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Greetings!
The Leadership Problem - Motivation of Team Members
I've been reading Too Man Bosses, Too Few Leaders by Rajeev Peshawaria and I like what I'm reading. Peshawaria writes about what we've endorsed, taught and facilitated for years; he says: "A great leader is someone who inspired you to show up for work every morning and do your best possible work, someone who made you believe in yourself, someone who genuinely cared about your success, and someone whom you wanted to follow willingly." Well said!
There's so much good information in this book, but I want to focus on Motivation of team members. Here Peshawaria writes: "Being a leader means energizing and motivating your team of direct reports to perform at a higher level. Again, there is no shortage of literature and advice on this issue, yet more managers get it wrong than right.... Another factor is that today's managers tend to be player-coaches, meaning they have individual production responsibilities in addition to their managerial roles. Who has time for all the "people issues"?
Yet every leader or manager out there deals with people issues daily. But very often, in dealing with an "issue", it's hard to break through to a team member and understand just what will get his/her attention. How do you tap into that person?
The effective leaders I've known and worked with have a great ability and that's knowing what motivates their team members.
We've all heard it over and over - you cannot motivate another person, they are motivated by their own purposes.
But do you know what motivates each team member? Chances are it isn't the same thing(s) that drive you - whatever you assume! Whatever the triggers of each person, your challenge is to match their expectations with the work that needs to be done.
How could that be handled? This comes back to the time invested in building relationships with team members, developing an understanding of each person's values so that you DO understand what motivates them. This is for the long term and does require more than the occasional one-on-one discussion - you, the leader, are building your team, creating a culture in which people can be successful. It requires the effort of learning about your team members.
Getting to know people...what makes them tick, what turns them on, what turns them off, how they like and expect to be treated, what they expect from you the leader - it's no easy trick getting to know others.
It's not as though you're striving to become best friends - you work together. You want to learn enough to understand a team member's hot buttons, strengths, where the TM needs work, what gets them excited. This knowledge allows you to individualize your approach with each team member.
It's the beginning of building a working relationship from which trust, mutual respect and interdependency can grow - and that's the ultimate goal - to have the kind of working relationships among team members and team leader that honesty create a team - people working toward a common goal, depending on each other's strengths and supporting team members when there is a need.
We all know these kinds of connections don't grow overnight and there can be misunderstandings and set-backs to developing a strong relationship - not to mention the time involved.
And who has the time? But wouldn't it make sense to invest the time on the front end, developing a strong relationship rather than taking the time later to correct the misunderstandings and set-backs? Of course, it would make more sense, so make the determination to invest the time wisely.
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