When we think about authentic motivation, a large part of it is about energy. When a person is truly motivated they feel energized to move forward, to take action, to do something.

So, as managers, we want to ask ourselves, “What can I do that will serve to energize people in an authentic way?”

Here are 7 things you can do that will energize your employees…

1. Communicate as much information to employees as often as possible.

On the authentic Top-10 List of what Employees want from work, #10 is… “Feeling well informed about what is going on.” Human nature is so very interesting. When people feel like they really know what’s currently going on with the company, it enhances their sense of control of their own lives. It also enhances involvement.

2. Send a problem out to all employees and ask for their suggestions on how to solve it.

This is remarkably effective. Once again, you’re doing something to stimulate involvement. And not only will you get some valuable ideas to consider, you’ll boost morale in an authentic way. There are few things more intrinsically motivating than to feel like your opinion is valued and sought-after.

3. Consistently and joyfully encourage employees to improve one process or procedure every day of how they do their job.

The very latest studies in human motivation tell us people have an inherent desire to master their work, if only they are not de-motivated to do so, and are given encouragement and support.

4. Give employees permission to say “Yes” to customers, along with the resources to do so.

This will energize your employees AND your customers. And you’ll be surprised at the creative solutions your employees will develop to truly serve their customers, as a result
of this.

5. Ask employees what one thing they would change in the organization and how they would change it.

With this question and some sincere listening, you’ll learn a lot. And it’s worth repeating that it’s very energizing, very empowering when people feel their opinions are valued and sought-after.

6. Openly encourage everyone to set aside time each day to focus on their highest priority tasks without any interruptions.

This is a way of stimulating important progress for people. One of the things that saps personal energy is feeling like you’re working hard but you’re not getting the important things done! (Read this one again.)

7. Ask people to bring one idea to the next meeting, about what can be done to make their job easier.

You don’t have to think too hard to realize why this is energizing for people. And this gets people thinking about efficiency. Also many of these ideas will be worth implementing.

If you’re not doing these things already, start adding a few of them into your approach to managing and your communication with people.

 
Is there anything better than being on a work team that “clicks,” that takes advantage of each team member’s talent and capabilities, that self-organizes to really get things done? And is there anything worse than being on a team that can’t seem to overcome their differences, doesn’t develop a clear sense of purpose, and doesn’t really accomplish the results they initially had in mind?

What’s the difference between those two teams?
That’s what we want to examine. That’s what we want to understand.

Teamwork is fundamental to business success. And work teams that really work are in complete alignment with the new awareness of human motivation, that is changing the way we think about work, the way we organize our work, and the way we do our work.

Being on a self-directed work team allows team members to experience one of the most important motivational drivers of the 21st Century, and that is…. autonomy. Working on teams allows team members to have a larger amount of control and influence over their work. It’s extremely motivating for employees to feel their opinions really count. On a work team that is more likely to be true.

Productive work teams don’t just happen. They have to be developed.

For teams to be energized and productive, they need to have…

• Rules of team engagement that everyone understands and agrees upon.
• A clear purpose.
• Goals the team members are clear about and care about.
• Authority to achieve results quickly and independently.

It’s amazing the level of self-sacrifice team members will contribute to the team’s efforts when they feel like they have a large say in how they’re going to work together. What you want is for team membership to increase each team member’s sense of being in charge of their own destiny.

It’s important for the team to establish rules for how they interact together.

A customer service team at Viscosity Oil in Willowbrook, Illinois, created and totally agreed to the following five rules as a code of team conduct…

• If you have a problem with another person, go directly to that person.
• Don’t ever put your finger in anyone else’s face.
• No back-stabbing – don’t say negative things about anyone.
• If someone comes to you with a problem, don’t share it with others.
• Come to work with a smile and keep it!

 
Remember, the team members themselves came up with these rules, and they all signed their names to a sheet that listed them. And they posted that sheet for all to see. This had a very positive effect on their ability to collaborate together and communicate with each other to get things done.
 
 
 
In our next article, part 2, on developing energized work teams, we’ll look at “the 5 Keys” a 3M VP discovered to be most important for productive team success.

Meanwhile, have yourself a great day.
 
 
 
 

We’ve been in the 21st Century for over a decade now, and yes, it’s true, slowly but surely old-fashioned ideas of management and employee motivation are being updated with a new awareness of what truly motivates human beings.

The “carrot & stick” concept of motivation is still in play of course. Create incentives and rewards for the behavior you want, and create demerits and some form of punishment for the behavior you don’t want. We may never get rid of that basic accepted aspect of motivating people. But the field of behavioral science is no longer in it’s infancy, and it is presenting us with evidence we cannot ignore that tells us much of what be believe about the effectiveness of the “carrot & stick” method of motivation just isn’t true.

A New Motivational Awareness is Developing based on updated Scientific Evidence

Make no mistake about it, a new awareness has been developing and it is already taking hold in dramatically productive ways all across America… indeed, all across the world.

Much of what managers do is actually based on outdated assumptions and even what we might call “business folklore.” It’s time for us, as managers, to align what we do with what is actually true. In the very wise words of that great American philosopher, Will Rogers … “Always ride the horse in the direction that it’s going.”

Economically everything has changed worldwide. We are going through the debt-liquidation phase of a 75-year economic cycle that is changing everything. The behavior and assumptions we developed during the other phases of this re-occuring cycle are no long appropriate or effective. It’s a new world, and it is vitally important that we open ourselves to re-thinking the way we think about work, the way we organize our work, and the way we do our work.

As is always the case, there are early adopters, managers who are willing to break free of their old assumptions and freshly examine their thinking… and try new methods based on new evidence.

I hope you will become one of them. The future is not happening sometime in the future. The future is happening right now.

People are Strongly Motivated by an Intrinsic Desire for “Autonomy”

 
One of the most important elements of what is being called “Motivation 3.0” is the increasing desire people have for autonomy. What we are finally discovering scientifically is that human beings have an innate need to direct their own lives. And this need seems to be stronger now than ever before. We have only to witness the outbreak of the many “freedom” movements in the middle-east to understand this to be so.

It is equally strong in the work environment, especially so with the younger generations of workers now working side-by-side with the older generations.

The important shift in thinking is towards an awareness of “intrinsic motivation,” as opposed to extrinsic motivation. The “carrot & the stick” approach is based entirely on extrinsic factors of motivation. But the urge to have more control over our lives is a powerful motivating factor that comes from within. When we pay attention to that, and we learn to effectively – and productively – organize our work around respecting and satisfying that urge, people become motivated in ways that cannot be duplicated with the “carrot & stick” methods.

Here’s something you can do right away, to start implementing productive intrinsic employee motivation:

Intrinsic Motivation Exercise #1:

• Begin conducting “idea gathering” sessions at your regular meetings, where you ask for and gather ideas from your employees about what they think can be done to improve the way they work and the way the company serves your customers.
• Take 20 minutes to do something like the brain-writing technique with your employees.
• Allow them to offer their ideas, and allow them to evaluate the best ones for implementing. And allow them to implement the best of their ideas.
• Do this sort of thing at least once a month.

 
We’ll be offering you more of these “intrinsic motivation exercises” to assist you in shifting your thinking and your approach to employee motivation. You’ll be surprised how effective this will be with your employees, and how much more fulfilling your management work will become. You’ll find the two go hand in hand.
 
It’s a challenging time to be alive. And it’s an exciting time to be alive.
Change is happening all around us. And much of that change will do us good.

Give this some thought. And give this motivational exercise a try.
And have yourself a really good week.
 
 
 

Motivational Tip #5: List your goals in a hierarchy, from most important to least important.

At the end of your motivational goal-structuring session, list your goals in a hierarchy. What I mean by that is, list them in terms of which goals are most important to you and which goals are least important to you. That way your goals won’t be competing with each other for your time and your energy.

Of all the things you care about and want to create, it’s important to know what’s most important to you.

So…

• Make a list of goals you want to create by the end of this year – and even the next two years, if you want – using these 5-tips for creating results from a “creative orientation.”
• Write down some simple goals that you really want to create. Accomplishing a couple of these simple goals will help you develop the your creative process as a method you use in your life. Accomplishing some simple goals you care about will also help
  you gain creative momentum, which is a wonderful thing.
• Feel free to put a couple of challenging goals on your list for creating this year, if you really desire them.
• List your goals in an order from top to bottom. Number them in terms of what’s most important. (Put a check mark next to the two most easy-to-create goals, as suggested above.)
• Create action plans for creating your goals, and maintain a clear awareness of your primary choice (desired results) and your secondary choices (actions to create those results.)

If you have any questions, post them here. Be as specific as you want, and I will answer them as quickly as I can.

Motivational Tip #4: Allow yourself to think about your true aspirations.

Sometimes, particularly curing challenging economic circumstances, we can get lost in thinking only about what we “should” do or what we “need” to do. I’ve been stuck in that kind of thinking pattern in my life more than once.

Two nights ago on a major television news show I heard a guy say emphatically we “should” – there’s that word again – make goals for helping other people. That sounds good, and I agree with it personally, which means I share that value with him. But without even realizing it, he wasn’t talking about goal setting. He was talking about his personal values.

An important thing to keep in mind is, for your goals to be about your values. You get to define what success is for you. Only you can determine what’s most important for you.

The things we think we “should” do, become obligations in our mind. However the power of “choice” is much more productive than obligation. The good news is, many obligations can become authentic personal choices when we understand the relationship between primary and secondary choices. Yes, we’re going to talk about this some more, because it is so very empowering.

One of my friends – I use my friends for examples about everything! – began chronically complaining about how much he disliked his job. Finally I just couldn’t take it anymore, so we had a discussion to help him consider what were his primary choices and what were his secondary choices in his life regarding his job. It quickly became clear he truly did not enjoy the work he was doing. But he had a good salary, excellent job security, and a really great health plan that included his wife and his two children.

During our discussion he realized going to his job every day was a secondary choice he was making to support a major primary choice he really cared about, which was providing financial stability and healthcare coverage for himself and his family. His complaining stopped right on the spot. And we spent another hour discussing a plan for evolving his work in possible directions he might really enjoy. He came up with lots of ideas, and is actively working to shape his job in another direction that will be good for him and good for his company.

It’s important to take the time to be with ourselves, to think about what we “truly want” to create and accomplish, how we truly want to develop our lives. This is easier once we understand the relationship between primary and secondary choices.

During your goal-setting, goal-structuring sessions, allow yourself to think about goals for the rest of this year, AND some goals for the next two years. Allow yourself to think about a few goals you really want to create and experience, even if you don’t currently know how you would ever accomplish them.

Allow yourself to choose and define the “What” of what you truly want, without having to initially know the “How” of how you would go about achieving it. You’ll surprise yourself with the action ideas you’ll come up with, to invent the path from where you are to where you want to go.

Continue to Motivational Tip #5 – Prioritizing Your Goals.

Motivational Tip #3: Describe your “desired end result,” rather than a “process” or “action” for creating that result.

This is an important point of motivational wisdom that many people misunderstand.

It’s a natural impulse to jump right into an action for creating a result before we’re even clear on what that result is. In doing this we can easily confuse a “process” or “action” for creating a result with the result itself.

A close friend of mine began to feel “shortness of breath” when he would walk up stairs. This alarmed him, so he decided to start walking 30 minutes a day. That became his goal. But he quickly found it difficult to keep at it.

Do you see the mistake he had made? He hadn’t clarified his real goal, which was to create cardiovascular fitness. He wanted to be able to walk up stairs and do other activities without feeling fatigued and out of breath. Cardiovascular fitness was what he really wanted to create. And without clearly defining that real goal to himself, he jumped to an “action step” or “process step” for creating his goal, walking 30 minutes a day. And he confused that with his real goal, creating cardiovascular fitness for himself.

He told himself his goal was to walk 30 minutes every day. Actually that was part of the action process for creating his authentic goal which was heart and lung fitness. In his rush to do something about his shortness of breath, he didn’t clarify his real goal, and he confused the “action to create a result” with the “result itself.”

All of us confuse ourselves like this more than we realize. And when we do it really damages our natural motivation. It makes it much harder for us to follow through to achieve the goals we really care about.

When you create an action plan for creating a clear result you’ve chosen, you begin listing action steps for creating your chosen result. Initially it’s important for the primary focus to be on the desired result. The actions to create that result are secondary.

The important thing to understand is this: the result you want to create is your “primary choice,” and the actions you choose to take, to create that result, are your “secondary choices.”

When we begin to clearly organize our goals and our actions in this way, it becomes much easier to take the actions necessary to create the results we want. And it becomes much easier to follow-through with our actions until we completely succeed at creating what we’ve chosen.

Our desired goals become primary choices we make, about what we truly want. And our actions become secondary choices we make, to create the primary choice we’ve chosen.

Please read that last sentence as many times as it takes for you to completely understand it. This is very powerful wisdom about the power of choice, and the structure of goals and actions.

When you begin thinking this way, and organizing your goals and actions this way, it will be much easier for you to take action because it will always be clearly in support of your desired result. As well, it becomes much easier to take actions (secondary choices) we don’t particularly enjoy, if they are clearly in support of creating an outcome (primary choice) we really care about.

I have a friend who hates to exercise, who is in better physical shape than anyone I know. He openly admits that he hates to exercise, and he makes no attempt to lie about it or try to convince himself otherwise. But he exercises rigorously for an hour every day (consistent secondary choice) because he really cares about fitness. What he really wants is to be physically toned and fit (primary choice.)

This is some of the most important wisdom for authentically motivating ourselves in our lives and in our work. Read Motivational Tip #4 to learn how to allow yourself to think about your true aspirations.

Motivational Tip #2……in determining the result you want to create, clarify your goal. Define your goal to yourself as something specific you truly desire to create or experience.

Clarity is very powerful and very motivating.

A good rule of thumb is to make your desired result clear enough and specific enough so you can easily picture it in your mind. Also use numbers if you can, to quantify your goal.

A friend of mine wrote a goal to “increase his business volume.” I suggested he create more clarity by getting more specific about the outcome he desired. He finally came up with a goal to obtain “seven new business clients in the next six months.” I could almost see his mind and his energy “switch on” as he created this kind of clarity about what he wanted to create. He immediately began writing action notes for himself.

If your outcome seems vague, continue to think about it until you can define it specifically. Specific goals make it much easier for us to organize our lives and our actions to create them.

My wife and I have health goals around creating a certain waist size measurement for ourselves. We both have a target number as part of our goal. As it turns out, waist size is an accurate indicator of overall health. Of course, we will not be focused on reducing our current waist size measurements. As you recall from our discussion about “shifting to a creative orientation,” it’s important to focus on creating what you want, rather than getting rid of what you don’t want. And so, we have defined a waist size for ourselves we will take actions to create.

And now that you understand this, Motivational Tip #3 comes into play.

Motivational Tip #1: Shift to a “Creative Orientation” in Defining Your Goals.

It’s so important to know how to define our goals for ourselves in a way that naturally motivates us.

When we understand how to most effectively define our goals, we start a chain reaction within ourselves that generates the energy and the follow-through for bringing our goals into being.  And there’s nothing more exciting than that!

Here is the first of FIVE TIPS on how to successfully DEFINE YOUR GOALS to genuinely motivate yourself.

#1:  Begin by answering the question: “What do I truly want to create?”
This will shift you into a “creative orientation,” which is very important & very powerful.         

To say it in simple terms… focus one what you want, rather than what you don’t want.  Make your goal something you truly value.  It’s about choosing what’s really important to you. And it’s best thought of as something you want to create, a result or experience you want to bring into being.

This may seem obvious, but many people incorrectly focus on what they’d like to get rid of, rather than what they’d like to create.  Focusing on what you don’t want, what you’d like to get rid of, is a “problem solving” orientation.  And even when you succeed at getting rid of what you don’t want, what have you got when you’re done?
The answer is… nothing. 

It’s hard to get motivated, to feel the natural excitement of really wanting to get your work done, when you’re problem solving.  Because you’re not really working to create what you want.

So, Tip #1 is more important than you might think.
Get in the habit of asking yourself, “What do I truly want to create?” 
This will shift you into a creative orientation.  And it is from a creative orientation that you’ll begin to experience authentic motivation.

Let’s look at this a little further…

>  Here’s a question for you:  Each year, what is the most common New Year’s resolution?

You guessed it!… to lose weight.  To get rid of something we don’t want!… a classic problem solving approach.  And, as is so common with efforts to lose weight, a problem solving approach will almost always create an “oscillating experience.”  Don’t let the word “oscillating” throw you. I’m talking about that experience best described as “two steps forward, followed by two steps back.”  First there is some success. You lose 15 pounds. Hooray!  But all too soon that is followed by a reversal as you gain back 14 pounds.  Oh no!  Two steps forward is followed by two steps back. Like a pendulum swinging back and forth. Like going around in circles.

If you’ve ever had that kind of experience with anything you were trying to accomplish — and who hasn’t? — chances are you were engaged in some kind of problem solving.  This problem solving approach is an easy habit to get into.  Our culture admires it and reinforces it.  But it is structurally unsound. And you won’t experience natural motivation and follow-through this way.

So, to increase your personal motivation, be certain your goal is something you want to create, rather than something you want to get rid of or eliminate.

Staying with our weight-loss illustration for just a little longer, people who shift to a creative orientation about their bodies, who choose to create a trim healthy body, rather than focus on getting rid of weight they don’t don’t want, are capable of sustaining action and changes in their behavior that successfully support the creation of long-term excellent health.  And, their bodies slim down as a by-product of the choice they have made and the actions they take to create health and vitalilty.

When we are faced with what we perceive to be a problem, we certainly don’t want to ignore it or deny it.  Our problems can be very real.  However, when faced with a problem, learn to ask yourself what you would like to create instead, in this area of your life or work. This way, our problems do not become our primary focus. Our primary focus will be on creating results that are most important to us.

Develop the habit of asking yourself, “What do I truly want to create?”
This will shift you to a creative orientation.  And that is the most powerful and highly motivating approach to living your life.

Tip #2 is also important, and you’ll notice it’s impact on your energy right away.

Your employees have more potential than you know. Just watch what happens when you try a few of our employee motivation tips to improve productivity and accountability. Bookmark us and come back soon for countless tips, strategies and ideas to help you improve employee motivation.

Is your team unmotivated or do they like the fire to truly want to win? In upcoming days we will have tons of great team motivation tips to help you help your team find their fire. Please bookmark us and come back soon!