Clients often ask me about motivating employee performance: how to do it, is it possible, does the new generation think differently, or do we just have different work ethics today than in years past so we have to accept status quo?
While I don’t consider myself Pollyanna-ish in my thinking, I do think of myself as the eternal optimist. I don’t believe you can take someone who simply doesn’t care at all and motivate them, but I do believe that passion provokes action and that passion is essential to motivating employee performance.
Perhaps you’re thinking, Yes, great, Linda, but how do you get employees passionate? This, of course, is the question employers have been asking forever. I’d like you to consider that it isn’t so much about getting employees passionate as about removing the obstacles and barriers that interfere with their being passionate. Yes, it’s our responsibility as leaders to run interference, remove the roadblocks, and even to eliminate the things that give our employees excuses for poor performance.
Early in my career I worked for a recruiting firm that had a bunch of (in my opinion) of whiners. They had every reason in the book for why they couldn’t perform well. One day I went to the president and said, “Let’s remove these obstacles, all those things they complain about, so then they just gotta go to work.” We did, and guess what happened? Some of them resigned because they had no more excuses. Others stepped up and got passionate, and that provoked action and sales. Both outcomes were ideal.
The point is that employees often find things to fuss about…the uncomfortable chair, the colleague who eats lunch at their desk and it smells awful, too much work to do, poorly defined expectations…you name it. It’s hard to be motivated when you have things to complain about, especially when you have colleagues who agree with your complaints.
Remove the obstacles, improve the communication, eliminate the issues and barriers, and now the excuses are gone. You have demonstrated that you heard, listened and cared enough to do something about it. Now you can ask for more, incite passion, and that passion will provoke action.
Motivating employee performance is the goal of every leader and company. But you can’t get them motivated without them being passionate. And they can’t be passionate when there are irritants around. Once those are addressed, instead of focusing on what’s wrong, lacking or irritating, they can focus on what’s good, working and successful. Happy employees are motivated employees.
All extraordinary teams have common characteristics, as do teams that don’t perform well together.
Find out where your team stacks up by downloading Functioning Together: Characteristics of Extraordinary and Poor Teams.
