ADVERTISEMENT |
Motivation is a very personal thing, so when you find it alive and well within a co-worker, it’s in your best interest (and theirs) to do everything you can to keep it vibrant. The challenge with those who would be motivators is they easily disconnect themselves from others’ perspectives.
ADVERTISEMENT |
Being egocentric creatures, we all look at the world through our own eyeballs. The trick is to see things through another’s while avoiding these five easily preventable, sure-fire demotivators:
1. Be sure to tell workers how expensive the factory utility bills are. Why doesn’t this work? Each person you tell has his own utility bills to pay on whatever income he makes. He doesn’t give a flying flip about the company’s electric bills, and trying to help you pay them. In one business, the general manager tried this guilt tactic for quite some time until more than one of his associates reminded him that their electricity at home had been disconnected because they hadn’t had enough money to pay the bill. Your overhead costs cannot possibly compete with the challenges the average worker faces for his own survival.
2. Remind your top sales people that the end of the accounting period is approaching, so they need to snap to and address all the open estimates out there. Be sure and do this when they’ve had a great sales week, and be sure to prod them without saying anything about how terrifically they’ve performed so far. Remind them of how far there is to go without celebrating how far they’ve come.
3. Send a generic email to everyone vaguely commending the progress for the entire team, but avoid face-to-face commendations. Use email to hide behind while congratulating yourself on what a wonderful communicator you are. Better yet, don’t say anything until people get fed up and turn in their notice. Then on their way out the door, let them know how you’ve appreciated their contribution. That goes down real well. Hint: Get out from behind that desk, walk over to the person, and tell her face to face how she is a valued member of the team. If she’s in another building or state, pick up the phone and tell her. Emails are OK, but face-to-face conversations are the best.
4. When people come to report on a big sale, a deadline that’s been nailed, a contract that’s been secured, or a project that’s been completed, let the first words out of your mouth be an interrogation over why they didn’t do more. I actually saw this happen more than once. (Truthfully, I’ve seen all these things happen more than once and done some of them myself, I’m ashamed to say.) A salesperson would call up the sales manager or a general manager and announce that he’d just closed on a big, big order, whereupon the manager immediately asks if the person pushed any add-on sales. This one is right up there among the stupidest things a manager or leader can do. The message conveyed is that nothing the associate does is ever good enough. Dumb, dumb, dumb. If the car is running and travelling at high speed, don’t puncture a tire.
5. Mess with their pay, and tell them it is a “positive move going forward.” All employee issues are local; see item one above. You may be a member of management and tuned in to what the company has decided to do, but your employees are dialed in to WII-FM (what’s in it for me), and they don’t take kindly to being compromised. Never forget that your employees aren’t stupid and can see a spin from a thousand yards away. One major U.S. company gave a three-day notice that it intended to eliminate all sales commissions, telling the sales staff that this was done for the employees’ benefit. The spin was that “We know how difficult it is to budget when your wages are inconsistent from paycheck to paycheck,” so went the company spin. “That’s why we’ve eliminated commissions, so you can have a consistent, known amount each pay period. This is a positive move going forward.”
This is not only unfair, it’s insulting. All the sales people could see was a positive for the company and a negative for themselves. If pay and benefit cuts are beyond your control, empathy for those who now have to get by on less won’t hurt. One manager added insult to injury by advising his people that they really shouldn’t consider their pay to be that important but to buy stock in the company for long-term growth and wealth. This is an example of high-position blindness brought on by forgetting what it is like to be a wage earner. I can guarantee you that the employees whose wages, benefits, or commissions were cut have only one long-term objective: Get out of that company as soon as they can.
If your biggest cost is personnel, it should also be your biggest asset. What examples of demotivation have you seen, experienced, or (gasp) done yourself? Know someone who could benefit from this? Do them a favor and pass it along.
ADVERTISEMENT |
Comments
words
Thanks for your points of motivation killing.
You said: "In one business, the general manager tried this guilt tactic for quite some time until more than one of his associates reminded him that their electricity bills at home had been disconnected because they hadn’t had enough money to pay the bill."
Wouldn't it be better to say their electricity was disconnected, not their bills?
Good catch
Add new comment