Motivate Your Team! Eight Quick Tips To Motivate For Success

By Ed Sykes

Motivation is the key ingredient for success in any
organization. You can have all the technical skills in the
world; however, if you can’t motivate your team, you will not
achieve success. As a leader, a majority of your job is to
motivate others to succeed so that everyone’s goals are
accomplished.

The following are eight quick tips to motivate your team:

1. Everyone Has Motivation
Your employees are motivated on some level. It is your job to
find the level of their motivation and move your employees to
the next level.

2. Listen to WIIFM
I wake up every morning listening to a very important radio
station, WIIFM. I hope you do too. WIIFM stands for What’s In It
For Me? To truly be a motivator, you must always be in tune to
your employees’ WIIFM. Find out why it is beneficial for your
employees to do a task, etc. Once you find out the employees’
motives, you find out how to motivate them.

3. It’s about Pain or Pleasure
Motivate your employees toward pleasure or away from pain. You
motivate toward the pleasure by providing recognition,
incentives, and rewards for doing a good job. You motivate away
from the pain of a corrective action, losing a position, or
doing a poor job. The key to this motivation is to be consistent
with all your employees at all times.

4. Give Me a Reason
Do it because I said so! Well, with our educated workforce
these days, that doesn’t work anymore. Employees like to know
why tasks are being requested of them so that they can feel
involved and that the task has worth. Let your employees know
why doing the task is important to you, the organization, and
for them.

5. Let Me Understand You
Take time to show sincere interest in your employees as people.
Understand what your employees are passionate about in their
lives. What are their special passions? What are their personal
needs? What brings them joy or pain? What are their short-range
and long-range goals? Once you understand the answers to these
questions, you can move them to a new level of motivation,
because you cared enough to ask the questions and show interest
in their success. Once you understand your employee’s needs and
goals, they will take more interest in understanding and achieving your goals.

6. Make Me Proud
Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “A soldier will fight long and
hard for a bit of colored ribbon.” Give your employees the
opportunity to be proud of their work. Reward team members
publicly for a job well done. Give them an opportunity in a team
meeting to explain how they accomplished the job. Have your
organization’s Director, President, Vice President, etc., give
recognition to these employees by personally sending a note,
recognizing them in an organizational or team meeting, or
creating a “Hall or Wall of Fame” recognition for employees that
really have gone beyond the call of duty.

7. Expect the Best
Expect the best and your employees will rise to that level. How
do you do this? You do it with the words you use. Are you
expressing positive expectations, or are you using words (kind
of, sort of, we’ll try, we have to, we haven’t done that before,
and that will never work) that communicate negative
expectations? What does your body language say about you? Does
it say, “I’m ready to take on any challenge, and I expect you
can also;” or does your body language say “Please don’t give me
another problem. I can’t handle it.”

Do our recognitions and rewards move our employees to do their
best? Do we consistently communicate our standards and
expectations for the best? Do we coach our team to always do
better?

8. Walk the Talk
Our employees model our behavior. If we are confident about a
major change in the organization, our employees will follow our
behavior. If we come in late and leave early, guess what will
happen? Remember, even when you don’t think someone is
watching…they are always watching. Set the example for others to
follow.

Apply these eight simple rules of motivation and you, too, will
have the skills to motivate your team to be inspired,
innovative, self-directed, and highly productive employees.

About the Author: Ed Sykes is a professional speaker, author,
and success coach in the areas of leadership, motivation, stress
management, customer service, and team building. You can e-mail
him at mailto:esykes@thesykesgrp.com, or call him at (757)
427-7032. Go to his web site, http://www.thesykesgrp.com, and
signup for his newsletter.

Source: http://www.isnare.com