainable
work-related goals
- Restructuring
jobs when necessary
- Rewards that
are based on performance
While
motivation practices will vary widely from workplace to workplace, these
are the areas you should draw on when looking to improve performance,
hence motivation.
Frederick
Herzberg’s Findings
Now,
it's worth going into a bit of theory here. One can look to Frederick
Herzberg, a well-respected researcher who closely studied the sources
of employee motivation in the 1950s and 1960s, to find answers relating
to job satisfaction and employee satisfaction. While Herzberg’s
studies were conducted some time ago, they are strongly respected and
underpin much of our current view of motivation.
As
he found, the things that make people satisfied and motivated on the
job are different in kind from the things that make them dissatisfied
(or act as de-motivators), which points to a trend which is exactly
opposite of the motivators commonly put in place in the modern workplace,
i.e. compensation and incentive packages.
For,
as discussed in his classic article in the Harvard Business Review ("One
More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?", January - February
1968), Herzberg determined that spiralling wages may very well
serve to motivate employees; however, it may very well only be motivating
the employees to seek the next wage increase and nothing more.
In
fact, Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory, drawn originally from
an examination of events in the lives of engineers and accountants and
later paired with at least 16 other studies that utilized a broader
sampling of professionals, suggests that the factors that determine
job satisfaction (and serve to motivate) are “separate and distinct
from the factors that lead to job dissatisfaction.” Hence,
the opposite of job satisfaction is not job dissatisfaction, but rather
no job satisfaction. Conclusively, the opposite of job dissatisfaction
is not job satisfaction, but no job satisfaction.
According
to Herzberg, the factors to consider when working to enhance job satisfaction
and motivation include:
- Achievement
- Recognition
for Achievement
- Work Itself
- Responsibility
- Growth
- Advancement
And
the factors which cause most dissatisfaction (Herzberg's "hygiene
factors", which we'll talk about in the next article) include:
- Company Policy
- Administration
- Supervision
- Interpersonal
Relationships
- Working Conditions
- Salary
- Status
- Security
So
managers should seek to motivate people by giving opportunities for
and celebrating achievement, and helping individuals enjoy and grow
in their jobs. And they should actively minimize the bureaucracy and
petty irritations that organizations often unthinkingly inflict on employees.
Herzberg
concluded that motivators are the primary cause of satisfaction, and
hygiene factors are the primary cause of unhappiness in the workplace.
Taking an example: people are often only temporarily motivated by an
increase in salary, however they can become very demotivated if they
think salaries are too low or if they’re earning less than their
peers.
Now,
it’s easy to pass over this information without absorbing its
significance.
Instead,
pause for a moment and put aside your current assumptions about other
people’s motivations. Reflect on how you feel yourself. Isn’t
this true for you? Don’t you get your greatest satisfaction from
doing a good job, being recognised for it, and from growing your capabilities?
And
aren’t you most demotivated by the frustrations of bureaucracy,
organizational stupidity, politics and being “taken advantage
of”?
As
it is for you, so it is for most other people.
A
Surprising Summary
If
you’re a manager, you already know that an important part of your
job is to motivate your team. In so many cases, the level of motivation
of your team is a huge factor in its performance.
The
role of motivating or “job enrichment” is, as Herzberg determined,
more than a single project, instead calling on continuous efforts from
management. In working to do this, managers should:
- Where possible,
enrich jobs so that they offer a level of challenge equal to the
skills of the person that was hired;
- Work to ensure
those with ability are able to demonstrate it, and can win promotion
to higher-level jobs; and
- Understand
that the very nature of motivators (as opposed to hygiene factors)
is that they have a much longer-term effect on employees’
attitudes.
Obviously,
not all jobs can be enriched, nor do all jobs need to be enriched. As
Herzberg concluded, if a small percentage of the time and money that
is dedicated to hygiene was instead allocated to his motivating factors,
the return in employee satisfaction and motivation, as well as economic
gain, would be one of “the largest dividends that industry and
society have ever reaped….”
Now,
time to put this into practice. How are you going to motivate your team?
How will you make good motivation a routine part of your approach to
management?
Look for part
two of our in-depth series on motivation in the next edition of the
Mind Tools newsletter.
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Book
Review: Triumph From Failure, Lessons from Life for Business Success
By: Sir Robert Alistair McAlpine and Kate Dixey
“We
may stop ourselves from going up, but never coming down.”
- Napoleon Bonaparte
In
working to craft a clear, concise summary of this eye-opening book,
I found myself going back to the above quote (which serves as the opening
of Chapter 6), for it summarizes the book well.
“Triumph
From Failure, Lessons from Life for Business Success” is the clever,
insightful work of authors Alistair McAlpine and Kate Dixey. In it,
this dynamic duo takes a look at the essential dimensions of balance
in life to achieve happiness and success.
McAlpine
and Dixey lay the groundwork for what it takes to reach that elusive
goal – to be successful in business, at home, and with people
in general.
As
appropriately pointed out in the book’s foreword, industry loses
billions of dollars every year through negativity displayed by both
employers and employees, with negativity starting in the mail room and
ending in the boardroom (or, for that matter, the other way around).
McAlpine
and Dixey say that negativity, once lit, runs like wildfire through
any business. More contagious than the flu, they determine that negativity
in today’s workforce is more deadly to a business than adverse
financial conditions.
“Triumph
from Failure” explores essential human themes, such as success,
eating, sleeping, understanding, beauty, kindness and failure, in an
effort to make life happier, defeat negativity and make both work and
home more successful through achieving balance (while holding your hand
and providing practical advice every step of the way).
Admittedly,
my favorite chapters in this great read are Chapters 1 and 7 (Kindness
and The Need for Understanding, respectively). For it seems that these
fundamentals have long since been missing from most of our boardrooms.
In
summary, the book looks at the importance of discovering your own unique
rhythm, and takes you all the way to sure-fire success – a journey
you are happy traveling on the entire way.
“Triumph
from Failure, Lessons from Life for Business Success,” is
available at www.amazon.com.
Tool
Review: Time Management
Planning to Make the Best Use of Your
Time
In
today’s global marketplace, where everyone seems to be working
with colleagues or customers in different time zones and where our society
seems to be moving at an increasingly hurried pace, effective time management
is more important that ever.
To
manage time well, you need to first determine your priorities
and set
your goals (see http://www.mindtools.com/prtodo.html
and http://www.mindtools.com/page6.html
for more information on priorities and goal-setting). Once you have
done this, delivery of your priorities and achievement of your goals
becomes an exercise in the effective allocation of time.
Start by looking at the time available to you. Next, plan how you will
this allotted time to achieve the goals you identified. While this sounds
simple enough, there is an art to effective scheduling. By learning
to schedule properly, you can:
-
Understand what you can realistically achieve with your time
-
Plan to make the best use of your time
-
Leave enough time for things you must absolutely do
-
Preserve contingency time to handle the unexpected and
-
Minimize stress by avoiding over-commitment to yourself and to others
If
you want help in doing this, assistance is available in the form of
diaries, organizers, paper-based organizers, PDAs and software suites
like Microsoft Outlook or GoalPro 6. The trick here is to determine
which method best suits you, your job, your situation and your budget.
Next,
commit to scheduling your time on a regular basis, perhaps at the start
of every week. In preparing your weekly schedule, you should:
-
Identify the time you want to make available for work, considering
the demands of your job and your personal goals.
- Write
in the actions you absolutely must take to ensure you do the best
job you can do (keeping in mind that the job you do may very well
be used as a measuring stick for later assessments of you). Note:
If you manage people, allow time for communication
with stakeholders, for dealing with issues that may arise and
make sure you leave time for good team management. In short, set aside
time for those important to you.
- Review
your to-do list (more on this at http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newHTE_04.htm)
and schedule in the high-priority or urgent activities, as well as
maintenance tasks that cannot be delegated (see http://www.mindtools.com/tmdelegt.html).
-
The next step is to write in appropriate contingency time. This requires
some experience, for the more unpredictable your job is, the more
contingency time you will need. If you are a manager, you already
know that most days bring constant interruption, with studies showing
that some managers get as little as six minutes of work time before
being interrupted. Because you cannot predict interruptions, you should
leave time in your schedule for these and make sure you allow yourself
the flexibility in your schedule to address each appropriately.
-
The time left over is your discretionary time, or the time you use
to deliver your priorities and achieve goals. Review your prioritized
to-do list and personal goals, evaluate the time needed to achieve
these actions, and schedule these in.
If,
by the time you complete Step 5 you find you have little or no time
left, you should revisit the assumptions you used in the first four
steps. In doing this, question what is absolutely necessary. Look for
tasks that may better be delegated, or perhaps done in less time.
Remember
that one of the ways people learn to achieve success is by maximizing
the leverage they can achieve with their time. To do this, delegate
work to others, be willing to spend some money to outsource, and use
technology to automate work as much as possible.
Also,
use this as an opportunity to review your to-do lists and personal goals.
Have you set goals that are not realistic, perhaps not achievable with
the time you have available? Are you taking on too many additional duties?
Do you need additional help? Or, are you placing greater importance
on things or in areas that really aren’t that important?
If,
after doing all of this, you find you still do not have enough time,
you may need to renegotiate your workload.
Effective Scheduling is just one of the 39 tools explained in Mind Tools’
“Make
Time for Success!”. This downloadable e-book contains more
than 140 pages of time-tested tips, tricks and secrets that help you
to work better (not harder). As many people have already found, you
can rely on “Make Time for Success!” to teach you how to
set realistic goals, generate a practical and achievable life plan and
finally leverage all the opportunities life has to offer you. It includes
workbook exercises that guarantee you understand how to put these invaluable
skills to work for you in your life. Click here
to find
out more.
A
Final Note...
I
hope you’ve enjoyed this issue – and in particular, I hope
you found the article on motivation useful.
Although
it takes time and effort to build a well-motivated team, the rewards
are enormous. And this is not just in terms of “feel good”:
By working to increase the motivation of your team you are very likely
to see substantial increases in productivity, revenue generation and
profitability.
And
what's more, you'll also see improvements in staff retention. This is
critical: properly done, it costs a lot of management time and money
to recruit new team members. Once recruited, they can take a long time
to come “up to speed”. This is why it's desperately difficult
to grow a business if your staff turnover is high: just as a new team
member finally becomes productive, another leaves and you lose a whole
lot more expertise.This
is yet another reason why a happy, well-motivated team is so much more
effective than an unhappy one.
Developing
this further, in our next issue, you can look forward to “The
Nuts & Bolts of Motivation”, part two of the three-part motivation
series.
We
also look at “The Value Chain”, a powerful tool for increasing
the value you deliver to your personal customers. We’ll have a
great article on stress, and we review a good book on motivation called
“The Enthusiastic Employee,” by David Sirota, Louis A. Mischkind
and Irwin Meltzer.
In
the meantime, if you'd like to forward this email to friends, co-workers
and team members, please do. I hope the newsletter stimulates some useful
discussion!
Best wishes, and until next time!
James
James Manktelow
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