Beer and biccies
That was the worst answer I ever heard to the question of how to motivate a team.
My objection was not because beer is a savoury drink, and a biscuit is a sweet food – although that’s grounds enough – it was that something as important and complex as motivation was reduced to something as simple and simplistic as the indiscriminate provision of the occasional dog treat.
I can see how it would work with dogs, but people?
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a really good answer to that question.
I was on a terrible management skills course a few years ago when someone listed “motivating the team” as a key part of the role of the manager. Anyway, I was getting bored and so I said “I don’t think it’s the manager’s role to motivate people” before the conversation moved on.
The trainer picked up on it, and brought it back to me, asking me to explain, his face crossed with concern.
“I think people are responsible for their own motivation”, I said, courting controversy partly for the sport of it, but also because I wanted to try out some new ideas I had about team motivation.
No one agreed with me. Lots of shocked faces and shaking heads.
So I said:
Well, I think I’m responsible for my own motivation
Everyone agreed, that yes, sure, we – as managers – were responsible for our own motivation, but everyone else …
You could see them questioning their assumptions.
If I am responsible for my own motivation, then why aren’t other people?
I let them off the hook:
I think we need to create the conditions where it’s easy for people to be motivated, and try to reduce de-motivating factors, but I don’t think we should take the responsibility of motivation away from our teams
My argument ran that if we make their lack of motivation more about us as managers rather than about them, we turn their failure into our failure, and give them an easy way out. If they accepted the money in the bank, then there was a fair expectation of performance, and if something was getting in the way of that (e.g. demotivation) then they had to try to solve it – with our help and support, of course.
This was pretty hardline, and I was pushing it because I wanted to test my thinking; but even now, so many years later I still largely stand by this (usually, when I revisit old arguments, I discover that I was wrong after all).
It’s everyone’s own responsibility to deliver at work. This requires them to be motivated. It’s the manager’s job to help make this easy for them: to remove the demotivating factors as far as possible, and to manage the team properly, but the team members can’t just shrug and claim demotivation and point the finger at the team leader.
Managing them properly is a big thing, too much for the tail of this little post, but with regards to motivation it mainly means treating them as an individual and taking a genuine interest in what they are doing, providing useful, fair and meaningful (especially positive) feedback.
It doesn’t mean providing beer and biccies.
Filed under: Management
