Before Attempting to Motivate Employees, First Be Clear About What’s Motivating You

There’s much atwitter about motivating employees in tough times. Many of the prescribed strategies and tactics amount to trying to control the behavior of others from the outside-in with carrots and sticks.

But motivational strategies and tactics that are imposed from the outside-in, rather than inspired from the inside-out, usually reflect a deficiency mindset that creates deficiency-driven behaviors in your employees.

Here’s how:

When it comes to motivating others there are three levels of influence:

• Content – Planned or orchestrated communications, experiences and behaviors. This includes anything you say and do that is designed to generate a desired response.

• Structure – The means by which your company achieves its objectives and the nature of your organizational culture. This includes the stuff you do and say behind closed doors to drive the behavior of others.

• Mindset – What you believe and think about yourself, others, the organization and the world that is not obvious to others and sometimes not even to yourself.

To their detriment, many organizations focus solely on controlling the explicit influencers while ignoring the more powerful influence of the implicit.  They fail to recognize the deficiency mindset that is driving or exacerbating their economic challenges.

Dealing with the Implicit

In organizational life, deficiency-based motivation is a force that flows from traditional power structures. If management from the C-suite on down is operating with a deficiency mindset, this becomes embedded in the organizational structure and has a greater influence on behavior than anything you do explicitly.

Deficiency Influences

As an example, when times are tough companies often slash budgets, cut costs, and lay off employees, while at the same time trying to try to crank up the feel-good incentives to motivate employees to sell more, spend less and stay loyal.

• On the level of content, you’re saying, “We care about and believe in you and we want you to believe in us.”

• On the level of structure, you’re saying, “If we’re not profitable, you won’t have a job so buck up.”

• On the level of mindset, you might be saying, “If you don’t pull your weight, it’ll be my job and I’m not about to sacrifice all my hard work.”

This misalignment between mindset, structure and content can undermine your leadership and sabotage the trust you’re working so hard to build.

What to do about it

Tough economies trigger the deficiency agendas of all but the most highly self-actualized individuals. But that doesn’t mean it has to rule your organization.

Employees can and do find fulfillment through their work in tough times, and in some cases even more so in tough times.

Investing in individual fulfillment and organizational growth from the inside out generates high-quality buy-in and behavior that can surpass expectations and open up new opportunities for innovation that were completely off your radar.

The economy might just be the challenge you need to shake up your organization and unite stakeholders.

1. Reexamine any routines, processes and systems that may have inadvertently led your organization down the path of mediocrity.
2. Make it an adventure or organization-wide challenge to see how you can achieve realistic goals or benchmarks while working within these new boundaries.
3. Be sure your operational structure reflects a growth/fulfillment mindset and supports what you’re doing and saying
4. Provide “internal” support for leadership at every level of your organization
5. Change the focus and the conversation. Catch employees demonstrating leadership from the inside-out and publicize their stories in your internal communications.

Leaders that tap into their own growth/fulfillment intent and realign daily operations around a structure of human fulfillment will find that employees do rise to the challenge and are better able to draw from their own internal resources rather than relying on external incentives.