New Thinking 2: How to motivate your team
It’s important to understand that people get motivated in different ways and you can
never assume that the same approach will work with everyone in your team.
To be able to energize and motivate the people around you to do a great job, the first step
is for you to identify what motivates your team members. You’ll need to get to know them,
notice what seems to excite them at work, and get curious about what makes them tick as
people. Ask them about what they are doing when they feel most energized at work, and
what drives them to want to do a great job.
One of the most common ways of thinking about motivation is considering the external and
internal factors.
Using external factors to motivate
This approach relies on enhancing or improving factors that are external to the specific job a
person performs. These "external" factors are aspects of a job that are related to job
environment, not the job content itself.
External factors include:
Company policies and benefits
Working conditions
Salary and other forms of compensation
Status
Job security
It’s been demonstrated that externally focused incentives only motivate people in the short
-term. For example, if you give your team a bonus or a new uniform, it will probably make
them feel more motivated for a few days, maybe even a week. However, the effect soon
wears off. To be effective in keeping people energized through external factors alone,
managers would need to continuously provide these rewards. This would become
increasingly costly over time!