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Just because people work for you (and therefore are supposed to do what you tell them) doesn’t mean it’s not better to motivate them to actually want to do the job.
Here are 10 ideas from my recent podcast and webinar on Motivating Without Money:
1. Get Personal. Money is the easiest and least personal way to motivate people (if you have money). If you don’t, you need to make the personal effort to get people to actually care about what they are working on.
2. Persuasion vs. Command. Money doesn’t buy loyalty, it only rents effort. We talked about how to persuade people to work for you, and build real loyalty and support.
3. Create Clarity. The biggest demotivator you can have is when people don’t know exactly what to work on or why it matters. Your job as a leader is to create clarity for your team when it does not exist around you – we talked about how.
4. Deal with chaos from above. What about when management keeps changing direction? Or when your team doesn’t agree with, or is skeptical or angry about where management is heading. You still need to find or create points of certainty for your team. We discussed several approaches.
5. Communicate on a regular schedule. Clear consistent communication is a magical motivator that so many leaders miss. You get huge points for leadership and credibility when you communicate well.
6. Build Trust. People are always more motivated to work for people they trust, know and respect. People know you through your communications. Set up the right communication plan with the right content on the right schedule.
7. Don’t be Invisible. If you you fail to communicate regularly, you will appear to be checked out, even if you are not checked out. People need to hear from you.
8. Don’t guess what people care about, ask them! Personally ask each person that works for you. You’ll be amazed at the answers, and how many things you can do without money that will make a material difference to them. I shared several surprising examples!
9. Recognize good work. Create a habit in your organization to recognize the contributions of people. This goes a long way to motivate not just select individuals, but everyone if you do it right.
10. Don’t over complicate it with processes, nominations, reviews, and spreadsheets. Just make it clear to your staff that you want to know when anyone in your organization does something remarkable, and then have one of the executives find a personal, direct way to say, “thank you.”
This article was originally published on Patty Azzarello’s Business Leadership blog.
