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?”