Motivational Management

Alexander Hiam

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9780814426821
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Most people want to do their jobs well. They don't need commands, threats, or ultimatums. What they can use more productively are direction, support, encouragement, and rewards. This book reveals how to increase commitment, competency, and productivity by stimulating each employee's intrinsic desire to excel. Author Alex Hiam's training methods and materials are used at hundreds of corporations, and he has personally trained managers from AT&T, Ford, and the United States armed forces. His field-proven approaches have been especially adapted for this essential guide, which includes strategies for: Motivational communications Eliminating contaminants that cause negative attitudes The use of challenge, purpose, and feedback to motivate, and much more. Plus, the book features an Incentive Profile for establishing a rewards system, a Motivation Level Inventory for measuring and tracking motivation, and a wide array of activities, techniques, and examples from the author's own experiences.

CHAPTER 1

The Quest for Star Performers

I’ve tried to create a culture of caring for people in the totality of their lives, not just at work. There’s no magic formula. It’s like building a giant mosaic—it takes thousands of little pieces.

—Herb Kelleher, CEO, Southwest Airlines

Just like Herb Kelleher, you too need to create a positive, can-do culture that, as he describes it, gives people “the license to be themselves.” Because, as Kelleher observed, “the intangibles are more important than the tangibles. Someone can go out and buy airplanes from Boeing and ticket counters, but they can’t buy our culture, our esprit de corps.”

Kelleher is talking about the differences between a workplace where everyone goes through the motions (like cogs in a machine) and a workplace where people are turned on and eager to perform well, individually and as a group. He is talking about the difference between a workplace where employees feel that they are expected to “check their brains at the gate” and one in which their ideas and enthusiasms are welcomed and harnessed to meaningful goals.

The difference can be bigger than we generally recognize, which is why I’m so excited about the chance to explore this issue with you in the coming pages. Companies with that special spirit Kelleher speaks of can and do outperform their rivals. Supervisors, managers, or team leaders who nurture that special something in their group tend not only to achieve more but to find it a heck of a lot more fun and rewarding to go to work each day—as do their people. The intangibles, as Kelleher calls them, are increasingly important in the workplace today.

“I always thought the company wanted me to leave my brain at the gate.”
(Employee of an auto manufacturer, quoted in the London Times.)

Managing for the New Work Environment

Do you need employees who check their brains at the entrance and just do what you tell them until the clock says they can go? Probably not. Most managers feel that they need a far higher level of involvement—that the kind of challenges they face require a far more dedicated and involved employee than this old stereotype suggests.

Work is harder than, or at least different from, how it used to be, and we increasingly need the full involvement of employees. To be successful we need not only their hands, but also their ideas and enthusiasms. There is a big difference between the results you get when employees perform well and fully, and when they just go through the motions. Brian McQuaid, executive director of human resources at MCI, told The Wall Street Journal that new employees only accomplish 60 percent of what experienced employees do (the firm compared employees who had been there less than three months with those who had been there longer). Even more striking, customer satisfaction was measurably lower for these less expert new employees than for others. Combine these findings with the observation that a 5 percent drop in overall employee efficiency cuts annual revenue by “a couple of hundred million dollars” at MCI, according to McQuaid, and the links from how individual employees perform to how the company performs become clearer.

McQuaid also reports that measures of employee satisfaction are linked at MCI to both customer satisfaction and employee productivity—key indicators of both quality and quantity of work performed (from a syndicated story in The Wall Street Journal, February 7, 1999). So, at MCI at least, employees who perform their work well, not just adequately, can make all the difference between success and failure for the company as a whole.

A Hypothetical Challenge

Imagine that you have been asked to select a boat and crew to do a specific job. Your job is to load large bales of hay and take them across a wide, calm, slow-moving river every day. What kind of boat and crew do you want for this job? Select one from the following options:

▸ Option A. A large, easy-to-load barge and a crew that is disciplined and good at doing repetitive work consistently

▸ Option B. A fast, seaworthy sailboat with a crew of intelligent, experienced sailors who are able to do a wide variety of things well, depending upon the situation

Option A makes good sense for the job you have been given. You don’t need speed or flexibility, you simply need something that can carry the same heavy load across the same flat water again and again. And if your workers want to “leave their brains at the gate” and do their work mindlessly, so what—the work we’re talking about here is pretty mindless, if truth be told.

But now imagine a different situation and see which option you’d prefer. Imagine you have been asked to head out to sea in storm season to try to find and rescue a missing ship that was carrying an important delegation with a load of treasure. Now which of the options do you choose, the barge and routine-oriented crew in Option A or the fast sailing ship and flexible, intelligent crew in Option B?

Managing in Stormy Weather

As a manager today, you face challenges that are unique. Studies of businesses and their competitive environments show that almost every organization faces challenges that are different from those of earlier decades. Things change faster. There are more potential competitors and customers. Technology dishes up more frequent surprises. It is harder to see the future and more important than ever to be creative and innovative—in other words, to help shape the future rather than to assume the past will continue as is.

All these challenges combine to create a business environment that demands a fast pace of change and frequent innovations on the part of employees and their organizations. No matter the size or type of organization, it must behave in innovative ways, seeking opportunities, solving problems, and embracing new directions. This need for agility and intelligence is as urgent in a government agency or nonprofit as it is in a for-profit company. There is emerging now a general set of requirements for organizations, their managers, and their employees that includes attributes like initiative, flexibility, and creative problem-solving.

In a traditional, stable environment, managers are protectors of the status quo. Their role is to make sure employees understand and follow the established procedures, because these procedures reflect many years of testing and refinement and are probably better than anything that employees could come up with independently. But today’s working environment is rarely stable, and the nature of work is different and the role of the manager must shift in response.

In today’s turbulent, fast-changing environment, managers are constructive enemies of the status quo. They need to create a healthy momentum by stimulating employees to innovate and change. Their role is to bring out the natural enthusiasm and intelligence of their people and make sure they apply it to their work.

There are far fewer layers of hierarchy today, because hierarchy gets in the way of innovation and fast response. There is less supporting staff for managers because secretaries and personal assistants are a luxury that few organizations can now afford. And so individual managers generally supervise more people with fewer resources than their counterparts did in earlier decades. And since most managers have plenty of work on their own desks, they must manage their people in between trying to get their own work done.

Rekindling Trust

According to the massive General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, people in the United States are gradually becoming less trusting of each other. In response to the question, “Do you think people would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance, or would they try to be fair?” a healthy majority used to vote for “fair,” but this trusting view has been slipping down steadily. In the 1970s, 64 percent thought others would be fair. In the 1980s, that percentage slipped to 58 percent, and by the end of the 1990s it was down to 52 percent. One possible explanation is that there are new values in the younger cohorts taking over the workplace, but whatever the reason it behooves business leaders to keep this shift in mind.¹

An obvious implication is that your employees are less likely than ever to trust you to be doing the right thing—so you better tell them what you are doing and give them enough information to reach a favorable conclusion on their own. Perhaps the rise of mistrust explains why there has been an increase in how important management communications and information-sharing are viewed in surveys of employee opinion.

Here’s a related question from the same General Social Survey that is perhaps even more telling: “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful, or that they are just looking out for themselves?” In the 1970s, a majority—59 percent—voted for “helpful.” Now the number has slipped below half, to 48 percent. In other words, probably more than half of your U.S. employees believe that the people around them are just looking out for themselves. This means that whenever two or...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Ebook Instructions
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Quest for Star Performers
• 2. Creating a Positive Performance Environment
• 3. Rethinking Management Communications
• 4. Using Motivational Communication Techniques
• 5. Tackling the Feelings That Drive Performance
• 6. Providing Challenging Opportunities
• 7. Using Feedback to Motivate
• 8. Eliminating Contaminants
• 9. Transforming Negative Attitudes
• 10. Appealing to Individual Motives
• 11. Using Recognition and Rewards
• Appendixes
• Index