Knowing Your People

Different people are motivated by different things. While this may sound obvious on the face of it, many systems are designed to provide one type of motivation for all people. A company may, for example, provide higher pay and bonuses for its most successful employees. Another organization might provide highly visible recognition programs for its most successful employees. Yet another may provide training and development to its stars. The organizations most successful in motivating its people and leveraging their talents implement some kind of combination of motivators.

Using different motivators is not just something an organization must consider, but is also something a front line leader must use. One of the things I have had to learn as a leader was to connect different motivators with the people most motivated by them. I started out by projecting my own needs and outlooks on the people that reported to me. I would provide verbal praise, which is important to me, to all of my employees who did well. I saw some respond well to this and others not as well. Why wasn't this working evenly for everyone? One of my own managers helped me out of my quandary by helping me step out of my own perspective and learning what motivated my people.

I incorporated into my regular meetings with my people time to learn about them as a person outside of work. I learned that some people provided a second income to a household and because their spouses would be moving within a year or two, that they were not interested in promotion. I learned that others, because of their responsibilities in raising children, were more motivated by the money associated with promotion. Others were interested in getting time off (time off is also something that is extremely important to me). Others responded especially well to specific goals and to achieving them (yes, I know that all goals need to be specific, but I have found that some people respond especially well to specific goals, more so than some of their peers). Still others craved that verbal praise and public recognition of a job well done.

You are, of course, limited by the resources at your disposal. You may not be able to grant large additional chunks of time off to your employees, or you may not have the ability to award bonuses. You must search for ways to deliver what rewards you can to your employees, and perhaps find ways to deliver rewards that may not appear to be available. For example, I thought that I could not deliver a bonus program to reward my employees. I knew, however, that some of them were well motivated by money because of their responsibilities at home. Working with the site director (who had the authority to create a bonus program), I identified a specific action my employees could take that would increase revenue. I then created a monthly bonus program that was large enough to get the employee's attention, but small enough to achieve a high return on investment comparing the increased revenue to the cost of the bonuses. The program has served to motivate many of the people on my team – but not all of them (I have one member of my team who comes to work to contribute to the success of a team, he has commented to me on the bonus program, “let others who really nee the money work toward the bonus”).

The first step in linking motivators with your people is learning what makes your team members tick. Make sure that you are meeting regularly with your people, either formally or informally. Every week, you should ask yourself, “what have I learned about my team members today?”

Making Corrections Versus Making Speed

When you perform an action slower, you have more time to make little corrections to get the action right. We have all experienced this. The same holds true for processes, too. The slower an organization performs a process, the more time it has to make corrections to get the process right.

During this weekend's rowing practice, my crew made a significant strides in our ability to row together. For the longest time, we have struggled to keep the boat balanced while we rowed. This interfered with our ability to stay together. The faster we rowed, in fact, the harder time we had rowing in sync. For weeks, we could row in sync no faster than 22 strokes per minute (spm). As soon as we increased our rate to 24 strokes a minute, we fell apart, and our oars would move out of time so that we looked more like an octopus than a crew. We have recently been making changes to our individual rowing technique to correct our balance. We have practiced these adjustments at a low rating of 16 to 20 strokes per minute. This gave us the opportunity to concentrate on what we were doing (for me, it was not dropping my hands in between strokes).

On our Sunday row, with good weather and an energetic crew, our boat captain put us to the test. We performed a series of drills to test how fast we could row using our new found balance. We would row hard one minute at a specified rate, then rest one minute, then start again rowing hard at a higher rate. We started out at 22 strokes per minute, which was well within our comfort level. Then we tried 24 strokes per minute, which is where we had been falling apart. We stayed in sync and rowed well. Then we tried 26 spm, we still held it together After another minute of rest, we bumped it up to 28, then 30. We rowed a full minute 36% faster than we had ever rowed as a crew before. We increased our speed once more to 32 spm. Suddenly, I saw the oar handle of the guy in front of my flying toward my face – he had “caught a crab” and lost his oar. He leaned back, I leaned back, and l lost my own oar. At 32 strokes per minute, there is no time to make any corrections or to recover (I have, in fact, recovered from “catching a crab” at 22 spm, but I have no chance at 32 spm).

Despite losing grip on our oars at 32 spm, the practice was a rousing success. Losing the oars got me thinking about speed and the ability to recover. As I said in the beginning, processes work this way, too. When you perform a process slowly, your team has time to make adjustments and corrections. When you work a process quickly, you have to get it right or risk disaster.

When starting a new process that involves a lot of human touch or input, it is wise to set up a checking process – a quality assurance process – to correct mistakes and set up a feedback loop to your employees. These checkers prevent errors from impacting your customers, or at least mitigating the impact of the error. The weakness in using checkers to correct mistakes is that it takes time to complete the checking process (in my rowing story above, we performed internal quality assurance checks by making adjustments to our stroke, which we had the time to concentrate on when we were only rowing 22 spm).. The quality assurance checking places a cap on the maximum speed at which your process can operate.

A solution for overcoming this speed governor is to set up a way of sunsetting your checking process. This means that, at some point, your employees need to be able to perform the task or carry out the process correctly themselves without someone correcting their mistakes. To get to this point, you need a feedback loop in your checking process. It isn't enough that your quality assurance checker corrects the mistake. You must also get the message back to employee of how to correct the error: what was the mistake, discovering why the employee make the mistake, and taking action to correct the mistake.

As part of this feedback loop, you need to identify the root causes of the employee mistake. If the employee didn't know, update your training or retrain the employee. If the employee didn't have a necessary resource, get the resource. If there is a disincentive to the employe doing the process right, remove the disincentive.

Having the employee perform the task right the first time enables you to redeploy your quality assurance checkers to another, newer process. Your employees, performing the task correctly the first time, can now operate at a faster speed. The benefit is that your team is now providing service faster to the customer. The risk in operating at this faster speed, is that when mistakes do occur, they will impact the customer before you can make any corrections. Just like when the oars went flying on our boat when we were rowing 32 strokes per minute, you won't have time to correct the error that your team makes operating at a high speed. The question you have to answer as a leader is, does the higher speed and greater efficiency of the process outweigh the impact of the errors?

Teamwork: The Influence of an Individual on a Whole Team's Performance

-->I am continuing the practice of my first two posts of relating rowing experiences to the workplace. This time, I am describing how one person can benefit or hobble the performance of an entire team.

The boat I am on has a problem with balance. Boat balance is critical in rowing because without the boats either leans to one side or flops back and forth – both situations make it harder to row in time or with consistent power because the oars hit the water at wrong times and the rowers hands get pushed against the gunwales of the boat. With proper boat balance all of these things correct themselves and rowing because enjoyable.

I helped balance the boat in my latest practice by making an adjustment to my hand height right before I drop my oar into the water. I made this adjustment based on two occurrences the practice before. The first was the boat captain demonstrating the effect of hand height from one person on the entire boat's balance. Holding his oar, he lowered his hands about four inches which caused the entire boat to lean dramatically. The second occurrence was the post practice discussion where we discussed all of the things each of us can do to improve the boat balance: one of them being not to lower one's hands just before dropping the oar in the water (which is something I have been doing for months, but hadn't realized it caused a problem).

I concentrated on holding up my hands instead of dipping them down before I dropped the oar into the water. It appeared to make all of the difference in the world: the boat had a better balance and rowing was much easier. As a group, we made other adjustments, but I know that my own small adjustment improved the situation.

This experience gave me perspective on the impacts each member of a team can have on the performance of a group. It is important, therefore, for a leader to help each team member understand the difference his or her contribution makes to the whole team's performance. Are you not sure yourself what is the impact? Find whatever data you have on your team's performance and work to divide up and identify individual contributions. The easiest impact to find is absence. If someone is not there, your team's production capacity diminishes. If you are meeting some deadline or responding to some emergency, that individual's absence will reveal itself in poor team performance.

Many workplaces, such as help desks and other IT services, benefit from having many measurement tools to identify individual contributions. Learn what tools you have, find your team members' individual contributions, and help them see their importance to the performance of the team. By helping them understand their contributions, you can help them make a greater contribution to the success of your team.