You know you don’t get close to 100% of the output your staff are capable of.
Most people don’t give 100% because most organisations don’t let them.
(This is probably true of you too, isn’t it?)
Your people will give 100% when they’re able to use their specific set of strengths to fulfil both their organisation’s mission AND their personal life goals.
Employees naturally want to do a great job, they have motivation built-in. But working in most organisations squashes that motivation. The policies, processes, systems and managers that are meant to increase performance end up defeating it. That’s how “process innovation” turns into bureaucracy.
Your job as a manager is not to motivate your staff, it’s to stop them becoming demotivated.
The idea that people are naturally lazy and need to be motivated is rubbish. All the evidence you have for it is actually evidence for organisations led by people who don’t know how to unleash discretionary effort.
The highest performing companies have more employees that work as hard as they can. They do this by building a culture that constantly connects their organisation’s purpose to their team’s mission, and connecting each staff member’s role to their professional and personal objectives.
Each employee knows that by applying themselves fully to their role, they will achieve their personal goals while helping their organisation achieve its goals.
More discretionary effort = more business performance, for any measure of performance you choose:
- Profit per employee, or EV/EBITDA (in commercial businesses)
- Mission effectiveness ÷ operating efficiency (for public sector organisations)
- Net Promoter Score (for any organisation).
Compare Apple’s Profit Per Employee ($86,700) with HP’s ($43,874) or Orange Telecom ($8,110).
Your job as a manager is not to motivate your staff, it’s to stop them becoming demotivated.
Get interested in what your people want in life, and work out, with them, how they can get it by helping the organisation achieve it’s mission. Then help them remove the hurdles to that, and give them feedback when they do good work, and negative feedback when they don’t.
Treat your staff as you would like to be treated, and they’ll give you a lot more discretionary effort.
Take-out: Build a culture that constantly removes barriers to each employee applying their individual strengths, and reinforces how they can achieve their personal and professional goals by doing great work here.
For more background to how you can do this, watch Dan Pink’s quick talk about what unleashes discretionary effort at work:
My name is David White and I help CIOs and their managers build high performance IT functions.